Reception Study in the U.S., 1985-2012

In the U.S. the field of reception study, encompassing scholarship in literary studies, cultural and media studies, and the history of the book, has grown substantially in both scope and volume over the last twenty-five years. There are now three scholarly journals devoted exclusively to research on audience, reading, and reception: Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History; Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy; and (in the U.S. and Britain) Classical Receptions Journal. In 2005, the Reception Study Society was founded as a national organization to promote research in response-and-reception study and critical exchange among scholars through a biennial conference and publication of the society's journal, Reception. Additionally, panels and sessions devoted to reception are now a regular part of the program at a number of leading regional and national meetings, including the annual Modern Language Association Convention and the American Literature Association Conference. Over the last ten years there has been especially notable growth in the number of books devoted entirely or in part to questions about reading practices, audience formation, and reception. Indeed, the past two years alone have witnessed the publication of over four dozen monographs and edited volumes in literary criticism, cultural/media studies, and the history of the book treating reception in both its historical and contemporary manifestations. These developments make clear that reception study in the U.S. is not only alive and well but is thriving and expanding to a degree that is both exciting and salutary. Reception study itself emerged in the U.S. in the 1980s, partly as an outgrowth of reader-response criticism, which itself developed in the 1970s in opposition to the prevailing New Criticism, particularly the latter's treatment of devices and structures "in" texts as purely objective essences and its dismissal of readers' responses as a mere "affective fallacy. " Response and reception theorists claim, by contrast, that readers' practices reflect and are influenced by psychological, socio-historical, and/or cultural factors, not the nature of the text itself. In both theory and practice, readerresponse criticism in the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly in literary studies, tended to take, as Steven Mailloux has pointed out, one of two forms: psychological versions, as embodied especially in the work of David Bleich and Norman Holland, and social approaches, exemplified by Jonathan Culler, Inge Crosman (Winters), Susan Suleiman, Elizabeth Freund, Peter Rabinowitz, and the early Stanley Fish, among others, many of whom were influenced by the new reader-oriented criticism from Europe, particularly Wolfgang Iser's The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading and Umberto Eco's The Role of the Reader. Psychological approaches tended to theorize and study response and interpretation as private, psychodynamic activities in which an individual's encounter with a text enabled her to understand herself. Bleich said, for example, that the text's aesthetics "do not matter" (2004, 309) because interpretation invariably reveals the personality of the reader. Social approaches, which employed – or at least claimed to employ –