A Consideration of Bogdan's "A Taxonomy of Responses and Respondents to Literature''

In her complex and interesting article, 1 Deanne Bogdan offers insights into three different types of interaction between text and reader.She calls the first "Total Form," which is characterized by a response called "stasis."The second she calls "Partial Form" which is associated with stock, kinetic, and spectator responses--all more or less defective.Finally, she proposes a second sort of "Total Form" which she thinks is more adequate than the frrst because it results in "autonomous response."When literary theory is directed to the understanding and description of reader response, it offers in a way which, though rare in our culture, is, nevertheless, useful to practising writers.Knowledge of the nature of reader responses can illuminate the design of rhetorical devices in the work-in-progress.By contrast, the effect of older modes of literary theory focuses on readers, not writers, and separates the former from their own experience by its preoccupation with the analyses of literary rhetoric.If the naive reader cries "Wow!" like Rita before she was educated, or falls silent, stunned by stasis as by a lightning flash, while the trained reader produces a literary essay using the terms of the latest fashion in criticism, then even sophisticated writers are liable to hope for naive readers among their audience.One might also hope to catch educated readers off-guard, or hope to be read by very intelligent people at a time when they were not doing criticism, but simply reading.In a telling reference to Northrop Frye, Bogdan reminds us of "the virtual impossibility of simultaneously participating in and being consciously aware of experience."This "dissociation of sensibility" applies to writers as well as to readers, and in a way represents the typical moral temptation of a writer's life.The typical temptation of a writer is to observe rather than undergo life, to tum life into material for writing, as critics then tum written words into material for criticism.When Damon Runyon said he had never met a boring person, we can perceive in the boast a sense in which he has not met the people whom he met.Or, as a clearer example, take the writer who fell down the stairwell of her apartment building in New York, ricocheting down floor after floor, breaking ribs and wrists ... as she went, she found herself saying "Ah!"Bogdan is well aware of the possibility that this dissociation could be prevent a critical response to literature, that one could not at the same time do literary criticism and read.But she does not wish to concede this somewhat romantic position because, among the responses she catalogues, her favoured one, the autonomous response, involves a degree of detachment.In outline, then, the taxonomy proposed by Bogdan goes as follows.There are two very different kinds of response called "Total Form" --stasis, and autonomous response.Then, under the heading "Partial Form," she places the more or less defective responses called the stock, kinetic, and spectator.First, let us consider stasis which is a lightning flash response, an ad- mired, and hoped for instantaneous reaction of pleasure, as the form and content 3(1), (Fall)l989

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