| dc.description | Affective criticism, as it has been practiced over the last few years, has come to focus upon the reader's (or audience's) subjective experience of a given literary work.1 Rather than examining the text qua object, affective criticism (like all subjective criticism) has abandoned the objectivism and textual reification which lay at the heart of the New Critical enterprise, striving instead to lead "one away from the 'thing itself' in all its solidity to the inchoate impressions of a variable and various reader" (Fish 1980:42).2 Shifting the critical focus away from the text to the reader has engendered much controversy, in large part because the emphasis placed upon the reader as sole (or co-)creator of meaning has led to "the exclusion, and even to the avowed extinction, of authors and literary objects" (DeMaria 1978:463). | eng |
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