Responding as a Reader
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The encounter between a reader and a written text, be it fiction or non-fiction, is invariably shaped by many factors. As Stanley Fish (34) has noted, this encounter and its outcome may depend in large measure on the reader and his or her attitudes, beliefs, values, and experiences rather than upon the text or the textÆs creator. While texts can be said to contain embedded meaning, meaning that is placed therein by the authorial voice, the way in which this meaning is acquired, interpreted and then understood or known is the product, so to speak, of the readerÆs own actions. What a writer intends in his or her work is, therefore, subject to what a reader brings to the process of reading that work. Thus, the critical approach to textual and literary analysis known as reader-response criticism places the reader in a dominant position vis-a-vis the text. Analyzing and criticizing literature is a process that can take many forms or move from any number of theoretical perspectives. The school of reader-response criticism is broadly defined as any literary theory that investigates the process of reading (Wright 529). Reader-response criticism involves the systematic examination of the aspects of a text that arouse, shape, and guide a readerÆs response. In this approach, the reader is a producer rather than a consumer of meanings, a hypothetical construct of norms and expectations that can be derived or projected or extrap
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West Indian and black womenÆs literary productions. For example, much of this literature demonstrates that black womenÆs writings validate the matrilineal over the patriarchal and metropolitan, with the inheritance of vales, including gendered modes of social resistance handed down from black mothers to black daughters. The problem presented by Jamaica Kincaid in The Autobiography of My Mother is the absence of such matrilineal values: ôThis fact of my mother dying at the moment I was born became a central motif of my lifeà. I refused to belong to a race, I refused to accept a nation (225-226).ö
Rhonda Cobham (868) also examined colonialism and its impact in this novel, commenting that ôthere was no gnosis, no sanctioned code for articulating Caribbean systems of belief and knowledge, through which the spiritual battle she had experienced could be incorporated into her academic text.ö Further, Cobham (269) believes that in this novel, Kincaid offers us a commentary on this paradox when her narrator tells a story about a group of schoolchildren who witness how a female water spirit laden with riches seduces one of their playmates, enticing him into death by drowning. Although the children's story invokes a familiar spiritu
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Approximate Word count = 9995
Approximate Pages = 40 (250 words per page)
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