Reader Response Example Essay
Heart of Darkness, again taking our critical topic as our theoretical example, is rather obviously trying to do something to its reader, to change him or his mind in some way. For one thing, as almost every critic has recognized, the work is obviously--if complexly--critiquing late nineteenth-century imperialism. But Heart of Darkness, even as it mounts this explicit critique, also explicitly practices the dogma of disinterestedness, a paradoxical feat accomplished primarily by making Marlow's act of tale-telling adhere to Shelley's image: the tale seems more like meditation than speech, and the audience seems less hearing than overhearing. There Marlow sits, almost invisible in the deepening darkness, simply thinking aloud. Or so it seems. The presence of his immediate audience seems almost if not entirely incidental, almost unnecessary to the telling of his tale.
A reader response critic would observe that so many "seemings" should make us wary, suspicious of what we seem to be seeing. He might also observe that one of the tale's "actions" is not only the usual conflict of characters, but also the less usual conflict of aesthetics and rhetoric here being discussed. Put otherwise, different definitions of literature are at war in Heart of Darkness, and the reader is being asked to sit in judgment on this agony as well as on that being narrated by Marlow, the most obvious instance of which is his struggle with Kurtz or, if you will, himself. All that we can be certain of, given Conrad's superior artistry, in this work and in his others, is that each request for the reader's judgment is designed to prompt rethinking of his conventional or received ways of thinking about and valuing art--and of the "persons" it fabricates.
--From "Darkening the Reader: Reader Response Criticism and Heart of Darkness" by Adena Rosmarin.
A reader response critic would observe that so many "seemings" should make us wary, suspicious of what we seem to be seeing. He might also observe that one of the tale's "actions" is not only the usual conflict of characters, but also the less usual conflict of aesthetics and rhetoric here being discussed. Put otherwise, different definitions of literature are at war in Heart of Darkness, and the reader is being asked to sit in judgment on this agony as well as on that being narrated by Marlow, the most obvious instance of which is his struggle with Kurtz or, if you will, himself. All that we can be certain of, given Conrad's superior artistry, in this work and in his others, is that each request for the reader's judgment is designed to prompt rethinking of his conventional or received ways of thinking about and valuing art--and of the "persons" it fabricates.
--From "Darkening the Reader: Reader Response Criticism and Heart of Darkness" by Adena Rosmarin.