Reader Response: Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes

READER RESPONSE:

Reader-response criticism encompasses various approaches to literature that explore and seek to explain the diversity (and often divergence) of readers' responses to literary works.

Source: http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_reader.html

Reader-Response Criticism is really a collective term used to describe a number of critical theories that have emerged since the 1960's, all of which focus on the response of the reader to the text rather than the text itself as the source of meaning in a literary work. In Reader-Response criticism a text is viewed as a process that goes on in the mind of the reader rather than as a stable entity with a single "correct meaning". In this sense the reader actually participates in creating the text.Regardless of their particular perspectives, all reader-response critics agree that since, in varying degrees, the individual reader creates the meanings of a text, there is no one correct meaning for a text. However, these critics offer differing opinions regarding how readers do in fact "read". Questions prominent to the studies of reader-response theorists are: What are the specific factors that influence the readers response? What meaning, if any, is inherent in the text? What power does the author or the text have in shaping the responses of the reader.

Source: http://home.earthlink.net/~potterama/Michele/projects/hyper/reader.html




What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up 
like a raisin in the sun?  Or fester like a sore--  And then run?  Does it stink like rotten meat?  Or crust and sugar over--  like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags  like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

ANALYSIS:

Being the reader, I comprehend the poem in a way that we have dreams which are not always achieved. Sometimes they are postponed fr some reasons. by understanding the entire text, we would see that not everything ends in a good way. There are times that things would go bad but it is not yet the end. The world doesn't end there. instead, we should dream something anew and do everything to make it come true.