Holland as a reader-response critic has always emphasized the reader's active role, but the scope of the reader's role in participating in the creation of literary meaning varies.
His early model elaborated in The Dynamics of Literary Response expla...
Holland as a reader-response critic has always emphasized the reader's active role, but the scope of the reader's role in participating in the creation of literary meaning varies.
His early model elaborated in The Dynamics of Literary Response explains the reader's literary response in terms of ege-psychology. Readers respond not only to the conceptual meaning, but at the same time to the fantasy embodied in the text in the way of gratifying serves as a defense to conceal the embodied fantasy. Readers transforms the text in the way of gratifying his unconscious fantasy which they don't want to be revealed. The result is the complex matching and interaction between the defense of form and the fantasy content in the text and the rader's defense mechanism and fantasy.
In 5 Readers Reading Holland develops a transactive model that gives readers more active role. The central idea of this model is 'identity-theme' that is a continuing and constant core of personality, an unchanging essence of an individual. With this we perceive texts. We accept from the text what our starategy of adaptation permits and draws out the fantasy that gives us plasure. This identity recreates itself through the process of expectation, defense, fantasy, and transformation. Thus interpretation is the function of identity. But Holland's transactive model has difficulties in separating the subject's identity-theme from that of the critic who describes it.
In The Critical I Holland attempts to combine the idea of identity-theme from psychoanalysis with feedback idea supported by recent cognitive science; we perceive by trying out constructions on the world. People actively participate in reading by constantly testing hypotheses against the instructions encountered in the text, producing a dynamic process of adjustment and correction that advances on the basis of the feedback that the subject receives. There are several hierarchical standards in this feedback process; a unique identity interpreted as theme and variations, code internalized from our culture and canon dependent upon interpretive communities, and physiological loop.
Holland's feedback model has an advantage of explaining the similarities and differences at the same time, but while Holland finds his theoretical basis in harder science, he overlooks the implicature of the fact that language is different from other objects.