In this article, the author argues that Emerson repudiated the formalism of nineteenth century belletristic, mechanistic, reason-centered, American rhetoric influenced by Hugh Blair. Instead Emerson promoted a rhetoric with imagination at its center, which calls for civic duty. (Contains 33 notes.)

Examines the view that readers read different texts and create the text they read. Argues that (1) this view is a form of conceptual relativism; (2) the view is incoherent; and (3) work on radical interpretation offers a much more satisfactory account of why interpretations of texts differ so radically and better explains the value of studying…

This essay explores a reading of "Robinson Crusoe" that suggests the novel has taken on new gravity after the first "preemptive" war in U.S. history, a war justified by the attempt to "spread freedom" to Iraq. It examines how Crusoe comes to understand the relationship between the state and the individual. Robinson…

Argues that adopting a metacritical stance and examining the dialogue between text and audience will result in a better understanding of how Canada's cultural and intellectual contexts shape the interpretive act, and how this dialogue constructs the public meaning of literary works. (RAE)

Provides a theoretical framework by which traditional prosody might be reformulated according to reader response insight. Advocates prosody taking the form of a "story of reading." Advocates a narrative style of prosodic criticism. (HB)

Claims that Tom is a character eminently suited to the multiplicity and subjectivity arguments of reader response criticism (RRC), that meaning is a relation between an author, a text, and a reader, not an object, as New Criticism held, and not a procedure, as RRC assumes. (RAE)

Argues that the exclusion of the literature of women, of black, ethnic, and working-class writers from the established literary canon has less to do with valuations of literary quality than with the social distribution of power. (SRT)

Broadens the space for a discussion of reading based in some degree of theorizing that has already occurred within the community of African-American critics and scholars. Argues that those engaged in reader-oriented approaches to literature need to intervene in the canonical debates and the critical practices of noncanonical literatures through…

Indicates how current stylistic criticism might engage ideological issues by more fully developing M. Bakhtin's ideas through an approach called cultural stylistics. Notes that Bakhtin's own work was very much concerned with the divorce between ideological and formalist analysis, and his "sociological stylistics" was intended to…

Explores questions about the use of history in teaching literature and about the relation between academic reading (with its emphasis on form and the objectification of the reading process) and naive reading (which depends on a psychological identification with a character). Illustrates these issues through a discussion of a feminist reader's…

Describes a teacher's unsuccessful attempt to introduce the poetry of Tu Fu, a wayward bureaucrat of the T'ang dynasty, to a class of part-time students. Uses his students' resistance to this poetry as an occasion to discuss the importance of personal responses to poetry, as opposed to "correct" academic responses. (TB)

Provides the reactions of Louise M. Rosenblatt, a key figure in the field of reader response criticism, to the developments in reading, writing, and critical theory in the 1980s. Gives a brief personal history of Rosenblatt and the field. Describes her transactional theory and interpretations of it by other critics. (HB)

Clarifies some common misconceptions about the nature of narcissism and projection and employs recent developments in post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory to explain how projective activities are filtered and altered by a certain notion of textual objectivity: objectivity as defined by the text's material signifiers. (FL)

Compares the theories of writing style advocated by Barthes and Coles. (FL)

Suggests humorous ways to generate student interest in literature such as creating advertising campaigns for characters in fiction. (SRT)