Response to Country Lovers Essay

The first thing that captured my interest about the story Country Lovers, by Nadine Gordimer was the first line. Right from the opening sentence it is clear that this will be a story about interracial relationships. ( Claxton, 2010). This sentence caught my attention because it gave me confused emotions, first of hoping that this forbidden love would have a happy ending, and also a sense of foreboding that this would not be the case due to the inter-racial question and the setting of the story.The analytical approach that I choose to evaluate this story would be a proofreader- response approach. Reader-response criticism encompasses various approaches to literature that explore and anticipate to explain the diversity (and often divergence) of readers responses to literary works. (Bedford, 1998). The reader- response approach is best described as connecting with a order of work, and finding a personal or creative way to engage with the story. It will most likely come from a per sonal connection to a character or theme and the emotions that they elicit. In reader-response critical approach, the primary focus falls on the reader and the process of reading rather than on the author or the text.Theoretical Assumptions Literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance, analogous to playing/singing a musical work, enacting a drama, etc. Literature exists only when it is read implication is an event (versus the New Critical concept of the affective fallacy). The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning or value thither is no one correct meaning.Literary meaning and value are transactional, dialogic, created by the interaction of the reader and the text. According to Louise Rosenblatt, a poem is what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text. Varying Emphases How readers interpret texts Sometimes called subjective. May deal with published readings of texts and/or study nonprofessional readings (e. g. , students). These critics explain similarities in readings in change ways styles or identity themes of readers are similar (Norman Hollandpsychoanalytic approach) cf.George Dillons classification of students responses to Faulkners A Rose for Emily Character-Action-Moral Style (connected knowers) march literature as coextensive with experience Diggers for Secretsfind hidden meanings in literature, psychoanalyze motives of characters, etc. Anthropologistslook for ethnical patterns, norms, values e. g. feminists, New Historicists.Readers belong to said(prenominal) interpretive communities (Stanley Fish) with shared reading strategies, values and interpretive assumptions (i. e. shared discourse) concept of the informed reader. readers are situated in a common cultural/historical setting and shaped by dominant discourses and ideologies (New Historicist emphasis). Reception theory/aesthetics studies the changing responses of the general reading public over time. How texts govern reader Focus on how text s guide, constrain, control reading often use linguistic, stylistic, narratological methods of analysis. Wolfgang Iser argues that the text in part controls the readers responses but contains gaps that the reader creatively fills. in that respect is a tension between the implied reader, who is established by the response-inviting structures of the text this type of reader is assumed and created by the work itself the actual reader, who brings his/her own experiences and preoccupations to the text. (McManus, 1998). For this particular piece of work, I find the reader- response approach to be the most appropriate. I do not feel that there are many passel that could not connect to this story on some level.The setting and the inter-racial love story excluded, there are still the aspects of first loves, and first sexual experiences that most people can identify with. Further into the story you have the aspects of horror at the thought of an innocent baby being murdered, much less at th e pass on of the babes own father. I personally felt outrage at the lack of justice for this lost soul and the knowledge that it is all too common a reality. It would seem that my sense of foreboding at the start of this story was well justified.