Reader Response Paradigms and the Selected Short Stories of Saul Bellow

The proposed critical study on the select stories of Saul Bellow discusses the five paradigms of the Reader Response Theory. The fabric of reader-response theory is woven of so many diverse and controversial threads that some methods of classification is necessary. The methods chosen in this study will give the clearest sense of the reader-response enterprise in general and prepare us to read the shorter fiction of Saul Bellow in this field. This range of approaches is organized under five headings: Transactional Reader-Response Theory, Affective Stylistics, Subjective Reader-Response Theory, Psychological Reader-Response Theory, and Social Reader-Response Theory. The thirteen short stories in the collection are grouped for the convenience of the researcher in a way that they are suitable to fit in to the five theories. The stories are grouped into five perceivable patterns. Under these patterns the stories are grouped and discussed.