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reader response
Reader response theory is basically a literary theory. It argues for the role of the reader in realising any text. The reader not only brings to their reading their expectations and experiences but are a necessary part of what is needed to have a text in the first instance.
Even more than this all texts have gaps, whether in the story, argument, or between its parts, and reading is required to 'fill' these gaps (indeed one measure of our sophistication as readers is how we interpret these gaps). In some ways we could probably define creative writing as being a writing that has more gaps than non fiction, but the role of the reader is a necessary one.
Another way to think about this is to recognise that the words on the page (or the screen) are not the text, that the story only happens when it is read, in its being read. But neither is the text only its reading, what might happen in the being read, so that the story is actually a thing in between, a virtual thing between the physical text and its reading.
This is a way of thinking about reading that makes the reader much more active than we might ordinarily think, and it is this active reader that hypertext theory thinks hypertext produces.
Finally, whenever we read we misread. This is because we are never adequate to the text, and the text is never adequate to us. We do things to it that it doesn't expect, or can't anticipate, and it assumes or needs us to do things that we don't or can't do. This is what some theorists have called the ideal reader, the mythological being that would understand all of the text (an obviously impossible project). However, this misreading is crucial, for this is the space of interpretation, of discovery, of creative reading.
It is not a free for all, all texts constrain us in some manner as to how or what we interpret, but within this constraint there is considerable freedom, and play (and play in perhaps the strongest sense of the term).
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