Discussion Chapter 5 Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader

             As the title suggests this was an article written in response to Ralph Rader’s model of literature and Rader’s articles about Fish’s reader response model.  Rader called Fishes model as rigorous work that does not lead to the true meaning.   Rader describe the reading of literature as assigning a single coherent meaning to the whole text.  Some example of a text can be a poem, a sentence a paragraph or a novel.  Rader claims that the pleasure we get from texts is when you discover the meaning that the author wrote or described.   When we interpret a text that is when you get meaning.   If we the reader cannot figure out the meaning he calls those interferences.   

                Fish stated that what Rader calls interferences is the reading experiencing.  We the reader will stumble or feel frustrated because the text is not direct or the author may use two negative, we ask our self did they or did they not?  This is not interference but the activity of reading and this activity is the meaning.  In reading L’Allegro you should feel frustrated and this is part of the experience and meaning of the poem.     We are carefree when Milton allows us to choose who comes to the window.   What Rader calls interferences Fish calls the act of reading and part of where we get meaning.

                Rader also called Fish’s work rigorous and Fish said it is rigorous and took it as a complement.  Reading and getting experiences is rigorous and part of the meaning of a text.  

                 Rader also commented that we don’t read to get an experience but we read to understand what the writer’s purpose is.   Fish disagrees that meaning of a text is not just to figure out what the author was saying but is an activity.  Fish agrees that there might be one coherent meaning of a text but that is not 

necessarily the meaning.  We get the meaning of any text by the activity of reading it.

                In reading a little about Rader’s work and articles that critic his work I find his work to be very similar to the standards we are seeing in the common core.  I agree with Rader that we should read literature and try to understand the author’s purpose for writing this novel or poem.  I also like this type of analysis of text when we read non-fiction.  When we are reading a chemistry or physics text we need to analyze what the purpose of this paragraph is. 

                Fish’s reader response model is closer to Rosenblatt’s theory.  I agree with Fish and Rosenblatt that when we read literature we need to connect to text and get our own meaning.   I also agree that reading is an activity which we need to help our students learn.  We might have to re-read a line or even a whole paragraph to get the meaning, but different text give us an experience.  We might read an essay and feel angry or sad, which might be the purpose of the author to get us to feel angry so that we might then help with their cause.  It might be the author’s purpose for us to feel sad so that we understand we are not alone that others feel sad in the same situation.  Here the meaning and the author’s purpose are two different items.

I am still reading and rereading Fish’s article/ Chapters about his models and theories.  However I found this article interesting since I had not read an article which was in response to another’s critic on his work.  I find it interesting that they publish these articles to defend their work. 

I have also attached some websites on Ralph Rader if anyone is interested in learning about Rader and his models on Literature.  There is also a review of Rader’s theory  the same article that Fish responded to, but these author’s agreed with Rader, so I thought it would be a nice contrast to see what people think is good about the model.

Ralph Rader -

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/11/28_raderobit.shtml

An excerpt from the article of Phelan and Richter.

The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Ralph W. Rader

James Phelan, David H. Richter

From: Narrative
Volume 18, Number 1, January 2010
pp. 73-90 | 10.1353/nar.0.0040

Rader’s Definition of Literature and His Concept of Form

In “Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation” (1974), Rader defines literature as that class of verbal compositions designed to be understood by immediate reference only to themselves through the reader’s grasp of the writer’s communicative act as directed toward the evocation of a certain pleasure in their own understanding. In this sense, literary works are verbal compositions in which “the act of understanding . . . is experienced as its own justification” (250). This definition has both a descriptive and an evaluative dimension. In its descriptive sense, the definition distinguishes literary works from non-literary works, the class of verbal compositions in which the reader’s act of understanding is directed toward her doing something else, often something practical (making a pie, voting for one candidate rather than another, writing a letter of protest, and so on). In its evaluative sense, the definition allows us to distinguish among degrees of literariness once we acknowledge that different members of the literary class offer their readers different degrees of pleasure-in-understanding and concomitantly different degrees of self-justification. For example, we could readily agree that Paradise Lost is substantially more literary than, say, Ogden Nash’s “Ode to a Baby”: “A bit of talcum / Is always walcum.”