A Reader-response Critical Study Of My ántonia

Willa Sibert Cather(1873-1947),one of the most influential writers in the United States in the early twentieth century,is the first woman writer in American literature who devotes herself to the portrayal of the frontier life of pioneers in Midwest.Her masterpieces are O,Pioneer!,My ántonia,A Lost Lady,The Professor's House and Death Comes for the Archbishop,of which My ántonia is her most representative novel.My ántonia is about a Bohemian woman ántonia Shimerda who becomes self-reliant with courage and confidence after immigrating to Nebraska prairie.This thesis is divided into four chapters besides the introduction and the conclusion.The introduction presents an overview of Willa Cather and My ántonia and literature review of this novel.Chapter One gives an overview of the origin and development of Reader-Response Criticism,focusing on three terms,namely,“Indeterminacy” proposed by Roman Ingraden,“Reader's Horizon of Expectation” put forward by Hans Robert Jauss and “Appeal Structure” proposed by Wolfgang Iser.This chapter also explains why this thesis is written from the perspective of Reader-Response Criticism.Chapter Two expounds that the reader plays an active role in literary interpretations.This chapter is divided into two parts.The first part discusses different definitions of the reader by different critics,such as Wolfgang Iser's “Implied Reader”,Hans Robert Jauss' s “Historical Reader” and Stanley Fish's “Informed Reader” and the like.The second part sets forth the positive and negative interpretations of My ántonia by real readers.Chapter Three is about the indeterminacy of the images of ántonia Shimeda from the perspectives of characters of the novel,the protagonist ántonia and the author Cather.First,Jim Burden(the narrator and main character),the Harlings(the representative of the old immigrants)and Lena Lingard(the representative of the new immigrants)have contradictory views of ántonia.In Jim's eyes,ántonia is the one with both femininity and masculinity.In the Harlings' opinions,on one hand,ántonia is a girl with tragic experience but cheerful and optimistic.On the other hand,she is a superficial and frivolous hired girl.In the eyes of Lena,ántonia is very kind but naive.Secondly,in ántonia's own opinion,although she considers herself as an individual with independent will,she often succumbs to the will of others.Moreover,in the author Cather's eyes,ántonia is a woman with unique charm.However,influenced by “Americanization Movement”,Cather has some limitations of the time.In short,the interior characters and ántonia herself and the author form a diversified and contradictory understanding of ántonia.Therefore,ántonia becomes a character with indeterminate image.Chapter Four concentrates on the interaction with two forms between the text and the reader.One is achieved through “Reader's Horizon of Expectation,and the other is through “Appeal Structure”.First,the text evokes the reader's formulated horizon of expectation and then the reader's expectations are constantly challenged,corrected and reshaped with the development of the plot.This helps the reader gain a new horizon and interact with the text.Second,there is an “Appeal Structure” within the text.This structure consists of “Negation” and “Blank”.They are the structural mechanism by which the reader is called on to read.Negation evokes the subject and the form with which the reader is familiar and then negates them.Negations in this text are embodied as the negation of social reality and that of Jim's narrative.Blanks are summons and invitations of the text to the reader.This thesis mainly analyzes five kinds of blanks,namely,the blank in the title of the novel,the blank in the image of road,blanks within dialogues,blanks in Pavel and Peter's tale and blanks in Mr.Shimeda's death.Once the reader fills in the blanks,the interaction takes place.Based on the above analysis,this thesis draws the conclusion: My ántonia is full of indeterminacy.The present author finds that the reader plays an indispensable role in the interpretations of the text through the analyses of the indeterminacy of the images of ántonia and the interaction between the text and the reader.My ántonia isn't a work with a complete meaning without the reader's participation.From the perspective of Reader-Response Criticism,the present author believes that the author Cather leaves a lot of blanks in the text.By analyzing the blanks in the text,this thesis reveals the theme of the complexity of human nature.