Johnathan Culler. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca, New York: Cornell U.P., 1982.The structuralist emphasis on literary codes, the constructive role forced upon readers by certain experimental fictions, and the need to find ways to talk about the most refractory contemporary works have all contributed to a change in the reader's role, but one should not overlook an aspect of that change that is easily ignored. For the rhetoricians of antiquity and the Renaissance, and for many critics of other times, a poem is a composition designed to produce an effect on readers, to move them in certain ways; and one's judgment of a poem depends on one's sense of the quality and intensity of its effect. To describe this impact is not, though, to give what we would today regard as an interpretation, as Jane Tompkins points out ("The Reader in History," pp. 202-9). The experiences or responses that modern reader-oriented critics invoke are generally cognitive rather than affective: not feeling shivers along the spine, weeping in sympathy, or being transported with awe, but having one's expectations proved false, struggling with an irresolvable ambiguity, or questioning the assumptions on which one had relied. In attacking the affective fallacy, Stanley Fish insists that "in the category of response I include not only 'tears, prickles,' and 'other psychological symptoms'" that Wimsatt and Beardsley's fallacy sets aside, "but all the precise mental operations involved in reading, including the formation of complete thoughts, the performing (and regretting) of acts of judgment, the following and making of logical sequences" (Is There a Text in This Class?, pp. 42-43). In fact, Fish never mentions tears or prickles; his reader-response criticism treats the reader's encounter with literature as an experience of interpretation. — pp. 39-40.
Fish [writes] that "the reader of whose responses I speak" is a complex figure, an "informed reader, neither an abstraction, nor an actual living reader, but a hybrid—a real reader (me) who does everything within his power to make himself informed," including "the attendant suppressing, in so far as that is possible, of what is personal and idiosyncratic and 1970ish in my response." "Each of us," he continues democratically, "if we are sufficiently responsible and self-conscious, can, in the course of applying the method, become the informed reader' (p. 49). — pp. 40-41.