The current national focus on critical thinking is unnecessarily narrow in its scope, and this mitigates against essential changes being made in the thinking and reasoning activities experienced by students. Two shortcomings, however, restrict the possibilities for change: the first results from taking a generic (versus discipline-based) view of…

Differences in readers' interpretations of a given text illustrate premises of the transactional or reader response theory of literature. The theory holds that: (1) meaning resides in the coming together of reader and text; (2) the reader affects the reading of the text and is affected by the text; and (3) there are potentially as many meanings to…

A study compared the literary response and character attribution processes of 40 undergraduate students on the basis of differences in their interpersonal construct repertoire, or "interpersonal cognitive complexity." No studies to date have explored the ways in which cognitive complexity influences readers' overall responses to…

A study generated a system for describing and analyzing the shifting focus from reader to text in written responses to literature, and explored the stances that readers adopt as they focus on personal, textual, and extra-textual concerns. Ten proficient and 10 less proficient undergraduate readers engaged in open-ended, exploratory written…

In what appear to be grand saccadic leaps, research on reader response has turned first, at the beginning of the century, to the external reality of the text; then to the internal reality of the reader; and finally to the movement of the response process itself. Three metaphors derive from the three successive research orientations: from the…

Two exercises were developed to demonstrate how Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of novelistic language and creative interpretation are instrumental in teaching students to read creatively. The text chosen for these exercises was "Crime Against Nature" by Minnie Bruce Pratt. According to Bakhtin's scheme, a fiction can be read most…

This paper presents four introductory activities designed to help students with their reading problems, motivate them to read, and help them turn their interpretations of literature into effective compositions. The paper presents samples for each of the four activities ("Opinionnaires," Scenarios, Simulations, and Role Playing),…

To shift the focus away from the writing instructor as the primary audience for written compositions, these writing assignments address the issue of audience directly. The assignments include the following: (1) select a magazine and analyze its audience; (2) compose a letter to the editor; (3) write an article for the selected magazine about an…

A study explored differences in attitudes and values that two groups of eleventh graders derived from literature. One group was comprised of 25 students from a basic skills class. The second group of 20 students was selected at random from an American literature class. All of the students were enrolled in a New Jersey urban high school. A pretest…

During the past 15 years, a fundamental change has taken place in literary criticism, with a decline in New Criticism (literature viewed as a public object) and an increase in reader response criticism (literature viewed as a private experience). New Critics considered the meaning of a literary text to exist within the text as an independent and…

This article argues that discussions of folktales would be more meaningful if their brief existence as "ideal tales" in a narrative contract could be accepted. The article focuses on the concept of a folktale as an object of experience and of study, by a sustained discussion and charting of the tortuous ways by which so-called folktales…

The double-entry journal requires students to write affective response statements to readings, and to compare such entries with classmates. After discussions with peers and critical analysis of the literature, students write a second journal entry synthesizing insights gained from discussion, analysis, readings, and writings. The journal (1)…

Assembled in the course of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, which examined the nature of collective and individual response to fairytale literature, this bibliography cites materials pertinent to response assessment. Listed by author, the subjects of the approximately 150 titles include language and meaning, poetics, literary…

The theoretical background of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project is discussed in this paper. The paper first offers support for the working hypotheses of the Fairytale Project, which was designed to determine (1) if there are aesthetic principles that are universal and that guide the reader's experience of literary works; (2)…