Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.