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This essay offers a historical explanation for the place of reader-response theory in English studies. Reader-response was a part of two movements: the (elitist) theory boom of the 1970s and the (populist) political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. If the theory boom was to remain elitist, it had to deauthorize reader-response. If reader-response was to remain populist, it had to consent to and participate in that deauthorization. In the 1980s reader-response was popular among compositionists, even as it began to lose currency among theorists. Later, however, compositionists professionalized themselves by deemphasizing, or even ignoring, reading. Now, as the profession again considers including explicit instruction in reading in the introductory writing course, the thinkers who could help us most have faded from the discussion.
I begin with an anomaly. In an issue of Reader focused on "Reading the Profession," Gary Ettari and Heather C. Easterling wonder why, even though reading is "one of the central activities" (12) of English studies, their graduate preparation has omitted explicit discussion of "making sense [...] of what happens when we read" ( 13).1 Ettari and Easterling, who identify themselves at the time of writing as graduate students at the University of Washington, raise a wise and well-founded question. For me and for others who remember the heyday of reader-response theory during the 1970s and 1980s, the question also evokes a certain nostalgia-even sadness. It seemed then that the question "What happens when human beings encounter written texts?" was on nearly everyone's mind. And tentative answers to that question, collectively known as reader-response theory, were energetically debated.
In this essay, I shall describe what I think happened to the discussions that surrounded a group of texts-Louise Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration and The Reader, the Text, the Poem, David Bleich's Readings and Feelings and Subjective Criticism, Wolfgang Iser s The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading, Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in This Class? and Norman Holland's Poems in Persons and Five Readers Reading-collectively known as readerresponse theory. With the exception of Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration, originally published in 1938, these works appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s.2 To begin, I need to discriminate reader-response theory from reception study (however blurry that distinction ultimately, and necessarily,...