#reader-response criticism

[princessofmerchants]

Some not fully formed thoughts about reading, canon, characters, and my relationship to all of these things...

The ACOTAR series is not yet complete. So many elements of the remainder of the story, for readers, are at present moving targets. Before ACOSF, this was also true of the how of Nessian's coming together, which in many ways is a great case study in the following stuff I'm gonna try to describe.

The fandom at its core is people who love this series for a variety of reasons coming together and interacting in relation to the series. There are moments in the fandom when the moving target-ness of the remainder of the series is the cause of a deep kind of readerly anxiety. I've experienced it myself (just before ACOSF came out I was a feral wreck), so I'm describing it from both my own experience of it and my observation of it around me in the fandom.

But then there are other times I step back, and think about how exciting and generative it is that the series isn't finished yet.

As a reader, I have a deep love for Sarah J. Maas, if only because the characters and stories she has created are helping me heal from a lot of trauma in my real life. (For me, the main character I'm referring to is Nesta.) I also trust her as a storyteller, and do believe she knows her own characters enough to tell their stories to us.

But, I am also a semi-inhabitant of the Death of the Author camp when it comes to how readers experience stories. What comes next in canon does not threaten my experience of the characters so far, both in canon and outside of it in the fandom (fic, art, metas, memes, all of it).

It's a shifting of perspective on what a story is, which is more than just the words on the published page (see also reader-response criticism, one of the most empowering things you may encounter as a reader and lover of stories), a shift I know I'm not explaining well. And because of this shift, I can freely enjoy the rest of the books in this series no matter the decisions SJM makes for the characters I have grown to love, because I'm not putting on SJM the responsibility to continue to construct the versions of these characters in my own head and heart that have grown to mean so much to me. In other words, I'm not giving canon the power to override the reasons I have connected to these characters in the first place. Does that make sense?

And furthermore, because of this, I can lean into, geek out, and totally enjoy the lull between canon books and all the discussion and content the fandom is generating in the space created by the length of time between canon books. And it also means I can enjoy canon itself, in the future, in the same way, because canon is at the end of the day just a new pile of content about my faves.

I have more thoughts I could add, about how given the above way I interact with this series and these characters, what my process of reading canon is like, and the way I use it to kind of test what SJM gives us about my favorite characters against my own construction of them in my head and heart, and how yes I do want them to integrate (because, again, I trust SJM to tell her characters' stories so I want to understand why they act and think as they do in canon because I think trying to determine that is a worthwhile activity, though not everyone will agree with that sentiment and that's totally valid), but I also don't force it (looking at you, Amren 😑), and the kind of reader/rereader I am because of all of this, but this is already long so I'll stop here for now.

[replaymodus]

>Replay modus.

I can’t remember when I started reading Homestuck. This is as much about the vagaries of memory as it is about Homestuck’s influence on my life- and the way in which I first was introduced to it.

For months, I’d been fascinated by TVTropes. The website had a tone that appealed that version of me- my pastself, if you will- and so I ended up reading a lot of articles there which led me to discover a lot of new media. Homestuck was probably the most significant.

When I first came across the page for Homestuck, there were mentions of Problem Sleuth, of how Homestuck was fourth in a line of comics, of how similar and yet different it was from Homestar Runner...my memory of this page might not even fully reflect any point in its history. Certainly, the current page doesn’t resemble this half-reconstructed fever dream.

John Egbert, as a protagonist, is defined by his sense of alienation. Of the four major characters of early Homestuck, John is the one with the least external conflicts. His issues with his father pale in comparison to other familial strife faced by the “beta” kids. He lives an ordinary life in the suburbs. He could be anyone- an Everyman.

Yet John is homestuck. He is alone, isolated, and apparently with the exception of his three online friends, lonely. The comic never harps on this point, but it’s clear that something about John’s mundane, stable existence disconcerts him- something which I very much related to.

