A reader-response approach to Susan Sontag's Death Kit

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dc.contributor.author Stead, Arnold
dc.contributor.department English
dc.date 2018-08-24T20:50:17.000
dc.date.accessioned 2020-07-02T05:34:31Z
dc.date.available 2020-07-02T05:34:31Z
dc.date.copyright Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 1988
dc.date.embargo 2013-03-26
dc.date.issued 1988
dc.description.abstract <p>I did not come to reader-response criticism because I understood it to be of importance to my critical methodology; it was, instead, suggested to me, and as I seemed to be in need of a label to lend legitimacy and focus to my reading of Death Kit, I latched on to it. As an approach to reading, it offers enough open-endedness to allow me to roam its continuum picking and choosing as I please. I have used Jane Tompkins~ Reader-Response Criticism From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, a collection of essays by reader-based critics, as a catalyst for a self-examination of my reading of Death Kit. After reading these essays and writing about Sontag~s novels, I see my reading of those books as heavily influenced by New Criticism. This is not surprising, for it had a firm hold in the academy when I was first introduced to literary study on a university level in the 1960s. Prior to my reading of the Tompkins~ anthology, I~d had a graduate seminar in the work of Stanley Cavell whose critical approach is certainly reader-based. I had also been impressed, and I think influenced, by Jean-Paul Sartre~s essay "Why Write?", which is concerned with the writer~s relationship to the reader, from the writer~s point of view more than the critic-reader~s. In the pages which follow, I attempt to set forth my version of the reader/writer relationship as instanced chiefly in my own reading of Susan Sontag~s Death Kit.</p>
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
dc.identifier archive/lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/32/
dc.identifier.articleid 1033
dc.identifier.contextkey 3961189
dc.identifier.doi https://doi.org/10.31274/rtd-180813-7551
dc.identifier.s3bucket isulib-bepress-aws-west
dc.identifier.submissionpath rtd/32
dc.identifier.uri https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/handle/20.500.12876/75696
dc.language.iso en
dc.source.bitstream archive/lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/32/1988_SteadAA_ReaderResponseApproach.pdf|||Fri Jan 14 23:33:17 UTC 2022
dc.subject.disciplines American Literature
dc.subject.disciplines Literature in English, North America
dc.title A reader-response approach to Susan Sontag's Death Kit
dc.type article
dc.type.genre thesis
dspace.entity.type Publication
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication a7f2ac65-89b1-4c12-b0c2-b9bb01dd641b
thesis.degree.discipline English (Literature)
thesis.degree.level thesis
thesis.degree.name Master of Arts
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