Reader-Response Critical Lens

Reader-Response Critical Lens

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Background

The Centaur May Swenson

• “In some such way, he would conclude our relationship. He did nothing of the sort. He only looked fixedly into the jungle. Then Richard Parker, companion of my torment, awful, fierce thing that kept me alive, moved forward and disappeared forever from my life.”(Martel 285)

• “Not a trace of it has been found. That’s a bit hard to believe, isn’t it? There are no tigers in the Americas. If there were a wild tiger out there, don’t you think the police would have heard about it by now?” (Martel 329)

• The criticism focuses on reader or audience and the experience of a work

• Reader-Response theorists actually think that readers are active participants who create a work of literature in the process of reading it. The meaning of a text, according to Reader-Response theorists, exists somewhere between the words on the page and the reader's mind.

• Death of the author

• reader-response criticism has significantly contributed to discussions of issues such as the indeterminacy of meaning

• “I was the horse and the rider, and the leather I slapped to his rump” (Swenson 1).

• “But when, with my brother’s jack knife, I had cut me a long limber horse with a good thick knob for a head,” (Swenson 1)

Works Cited

Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary & Cultural Criticism;.

N.p.: Columbia UP, 1995. Print.

Hill, Symon. The Upside-down Bible: What Jesus Really Said

about Money, Sex and Violence. London: Darton Longman & Todd, 2015. Print.

Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2016. Print.

New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics. N.p.:

Princeton UP, 1993. Print.

Swenson, May. May out West: Poems of May Swenson.

Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 1996. Print.

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