16 Practicing Reader Response Criticism
Now that you’ve learned about reader response theory, practiced this method of analysis with “What an Indian Thought When He Saw a Comet,” and reviewed some examples, you will complete a theoretical response to a text using reader response as your approach. You will read three different texts below. Choose one text and respond to the questions in a short essay (500-750 words).
I have included questions to guide your reading. You may choose to respond to some or all of these questions; however, your response should be written as a short essay, and you will need to come up with a thesis statement about your chosen text. Post your short essay as a response to the Reader Response Theoretical Response discussion board. I have included the theoretical response assignment instructions at the end of this chapter.
Checklist for Practicing Reader Response Criticism
When using the reader response approach, the goal is to put the reader, either subjective (you) or implied, at the center of the target. You’ll interpret the text based on either your own subjective responses or based on the implied reader’s responses. You may be asked to consider how different people would respond differently to the text.
- Practice active reading. Make notes, ask questions, respond to the text, and record your responses.
- Focus on the details (much as you do with a close reading) and ask how your response to the text might change if those details changed.
- Decide whether you will write a subjective or a receptive response to the text.
1. Dear Phantom Children (2018)
By Catherine Broadwell (formerly Catherine Kyle)
Dear phantom children
who hover near the futon frame
like lavender genies or wisps
of feathered incense smoke, take heed—
we get it. You enjoy the look
of daffodils and jello. It might be fun
to dress you as a puppy or a cub. We’ve pushed
our share of strollers watching neighbor ladies’
babies, and yes, the dappling of sun on plaid
and board book can be sweet. The thing is,
spirits, we can barely even hold each other—
our other hands latched to the railing of this speeding ship.
*
To those already here, well, welcome
to holey vessel. We’ll do our best
to patch it up before it’s sink or
kill. We’re trying not to polar bear
ourselves or leave you ice cubes
from which you’ll have to hop and
hop, precarious wayfare. Democracy,
the ultimate hair-tearing-out group project.
Humanity, the raft that everybody wants
to steer. For now, don’t worry, babies; look—
aurora borealis. Take a load off, babies; look
at Ursa Major rise.
Catherine Broadwall (formerly known as Catherine Kyle) is the author of Water Spell (Cornerstone Press, forthcoming 2025), Fulgurite (Cornerstone Press, 2023), Shelter in Place (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and other collections. Her writing has appeared in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She was the winner of the 2019-2020 COG Poetry Award and a finalist for the 2021 Mississippi Review Prize in poetry. She is an assistant professor at DigiPen Institute of Technology, where she teaches creative writing and literature. “Dear Phantom Children” is All Rights Reserved, reprinted here with written permission of the author.
Questions
Here are some reader response questions you can use to guide your response. You to do not have to use every question. You should formulate a thesis statement about the text and include this thesis statement in your response. Then support the thesis statement with evidence from the text.
- Who is the implied reader for this passage? What characteristics of the writing help you to define this implied reader? How does the author use description to relate to the implied reader?
- How does the poem’s imagery affect you? Consider these lines: “We’ll do our best/to patch it up before it’s sink/or kill” and “Democracy,/The ultimate hair-tearing-out group project.” What specific examples from recent events come to mind when you read these lines?
- How do you feel after reading the poem? Do you feel wistful? Hopeful? Angry? Resigned? Something else? Would other readers be likely to feel like you do when they read the poem? Why or why not?
- What role do you think social media played in the writing of this poem? Does the imagery remind you of Instagram posts? Why might some readers see the influence of social media in the poem while others might not? In what ways would those readers be different?
- Think of at least five different receptive audiences for this text. Examples might include Millennials, Boomers, Generation Z, parents, people who have chosen to be childless, women, men, liberals, or conservatives. How might these different groups understand the text in different ways?
2. Excerpt from Demon Copperhead (2022 Pulitzer Prize Co-Winner for Fiction)
By Barbara Kingsolver
First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.
On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she’d be, little bleach-blonde smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we’re discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl tile, worming and shoving around because I’m still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life.
Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he’d spent waiting on women. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute, first she needed to go see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored up again. Mrs. Peggot being a lady that doesn’t beat around the bushes and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag.