My early experience of Homestuck was being prepared for a story about an apocalypse, and being in the kind of headspace where it seemed like a good analogy for just how difficult and alienating I was finding college.

As I embark on this Homestuck re-read, each post (covering some unspecified number of panels) will approach Homestuck using a different literary theory. They will not be unique (I’ll likely start to alternate through some well-known critical lenses soon enough) but they will be part of my attempt to think about Homestuck in new ways. For this first one, we’re talking about reader-response criticism, which means we’re talking about how I experienced Homestuck’s first few pages.

The thing is, at this point in the comic, readers were truly submitting commands. The names of the first four protagonists of the comic were selected based on reader submissions, as were the initial commands given to the kids- for at least three acts, if I remember correctly.

I didn’t know this at the time- I thought the commands were indicative of Hussie’s humor, which disagreed with me. They are, of course, as Hussie did choose them- but they are an expression of a larger context. There were other, similar comics based on reader-submitted commands; these were called quests. So what happens when divorced from their original context? What happens when you read Homestuck, as I did, without knowing anything about Hussie’s previous (and frankly horrifying, painful) work?

You respond to John’s interests as though experiencing a kind of characterization you’ve never seen before. John resembles a real person, because of his INTERESTS which are CAPITALIZED so that you know that this is a FUN STORY and JUST A GAME and not a DEEPLY SIGNIFICANT PIECE OF MEDIA THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER.

As someone who had never really played the sorts of games or been exposed to the programming concepts or really even the Internet meme culture being referenced in this comic, my experience of Homestuck was meeting a group of characters who resembled real people, but were wildly different in new and interesting ways. The narration felt funny in a self-aware way, which appealed to my lingering adolescence. John’s antics are charmingly unrelatable while still being relatable, and the general- air of incompetence produced by the reader-submitted commands just made it cathartic to read. So I kept playing- and now I’m here, revisiting. Let’s begin.

[christianpublishinghouse-blog]

BIBLICAL CRITICISM: Reader-Response and Narrative Criticism

BIBLICAL CRITICISM: Reader-Response and Narrative Criticism

Thomas Howe Director of Veritas Graduate School of Apologetics. Professor of Bible and Biblical Languages at Southern Evangelical Seminary (B.D., 1985; B.A., 1985; M.A., 1992; Ph.D., 1998)

Introduction

At the very beginning of his monumental work, A History of Literary Criticism and Theory, M. A. R. Habib declares, “In our world it has become more important than ever that we learn to…

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[principleofplenitude]

[hours]

"[I]f, as the post-structuralists claim, reality itself is language-based, then the study of language necessarily takes on a political character. The insistence that language is constitutive of reality rather than merely reflective of it suggests that contemporary critical theory has come to occupy a position very similar to, if not the same as, that of the Greek rhetoricians for whom mastery of language meant mastery of the state. The questions that propose themselves within this critical framework therefore concern, broadly, the relations of discourse and power. What makes one set of perceptual strategies or literary conventions win out over another? If the world is the product of interpretation, then who or what determines which interpretive system will prevail?"

— Jane P. Tompkins, "The Reader in History: The Changing Shape of Literary Response," Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (edited by Jane P. Tompkins)

[hours]

"[R]eader-response criticism['s] close relative [is] deconstructive criticism."

— Jane P. Tompkins, "The Reader in History: The Changing Shape of Literary Response," Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (edited by Jane P. Tompkins)

[hours]

"When discourse is responsible for reality and not merely a reflection of it, then whose discourse prevails makes all the difference."

— Jane P. Tompkins, "An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism," Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (edited by Jane P. Tompkins)

[hours]

"[C. S.] Peirce's attack on the Cartesian concept of the self asserts that the self is not primary, not intuited directly, not independent or free, but perceived, like everything else, by inference. Since, according to Peirce, all our thoughts are signs (for it can't be proven that thought precedes signs) the only way we can know the self is as a sign."

— Jane P. Tompkins, "An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism," Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (edited by Jane P. Tompkins)