Reader Response Theory Quotes

There is nothing outside the text

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

The writer after all is only half the book, the other half is the reader.

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.

There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.

And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?

There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.

People don't understand how much influence they can actually have on a writer, how much a writer's feelings can be hurt, how much they can deflect his course when they raise their voices like they did over highly personal books like 'Panama' or 'Bullet Park.'

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things.

To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.

Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

A book , once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book "means" thereafter, perforce, both grammatically and actually, whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.

Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.