Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"Epistemological Assumptions in the Study of Response"
The assumption of the subjective paradigm is that collective similarity of response can be determined only by each individual's announcement of his response and subsequent communally motivated negotiative comparison. This assumption is validated by the ordinary fact that when each person says what he sees, each statement will be substantially different. The response must therefore be the starting point for the study of aesthetic experience.
Just because everyone responds differently to a literary text, that doesn't mean we can't come to some kind of agreement about what a literary text is about. Yeah, we all have different interpretations and responses—we're different people, after all. But we can still arrive at a general idea about what a text is doing to us, and about how it affects us, by comparing notes. What's your impression of this novel or play and how is it different from or similar to mine?
David Bleich is responding to a common criticism tossed at Reader-Response theorists: if every reader responds differently to a work of literature, then how the heck can we ever talk about literature with other people? If everyone has a different opinion, then we can never agree on what a text's saying, right?
Bleich's point is that even if we can't come to any one objective interpretation of a text, we can still come to a general understanding of it—but we can only do that by first taking into account a number of subjective responses to that work. So it looks like there's a kind of middle ground between totally objective and totally subjective readings of literature: that's the sweet spot for textual interpretation.