Where would Roland Barthes, with his "The Death of the Author" fall within the Reader-Response continuum? Am I wrong to find similarities between Reader-Response and Deconstructionists? I think Barthes--later in his career--saw himself as a post-structuralist. I wanted to introduce my IB students to the idea of "reading as the 'author intended'" versus "reading as the reader creates it."
Thanks for a great question! I don't think you're wrong at all! I think the big difference is that reader-response theory as practiced in the United States has a more pragmatic and communitarian orientation, where meaning happens through the work of people in groups interacting with each other, such as Fish's interpretive communities. Fish belongs to an American tradition that includes Peirce, Dewey, and Rorty. In this sense, then, meaning in Reader-Response Theory is an event and can be located as historical action or practice. I think Barthes took the abstract and ahistorical structuralism of De Saussure and Lévi-Strauss in a similar pragmatic direction, but under the influence of the phenomenological and existential traditions of thought, which were likewise interested in how abstract structures and processed played out in practical experience, as the events of historical phenomena, including the experience of readers. For this reason, Barthes was an important link from structuralism to "Cultural Studies" as developed by Stuart Hall and others, especially since they shared Barthes's Marxist commitments. See my videos on Structuralism (pt 1 and 2) and my one on Marxism coming out in the next week.
Where would Roland Barthes, with his "The Death of the Author" fall within the Reader-Response continuum? Am I wrong to find similarities between Reader-Response and Deconstructionists? I think Barthes--later in his career--saw himself as a post-structuralist. I wanted to introduce my IB students to the idea of "reading as the 'author intended'" versus "reading as the reader creates it."
Thanks for a great question! I don't think you're wrong at all! I think the big difference is that reader-response theory as practiced in the United States has a more pragmatic and communitarian orientation, where meaning happens through the work of people in groups interacting with each other, such as Fish's interpretive communities. Fish belongs to an American tradition that includes Peirce, Dewey, and Rorty.
In this sense, then, meaning in Reader-Response Theory is an event and can be located as historical action or practice. I think Barthes took the abstract and ahistorical structuralism of De Saussure and Lévi-Strauss in a similar pragmatic direction, but under the influence of the phenomenological and existential traditions of thought, which were likewise interested in how abstract structures and processed played out in practical experience, as the events of historical phenomena, including the experience of readers. For this reason, Barthes was an important link from structuralism to "Cultural Studies" as developed by Stuart Hall and others, especially since they shared Barthes's Marxist commitments. See my videos on Structuralism (pt 1 and 2) and my one on Marxism coming out in the next week.