Carlos Reads a Poem

Abstract

Everybody seriously concerned with criticism, interpretation, and pedagogy has probably asked at some time why readers read the way they do-if only in the form Why do they read that way? In recent years the study of reading has sprouted into a minor industry.1 Generally people have accented one of two aspects of the process: either the parts of reading that each reader shares or could share with every other reader or the parts that are unique to some one reader. Obviously, however, any given reading includes both kinds of perception, the communal and the personal. How, then, are they related? Students (and other readers) read a literary text by identifying its words and sentences, and most will do this mostly in the same way. They decide what the words and sentences mean, and that meaning will have both communal and personal elements. Then they will relate that meaning to authorial intention, formal structure, socio-economic conditions, autobiographical anecdotes, the absurdity of the modern world, this year's Frenchman, or whatever else is in vogue. The style of reading will vary considerably from reader to reader and critical school to critical school. Readers may perform one or another of these steps naturally (that is, because it is part of their definition of reading), because they have been specifically trained to do it, or because they have been rewarded in various ways for doing it in the past. However, our adverbs, mostly, considerably, say little about what goes on between communal perceptions and personal ones. To unfold that relation, we need to study readers and their activities at an atomic level, identifying the separate cognitive processes involved in the act of reading and then attempting to say why this reader does it this way and that reader some other way. To answer that question requires, in turn, a way of characterizing a reader's identity, a way of describing the quiddity of a reader's actions, and a way of relating the two. But first we need a reader.