Like a little blue prizefighter. Those are the words she’d use later on, being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom’s life. And if that’s how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I’ll take it. To me that says I had a fighting chance. Long odds, yes I know. If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed. Kid born to the junkie is a junkie. He’ll grow up to be everything you don’t want to know, the rotten teeth and dead-zone eyes, the nuisance of locking up your tools in the garage so they don’t walk off, the rent-by-the-week motel squatting well back from the scenic highway. This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things, should have got himself delivered to some rich or smart or Christian, nonusing type of mother. Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.
Me though, I was a born sucker for the superhero rescue. Did that line of work even exist, in our trailer-home universe? Had they all quit Smallville and gone looking for bigger action? Save or be saved, these are questions. You want to think it’s not over till the last page.
It was a Wednesday this all happened, which supposedly is the bad one. Full of woe etc. Add to that, coming out still inside the fetus ziplock. But. According to Mrs. Peggot there is one good piece of luck that comes with the baggie birth: it’s this promise from God that you’ll never drown. Specifically. You could still OD, or get pinned to the wheel and charbroiled in your driver’s seat, or for that matter blow your own brains out, but the one place where you will not suck your last breath is underwater. Thank you, Jesus.
I don’t know if this is at all related, but I always had a thing for the ocean. Usually kids will get fixated on naming every make and model of dinosaur or what have you. With me it was whales and sharks. Even now I probably think more than the normal about water, floating in it, just the color blue itself and how for the fish, that blue is the whole deal. Air and noise and people and our all-important hectic nonsense, a minor irritant if even that.
I’ve not seen the real thing, just pictures, and this hypnotizing screen saver of waves rearing up and spilling over on a library computer. So what do I know about ocean, still yet to stand on its sandy beard and look it in the eye? Still waiting to meet the one big thing I know is not going to swallow me alive.
Barbara Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is a Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist, essayist and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family’s attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead.[1] Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments. This passage excerpted from Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Copyright © 2022 by Barbara Kingsolver and reprinted under a Fair Use Exception.
Questions
Here are some reader response questions you can use to guide your response. You to do not have to use every question. You should formulate a thesis statement about the text and include this thesis statement in your response. Then support the thesis statement with evidence from the text.
- Who is the implied reader for this passage? What characteristics of the writing help you to define this implied reader? How does knowing that the author won a Pulitzer Prize for the book in 2022 affect your reading and your understanding of the implied reader?
- Are you aware that Demon Copperhead is a loose retelling of the classic Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield? How would reading Dickens’s novel or at least being aware of this fact impact a reader’s response to the book?
- What do you expect will happen to the narrator based on this passage? Will the book’s ending be happy? Sad? Mixed? Why do you feel this way?
- Describe your view of the narrator. Do you relate to him, or does he seem like a stranger? Why do you feel this way? Look at specific examples from the text.
- Think of at least five different receptive audiences for this text. Examples might include doctors, college students, people living in recovery, or people from varied socioeconomic backgrounds. How might these different groups understand the text in different ways?
3. Idea 61: Since There’s No Help (1619)
Questions
Here are some reader response questions you can use to guide your response. You to do not have to use every question. You should formulate a thesis statement about the text and include this thesis statement in your response. Then support the thesis statement with evidence from the text.
- How do you emotionally respond to the speaker’s decision to part ways with their beloved? What emotions or sentiments does the poem evoke in you as a reader, and how do they influence your understanding of the speaker’s perspective?
- Reflect on your own experiences with love and parting. Can you relate to the emotions conveyed in the poem, such as the sense of finality and the desire to cleanly break free? How do your personal experiences shape your interpretation of the speaker’s actions and feelings?
- Consider the poem’s portrayal of the end of a romantic relationship as a moment of “latest breath” and “closing up [of] eyes.” How does this imagery resonate with your own perceptions of love and its eventual conclusion? How does it enhance or challenge your understanding of love’s stages and transitions?
- Explore the concept of closure in the poem. How does the speaker seek closure in this parting, and what does it mean to them? How does the notion of canceling vows and erasing all signs of love from their brows reflect the speaker’s perspective on moving on from a relationship?
- Who is the implied reader for the poem? Is there an actual audience that we know of? Consider this information about the author, Michael Drayton. In 1591. he fell in love with Anne Goodere and probably wrote this sonnet shortly afterwards. Anne married Sir Henry Rainsford in 1596. While Drayton never married, he often visited Anne and Henry at their country home, and his passion apparently transmuted into a deep friendship with Anne. How does this information affect your response to the poem?
Theoretical Response Assignment Instructions
Instructions
Grading
- 15 points: theoretical response
- 10 points: online discussion (5 points per response) OR class attendance.
