reader response

READER - RESPONSE
~ A literary criticism that focuses primarily on the reader's reaction to a text.
~ It recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation.
~ It redefines the role of the text from an independent object into something that can only exist when it is read and interacts with the mind of the reader.

A LIFE - Sylvia Plath

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,

This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.

Here's yesterday, last year ---

Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast

Windless thread work of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:

It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir

Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.

The inhabitants are light as cork,

Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.

Never trespassing in bad temper:

Stalling in midair,

Short-reined, pawing like parade ground horses.

Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This family

Of valentine faces might please a collector:

They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.

The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle

About a bald hospital saucer.

It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper

And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.

She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,

The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture

She has one too many dimensions to enter.

Grief and anger, exorcised,

Leave her alone now.

The future is a grey seagull

Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.

Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,

And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,

Crawls up out of the sea.

CRITICISM 

As stated above, in the reader response theory, the reader is the one who gives meaning to what they have 

read through his or her interpretations. In this poem A life, the speaker here is asking to touch something. It 

could be a picture or something else but due to the very large scale of different views I therefore conclude

that the speaker was referring to a painting. The speaker want us to touch the painting that has different 

beautiful views of nature, based on what i have understood. So here I can infer that the while the speaker is 

describing the surroundings, she may be felling happy and relaxed, but at the last part of the poem, the 

speaker suddenly changed her subject. the speaker already involved different people, a man and a woman, 

who is both suferring I think in depression.They cannot appreciate or they are not somehow related to their

outside world. The woman that was mentioned in the poem was in the hospital so it is obviously that she 

cannot the beautiful views. Same with the man in the poem. 

So to Sum up, I can infer that the poem was all about how people always enjoy views of nature without even 

realizing that some poeple are suffering from many factors and cannot enjoy what others enjoy.

So This is it! This is how I interpreted the poem, but as another reader read the poem, he or she may

have a different interpretation regarding on what they read. That will explain how reader response 

theory works.      

The poem itself is very deep in meaning it will depend upon the reader on how she or he will interpret it.