Reader Response Theory in the Phenomenology of Reading with the text and the reader as its focal point

A literary work used to be looked at and received as the product of the writer's own horizon, imagination and aesthetic creativity. This conception of the text focused on and tried to understand a single meaning allocated to the text and that fixed and final meaning is nothing but the intention of the author of the text. It was claimed that responses to the same text would necessarily have to be the same albeit at different times and by different readers. The text was doomed to a pregiven and single meaning and unchangeable reality prior to it. Yet, twentieth century criticism has drawn a considerable attention and critical importance to the possibility that responses and interpretations to a given text evolve and develop from time to time and from reader to another reader. The approach of this theory which is called reader response theory in the phenomenology of reading revolves around the text and the reader and argues that the relationship between them is ontological in its nature. Ontological in the sense that a written text must have a reader and that the reader lends genuine value to the text. This paper is going to explore how, according to this theory, a text is open to meanings and is capable of producing different responses.