In the 20th century three major approaches to literary criticism were developed. They focused respectively on one of the constituents of meaning namely, writer, text and reader, and played their specific roles in the evolution of literary criticism. The first approach, considering the writer as the main source of the meaning, focuses on the biography of the writer to deeply understand what is going on in a text. The second approach essentially concerned with structuralism, studies the text and its structures to understand the aims of the narrator. The critics of the third group believe that the reader is the main reason for the writer to produce his book; therefore their criticism intends to understand the meaning of the text according to the reader's intentions and desires.
This paper is to explain the views of the third group critiques whose philosophical base is phenomenology and they foreground, therefore, the reader's choice to interpret the text. In this way, the basis for any criticism, will be no more the single meaning of the text, but the personal interpretation of the reader.
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