Select
one
of the writings found at the bottom of this assignment for your Reader Response essay. Your essay must be
two to three pages in length.
You do not need a Works Cited page for this single source essay.
For this essay, read the story or poem you have selected several times and make note of your ideas about the story or poem’s action, characters, form, and meaning. Work to understand the writing and then determine your
reaction
to its ideas.
Your
introductory
paragraph should contain the
title
of the writing you have selected as well as
its author
. The introduction should also mention the
general topic of the story or poem.
This opening paragraph will be three or four sentences.
Then summarize
the story or poem in one or two paragraphs. Each paragraph should be five to eight sentences long.
This introductory paragraph and 1 or 2 short summary paragraphs should total less than a page in length (your total essay is 2 to 3 pages in length).
Continue to
think about
the story or poem you have selected.
Next
craft body paragraphs giving your response or reaction to the writing or to a portion of the writing you particularly enjoyed or found upsetting. You may have as many paragraphs at as many lengths as you need to explain your response. You may use first person, I. Use at least
one quote
from the writing or line from the poem in your response.
Finish
your essay with a brief conclusion.
These response paragraphs and short conclusion should be a page or more in length (your total essay is 2 to 3 pages in length).
Please use a proper MLA heading, standard 12-point font, one-inch margins, and double space your essay in its entirety including the heading and title area.
A
student example
is posted in this Reader Response Information module, and there are other responses found on pages 42 and 841 in the textbook.
Remember that your response may include one or more of the following:
Examination of your agreement or disagreement with the ideas in the text
Discussion of the ideas in the story or poem that clash with your view of the world and with what you consider right and wrong
Explanation of what you learned from the text and of how the text may have changed your views and opinions about the topic
Exploration of an idea (or two ideas) that you particularly understood or found interesting
Reaction to or explanation of how the ideas in the text relate to your own experiences
Reaction to how ideas in the text relate to other things you’ve read or seen
Evaluation of how this text tries to convince the reader and whether it is effective
Explanation of whether the text worked as entertainment or as a work of art
All readings are found in the textbook for this class,
The Norton Introduction to Literature
, Shorter, 13th edition.
Select one of these writings for your Reader Response:
“King of the Bingo Game”
“Araby”
“A Pair of Tickets”
“The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket”
“The Interpreter of Maladies”
“Diving Into the Wreck”
“I Hear America Singing”
“Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night”
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself”
“Escape from the Old Country”
“Elena”
“Lady Lazarus”
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
English 1302 Reader Response Information
Critic Louise Rosenblatt is often credited with pioneering the
reader response
approach in
Literature as Exploration
(1938). Later, in her 1969 essay “Towards a Transactional Theory of Reading,” she summed up her position as follows:
“A poem is what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and what he experiences as relevant to the text.”
- Think about this quote and then decide:
- What is this author suggesting about reading?
- What is she arguing?
- What is she asserting?
- Critic Stanley Fish built on these ideas and argues that “literature exists only when it is read – a story is not an object nor is a poem nor is an essay.”
-
In a way, these writers are
redefining literature as something that only exists meaningfully in the mind of the reader
, and with the redefinition of the literary work as a
catalyst of mental events
, comes a redefinition of the
reader
.
No longer is the reader the passive recipient
of those ideas that an author has created in a text. “The reader is
active,
” Rosenblatt has insisted. Fish makes the same point in “Literature in the Reader”: “Reading is something you
do
.
” -
Thus the idea that the reader is an active participant in the reading process, not just a passive vessel, changes and enlivens the reading process, and gives you, the reader,
ownership in this learning process.
-
Learning to respond to text, to something you read, in a thoughtful way is an important part of increasing both reading and writing skills. A reader response essay asks the reader to examine, explain, and/or defend her/his personal reaction to a reading. You might be asked to explore why you like or dislike a reading; and/or to explain whether you agree or disagree with the ideas in a reading; and/or to discuss if you have experienced something similar to the ideas in a reading; and/or to determine if a reading is persuasive; and/or clarify what the author may be trying to accomplish with a reading; and/or to explain other ideas as set in an reader response assignment. There are no right or wrong responses in a reader response essay as long as each response is tied to the text. Nonetheless, it is important
that you demonstrate an understanding of the entire reading and clearly explain/support your reactions.
