Introduction
One’s sense of value is rarely exhausted by descriptive and instrumental accounts, especially when the object of attention is aesthetic and contemplative. Modern literary criticism should be able to describe the text’s capacity to perform attitudes, but there remains a horizon to our grasp of these attitudes, an “attitude toward attitudes,” perhaps, where the stance that reveals some important dimensions of literary experience (:2000). The viewers/readers should be able to examine texts or competence, not to attend to objects or direct acts of interpretation, but to speculate on the values that consciously reflect upon the powers the readers/ viewers exercise in reading and the cultural identifications implicit in the possession of those powers. Instead of describing competence in reading, they should construct two ideals that can be seen as possible conditions of self-knowledge and attitudes toward culture, made available by reflecting on what is involved in taking texts as performances which constitute a qualitative cultural meaning.
The first of the two values, or ideal self-reflective attitudes, the readers/ viewers concentrate on can be stated in simple terms: because it develops powers to describe actions, literary education can be seen as also fostering a capacity to bestow on human agents (and by analogy on the self) attributes traditionally associated with ideas of dignity and nobility (1989). The literary imagination, he said, tries to do justice to human lives, often when the agent represented would, in reality, lack the terms and faculties for doing so in his or her own right. The idea of justice makes literature leery, since it admits radical ironic reversals. However, it is extremely significant aspect of literary experience–an attitude committed to taking seriously the purposes, qualities, and achievements of the agents represented (1981). Because it reflects upon their acts that cannot easily take up the casual stances that they often do in daily life and, because they attend to qualities, they are not content with impersonal explanations that can treat lives as symptomatic reflexes of external conditions. Even when persons are represented as defeated by these conditions, most of best literary texts make the readers/viewers understand that defeat from within a character’s attitude so that they can fully sympathize with it or at least understand it as a significant state of mind. So an attitude of seriousness toward actions leads to a sense of how agents outside literary texts can be valued.
The Humble Boy and Snowman
The reception theory by is a branch of post modern literary criticism that focuses on the ways that literary works are received by the readers (1992). It is also sometimes called reader-response theory. According to , literary texts are established against existing horizon of expectations consisting of readers’ current knowledge and assumptions about literature, and that the meaning of texts, change as the horizons shift. Not like most types of reader-response theory, the reception theory is interested more in historical changes affecting the reading public than in the lone reader.
There are some related theoretical discussions about the building of meaning by readers or audiences, or more generally by consumers of information and cultural goods (:1989). The reception theory contradicts conventional perspectives of meaning that benefit strong concepts of authorial intention and related view that meaning found in texts. Both perspectives put the reader as the receiver of fixed, intentional meaning. Instead, reception theory stresses the variety of possible “positions” that a reader may occupy with respect to a text. Some of these positions correspond to a target audience and require a set of competencies in the expectations of the genre or complicity in suspending critical judgment. Just like the two plays, Humble Boy and Snowman. Both have critical and dissenting positions that materialize at the margins of their viewers.
Both plays represent the similar themes that have been lobbying by the reader-response and audience theorists and basically within what literary critics called cultural studies (:2000). The themes are underwritten a wide range of research and in many cases integrate a strong sociological focus. The Humble Boy, shows the important role that culture, history and the nature of language in a play that helps the viewers construct “meaning.” While the Snowman has monolithic objective that contains truth with a single and fixed meaning that have placed the playwright as the God of his or her views and knowledge, on the other hand, the Humble Boy, established a process of creating meaning as a form of collaborative work between the author, the viewers, the culture or “interpretative community,” the author and reader inhabit, the language which the play created.
The Humble Boy presents the multivalent nature of language and it considers the literary interpretation as a provisional enterprise and at the same time explored the manner that culture identifies interpretive possibilities. The viewers were able to have an in depth understanding about the relationship between art and culture in a much more challenging way, and so doing, they have participated in intellectual activity of construction of meaning in a literary texts. Therefore, the Humble Boy has given the viewers a more challenging, responsible and rewarding “interaction” with the play.
Using the perspective of the reception theory, the Humble Boy is comparable to the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Awakening and Their Eyes Were Watching God. It gives the viewers with significant challenges to conventional simplistic conceptions of the value of literature. They also offer viewers a chance to watch a culture work at defining itself, its literary canon and establish critical vocabulary and methodology. These literary works also exposed the viewers to what the critics called “reception moments” that help them understand in a very concrete approach that the value of the texts are socially constructed. Deriving the meaning from these texts are significantly provisional enterprise.
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