THE INDETERMINACY OF LlTERARY TEXTS: THE VIEW FROM THE READER

Literature in Language Education

“…The claim seems a strong one, and even counterintuitive, but van Peer's work is good research because it should prompt careful researched responses. Miall (1988) and Miall and Kuiken (1998;, replicating and extending van Peer's empirical work with prose fiction rather than poetry, have argued that foregrounding prompts readers to focus on and consider more carefully the same or similar features in a story or poem, and then elaborate their own reader meanings ('response') based on what they bring to the text, including autobiographical experience. Thus literary reading takes place under certain constraints, but is not 'determined' or fully predictable from any purely textual linguistic analysis.…”

Adding an empirical dimension to the study of poetic metaphor

“…It was only forty years later, however, that such an approach coalesced into a specific empirical strategy within reader-response criticism (Suleiman and Crosman 1980;Tompkins 1980;Brooke-Rose 1980). One group has essentially continued the line of investigation begun by Richards, in which literary texts are given to subjects, and their verbal responses are recorded either in writing or on tape (Rosenblatt 1964(Rosenblatt , 1969Bleich 1967Bleich , 1969Bleich , 1971Holland 1973Holland , 1975Kintgen 1983;Miall 1988;Peskin 1998). The second group has introduced greater experimental control into the empirical investigation of literature, with more formal definitions of text segments, subjects' tasks and rating scales (Ben-Porat 1978Meutsch and Schmidt 1985;Hauptmeier et al 1989; Van Peer 1983Andringa 1990;Glicksohn, Tsur and Goodblatt 1991;Miall and Kuiken 1994;Steen 1994).…”