If readers make the meaning, can any reading be right?

No, at least not according to its leading theorists, even though they say readers make the meaning. Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and their experience of a work, rather than on the author, the content or the form. Its members are united in believing that the meaning of a text is derived from the reader through the reading process.

But that does not mean anything goes. Wolfgang Iser said that meaning is not an object to be found in a text but an event of construction between the text and the reader. He compared it to two people looking at the same stars, one seeing a plough and the other a dipper: the stars in a literary text are fixed, but the lines that join them are variable. Readers fill gaps, but only within the interpretive limits the text gives.

Stanley Fish put the limit elsewhere. For him an interpretation is created in an interpretive community, a group of minds that share a reading strategy. A reader's approach is not completely subjective, because a shared understanding of language creates normative boundaries.

Critics push back all the same. Text-oriented schools such as formalism call reader-response criticism an anarchic subjectivism that lets readers interpret a text any way they want. Others say it fails to explain how a text can expand a reader's understanding. The debate matters because it asks whether a poem has one right reading, many, or a lot of wrong ones.