Response to Country Lovers Essay

The first thing that captured my recreate rough the drool Country Lovers, by Nadine Gordimer was the first line. Right from the enterprise sentence it is clear that this will be a story about interracial relationships. ( Claxton, 2010). This sentence caught my attention because it gave me mixed emotions, first of hoping that this veto love would have a happy ending, and also a gumption of foreboding that this would non be the case due to the inter-racial theme and the lay of the story.The analytical approach that I choose to evaluate this story would be a contributor- response approach. Reader-response criticism encompasses various approaches to literature that explore and look for to explain the diversity (and often divergence) of readers responses to literary works. (Bedford, 1998). The reader- response approach is best described as connecting with a piece of work, and finding a individualised or creative way to engage with the story. It will to the highest degree se eming come from a personal connection to a character or theme and the emotions that they elicit. In reader-response critical approach, the primary focus falls on the reader and the process of knowledge rather than on the author or the text.Theoretical Assumptions Literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance, analogous to playing/singing a musical work, enacting a drama, etcetera Literature exists only when it is read meaning is an event (versus the immature comminuted concept of the affective fallacy). The literary text possesses no indomitable and final meaning or value there is no iodin correct meaning.Literary meaning and value are transactional, dialogic, created by the interaction of the reader and the text. According to Louise Rosenblatt, a poem is what the reader lives through down the stairs the guidance of the text. Varying Emphases How readers interpret texts Sometimes called subjective. May deal with published readings of texts and/or stud y nonprofessional readings (e. g. , students). These critics explain similarities in readings in alter ways styles or identity themes of readers are similar (Norman Hollandpsychoanalytic approach) cfGeorge Dillons classification of students responses to Faulkners A Rose for Emily Character-Action-Moral Style (committed knowers)treat literature as coextensive with experience Diggers for Secretsfind surreptitious meanings in literature, psychoanalyze motives of characters, etc. Anthropologistslook for cultural patterns, norms, values e. g. feminists, New Historicists.Readers belong to same informative communities (Stanley Fish) with shared reading strategies, values and interpretive assumptions (i. e. shared discourse) concept of the informed reader. readers are situated in a common cultural/historical setting and shaped by dominant discourses and ideologies (New Historicist emphasis). Reception theory/aesthetics studies the changing responses of the general reading public over t ime. How texts govern reader Focus on how texts guide, constrain, authority reading often use linguistic, stylistic, narratological methods of analysis. Wolfgang Iser argues that the text in part controls the readers responses but contains gaps that the reader creatively fills.There is a tautness between the implied reader, who is established by the response-inviting structures of the text this type of reader is pretended and created by the work itself the actual reader, who brings his/her own experiences and preoccupations to the text. (McManus, 1998). For this particular piece of work, I find the reader- response approach to be the most appropriate. I do not feel that there are many people that could not connect to this story on some level.The setting and the inter-racial love story excluded, there are still the aspects of first loves, and first sexual experiences that most people can identify with. Further into the story you have the aspects of repulsion at the thought of an innocent baby being murdered, much slight at the hands of the babes own father. I personally felt outrage at the lack of justice for this lost individual and the knowledge that it is all too common a reality. It would seem that my sniff out of foreboding at the start of this story was well justified.