Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark [Paperback]

Robert M. Fowler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2001

First published in hardcover in 1991, Robert Fowler’s Let the Reader Understand was ahead of its time. Using reader-response criticism, a pioneering method for reading the Gospel of Mark, he invited contemporary readers to participate actively in making the meaning of the Gospel. Ten years later, the importance of this methodology is clear to all. In Let the Reader Understand Fowler provides clues to the rhetorical strategies used in Mark, and asks the reader to be attentive to the ways in which the narrative weaves its spell. He also demonstrates how the narrative provides both direction and indirection for the reader through its use of irony and paradox. Rather than providing a complete exposition of Mark, Fowler’s book offers hints and suggestions about how readers can read Mark and fashion contemporary meaning for themselves. Robert M. Fowler is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Religion Department at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. He is the author of Loaves and Fishes: The Function of the Feeding Stories in the Gospel of Mark and is a contributor to The Postmodern Bible. For: Seminarians; graduate students; undergraduates; general audiences; pastors>

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Let the Reader Understand is that rare book that both serves as an introduction to a method of scholarship and is also a landmark work in the field. Fowler provides an excellent, accessible introduction to anyone new to reader-response criticism of the Bible. His critical reading of the Gospel of Mark provides one of the most in comprehensive and insightful applications of reader-oriented criticism available to scholars to date."-- Russell W. Dalton, United Theological Seminary (Russell W. Dalton, United Theological Seminary )

"The paperback edition of this important book is long overdue. No other biblical scholar has been as closely identified with reader-response criticism as Robert Fowler, and Let the Reader Understand remains the most thoroughgoing and impressive application of this much-discussed methodology to a biblical text."-- Stephen D. Moore, author of Literary Criticism and the Gospels (Stephen D. Moore )

"Robert Fowler proposes a novel idea: What if we were to read books of the Bible the way we read other books? He reviews the Gospel of Mark the way one might approach a modern short story, noting how it affects its readers and asking why it sometimes affects different readers differently. A breakthrough in biblical scholarship, Let the Reader Understand has pragmatic worth for all who appreciate the Gospels as something other than historical artifacts. His approach brings the Gospel of Mark into the present, allowing it to speak in potentially unique ways to everyone who reads it. A modern 'classic' of biblical criticism, this volume is essential reading for all who are serious about studying the Gospels in ways that respect their character as literary narratives."--Mark Allan Powell (Mark Allan Powell )

"Let the Reader Understand is that rare book that both serves as an introduction to a method of scholarship and is also a landmark work in the field. Fowler provides an excellent, accessible introduction to anyone new to reader-response criticism of the Bible. His critical reading of the Gospel of Mark provides one of the most in comprehensive and insightful applications of reader-oriented criticism available to scholars to date."-- Russell W. Dalton, United Theological Seminary (, )

"The paperback edition of this important book is long overdue. No other biblical scholar has been as closely identified with reader-response criticism as Robert Fowler, and Let the Reader Understand remains the most thoroughgoing and impressive application of this much-discussed methodology to a biblical text."-- Stephen D. Moore, author of Literary Criticism and the Gospels (, )

"Robert Fowler proposes a novel idea: What if we were to read books of the Bible the way we read other books? He reviews the Gospel of Mark the way one might approach a modern short story, noting how it affects its readers and asking why it sometimes affects different readers differently. A breakthrough in biblical scholarship, Let the Reader Understand has pragmatic worth for all who appreciate the Gospels as something other than historical artifacts. His approach brings the Gospel of Mark into the present, allowing it to speak in potentially unique ways to everyone who reads it. A modern 'classic' of biblical criticism, this volume is essential reading for all who are serious about studying the Gospels in ways that respect their character as literary narratives."--Mark Allan Powell (, )

From the Publisher

Robert Fowler's groundbreaking method--reader-response criticism--as a strategy for reading the Gospel of Mark invites contemporary readers to participating in making the meaning of the Gospel. Now available in paperback.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Trinity Press Int'l (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1563383381
• ISBN-13: 978-1563383380
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #978,484 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Out of Print? Tragic!, April 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark (Hardcover)

This book is amazing. During the course of writing a master's thesis on Mark, I waded through a LOT of commentaries and this is the only one that I would recommend to the general reader. Here is why: he makes you see so plainly what you almost certainly did not notice before by using simple techniques of literary criticsm to make the text plain. No matter what it takes, hunt this one down.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The only way to understand, February 7, 2002

By 

"matth3713" (Birmingham, AL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark (Paperback)

Anyone who attempts to read, understand, teach or learn anything about the Gospel of Mark, whether cleric or lay, scholar or non-scholar, MUST read this first. No section, episode or verse should be commented on, interpreted, or even read without the necessary insights of this book. Before we can understand a reading of Mark, we must understand HOW to read Mark. Only after reading this book did I even begin to grasp any other introduction, commentary, or interpretation of the world-changing literary achievement we know today as a gospel. This book unlocks our minds from reading backward through orthodoxy and instead allows a fresh, unbiased reading of what has been unrecognized as a truly literary masterpiece. Mr. Fowler is deserving of any and all accolades he receives for this landmark work of scholarship.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Restricted Methodology, January 15, 2010

By 

David J. Krause (Petoskey, MI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark (Paperback)

In this book Fowler examines the gospel of Mark using "reader-response" criticism, a methodology based largely on Stanley Fish's anti-realism postmodern literary approach of the 1980s that contributed to the "science wars" controversies of that time. This methodology claims that ALL texts, scientific as well as literary, tell us NOTHING objectively correct about the world around us (see pp 44-47 for Fowler's explicit endorsement of this approach). Accordingly, textual analysis consists ONLY of examining the reader's reactions to what is read: individual interpretation is everything and ALL meaning lies in FRONT of the text with nothing whatever behind. Fowler therefore has no basis for inferring anything about a real world of events, places, objects, or persons behind what the (author of) Mark has written (even though he cannot avoid do this anyway in many places in the book). He first applies this methodology in ch. 4 by giving an insightful account of how Mark leads his readers to increasingly distance themselves from the disciples (elaborated in ch 8), but the really interesting question, whether there was something in Mark's real world setting that led him to do this, cannot be asked with Fowler's methodology. This question has indeed been addressed by other critics who are not bound by Fowler's ideology (Michael Goulder, for one) with an answer supplied: Mark was a Pauline Christian who wanted to disparage the competing branch of Christianity founded in Jerusalem by the disciples (the Petrines) who had been directly associated with Jesus during his ministry, as Paul, of course, was not. Is this issue worth investigating? Fowler would say that reader-response criticism renders such questions meaningless.

Reader-response criticism can certainly provide insights into how texts are read, but when adopted as an all-encompassing ideology, as Fowler does here, it prevents us from even asking the kinds of questions I suspect most readers of biblical texts would like to see illuminated.