Reader-Response Criticism

Reader-Response Criticism and the related Reception Theory focus on the ways readers create meaning from a text. They are fundamentally opposed to the other linguistic criticisms, which exclude the reader's experience from literary analysis.

Associate the following ideas and people with Reader Response Criticism:

-reader's experience = central literary event
-books have an "implied reader" or "ideal reader," discernible through the book's implicit assumptions about how the reader will read
-aesthetic impact (breaking the "horizon of expectations")

Note that Reception Theory and Reader-Response Criticism makes heavy use of terms and ideas from a variety of other critical fields.

For more information, I recommend Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction.