Reading literature through the looking glass of theory.
Paradise Lost by John Milton
So Stanley Fish wrote a book called Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. He set out to explore how readers respond to John Milton's epic about the creation of humans—and their fall from...
Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne
Religio Medici is a medieval text by a dude named Sir Thomas Browne. It's kind of an autobiography, in which Browne talks about the Bible, religion, and spiritual life. In his essay "Literature in...
Endgame by Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett is famous for writing plays in which nothing happens. People just sit around, and they say very little… or they say a lot of nonsense. There are lots of big gaps, or "blanks," in B...
"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner
Reader-Response theorist Norman N. Holland is totally into psychoanalysis. In his book The Nature of Literary Response: 5 Readers Reading, he asked—you guessed it—five readers to respond to a n...
Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1603)
So Hamlet's father was king until some guy named Claudius came along, killed him, married Hamlet's mother, and took over the throne. Hamlet is, by custom, supposed to avenge his father's murder by...