Reader Response Theory and the Restrictive Nature of Freedom

During the mid twentieth century, the literary community witnessed the descent of the New Criticism and the emergence of the reader response movement. The reader response movement sharply contrasts the theories of New Criticism in that it focuses on the importance of the reader in the creation of the literary experience. Like New Critics, reader response theorists do not entirely agree on all issues and, consequently, different branches of the movement form. The phenomenological approach …

…the text, the reader plays an equally important role in the work's creation because it is the reader who ultimately performs the text. Phenomenologists support the bestowal of great freedom to the reader in the "performance" of the text. Ideally, freedom is defined as an unrestrained condition- or not being under another's control. This is not the freedom that the phenomenologists grant their readers, though. The freedom that they detail is both limited and restrictive.