Ciarán Kavanagh’s defining argument in Refiguring Reader-Response is that to genuinely understand what a text does—its experiential and interpretive potentialities—we must move beyond monolithic conceptions of the reader, to consider readers as a plurality. That is, we must shift our attention to what a text can do—not as purely theoretical exercise but as the very propulsion driving our inquiry into the text. Consequently, this book seeks to push reader-oriented criticism beyond the “monolithic” conceptual reader who is theorized to read and experience texts only in intended, academically approved, or statistically standard ways. To this end, Kavanagh aims to revitalize and refigure reader-response theory into what might be called “New Reader-Response.” To do so, Kavanagh returns to the reader-oriented theories principally imagined and iterated in the 1960s through 1980s by critics such as Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, and Judith Fetterley.
Kavanagh’s aim in refiguring reader-response is syncretic: He endeavors to salvage the ambitious egalitarianism of reader-response’s originators, while reworking their philosophical approach into a more active methodology through modern means of conceptualizing texts, readers, and the reading experience, such as theories of genre, narratology, embodiment, and affective science. By analyzing literary texts by Kurt Vonnegut, J. G. Ballard, and Joanna Russ, Kavanagh provides a blueprint for future criticism that aims to combine the analytical work of close reading with reception-informed work and, as a result, reveals how texts move through readers’ lives and wider society.