Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Precursor to Reader-Response Theory

This article contends that there exists significant similitude between the fundamental principles of twentieth-century Reader-Response theory and the notions of the role of the reader and the reading process ideated by nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). Through a close reading of the multifarious references, sporadically scattered through Emerson's essays, addresses and journals, and the theories of Louise Rosenblatt, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser and Jonathan Culler, this article attempts to shed light on how Emerson presages the Reader -Response theorists' emphasis on the instrumental role of the reader in meaning formation, on the essentially creative and active, inherently subjective and unique nature of the reading process, the relentlessly dynamic and unduplicable experience of the act of reading; and, lastly, the indispensable importance of literary knowledge and competence as prerequisites to signification and meaning construal of the interpretative reading process.