Reader response and reader reception theories of the twentieth-century have left one area of research curiously unexamined—readers. From the Russian Formalists (Victor Shklovksy), to the Constance school (Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser), to the poststructuralists (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida), the focus of theorists has always been on texts and the characteristics that define their literariness. Readers—in actuality, a multitude of real individuals with various aptitudes, experiences and tastes—have been abstracted into “the reader,” a hypothetical everyman. As such, a vast section on the spectrum of possible reader responses, which may include interest, intrigue and enjoyment, but also frustration, boredom and annoyance, has been regretfully ignored in the discipline of literary studies. Texts that present readers with difficulties—either linguistic or logical—highlight especially well the wide array of possible reader responses, for experimental art (whether visual or written) sets out to defy expectations, aiming precisely to incite controversy and divide opinions. This dissertation therefore takes up works published in the late 1960s and early 1970s that are known for their difficult, experimental styles and studies how readers respond to them, taking particular interest in the cognitive processes that are involved in the act of reading. Under the lens are Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela and Macedonio iii Fernández’s El Museo de la novela de la Eterna . To consider the impact of readers’ expectations surrounding genre, responses to Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie, a text of theory that employs similar formal games, are also compared. Numerous advances in the cognitive sciences over the past two decades have granted previously unfathomable insights into the functioning of the human brain where language and reading are concerned. The purpose of this thesis is twofold: 1) to promote a new framework for the study of reader response that is informed by the cognitive sciences; and 2) to acknowledge that texts elicit various responses from readers and thus argue that cognitive factors such as attention, long-term and working memory and emotions, as well as readers’ expectations of coherency, shape these responses.

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Repetition and the Construction of Character in Gravity's Rainbow

Understanding Difficulty: Reader Response and Cognition Across Genres

This paper examines one explicit and many potential references to James Joyce in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and explores evidence that a minor Pynchon character may be read as an amalgamat...

Repetition and the Construction of Character in Gravity's Rainbow

Citations

Understanding Difficulty: Reader Response and Cognition Across Genres

Clash of the Modern/Postmodern Titans? James Joyce in Gravity’s Rainbow