Araby Reader Response

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Michael Nachebe Interpretive Expectations When an educated reader opens a book, no matter the length, they almost always have an expectation that they hope is met when the end is reached. But what happens when this expectation is not met? What happens when the story exceeds this expectation? This desire to be wowed or even to just be minimally satisfied by the text is believed to be the main reason for reading fiction. Will I get what I want out of this reader-passage relationship? The answer to these questions is simple; it’s complicated. The way that one person experiences a story can vary greatly from how another reader interprets it, even if that person is a peer or part of the other’s interpretive community. Your interpretive community is the group of people that you relate to most literally and are most commonly linked through educational institutions. For instance, Jack and Jill both attend the same university, and they both share reading strategies and intellectual views. Jack and Jill are considered to be in the same interpretive community. When analyzing a work of literature, Jack and Jill would have similar points and break down the structure of work in similar manners. This influences critical analysis greatly in that it is somewhat predictable and is usually prioritized over personal experiences. The analytical differences of interpreting literature is not limited to your interpretive community, but is also influenced by the age at which you read the work, your life experiences with the subject matter, as well as “how the text produces a response” through the transaction of the reader and the text (Siegel). This theoretical approach is referred to as reader response criticism and is an extremely interesting way of critiquing literary works, especially fiction. This reader response criticism involves many variables and infers that the act of reading
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