reading texts

Eva Nur Mazidah
120710209
English Department

Reading Texts
Wednesday class

Text, in fact, can bring us into world of imaginations. Readers are stimulated into the story in text. Text sends stimuli to readers mind and invite the readers to emerge their projections of characters and events within text. Readers are taken over by the text and be part of the text. The more they enjoy or get pleasure in reading the text, the more they see the text as reality. Thus, it is explained by Iser that text can make readers experience its living event.

Stimuli
Text -------------------- reading----------------reaction
Expectation actual event (response will be different after some times)

Reading a text, readers do process of perceiving and dynamic interaction. Somehow this process is only done by readers not the text they read. Suffice to say, the ones adopting is the readers. It is because text is consistent until the end of the day, the beginning, the ending, characters, plot, setting, and such remain the same. It is the readers who contact with text so that they can understand what they are about. The readers are to crack down the network of possible connection and to fill the gaps in the text. It is they who follow the guidance provided by text. Thus, text never adapts to whom they are read but readers adapt by themselves to be in the text.
It is not for from “text as the living event”. Readers may have different imagination about the text they are reading. They use their background knowledge and experience to decode the information in the text (making projection). Thus text brings them to get involved in text. They are provoked to be part of it. They may be mad, sad, happy, etc. when they read it. Sure, we are brought to the situation and leave who we are—we live in our projections but it is not completely total. In short, we are in illusion-forming and illusion-breaking; we are living in another live within story and at the same time we realize that we are awake.
Reading and interpretion is different. Reading means that readers make interaction with the text. There is a process of internalization and transfer of information in the text to the readers. The process of interpretation can be gained after the process of internalizing the text is done. We can interpret what the text wants after we finish reading all of it. Simply, interpretation is the extent of reading process and everyone may have different interpretation towards the text.
Readers and text have asymmetrical relationship. In reading text, it is readers who adapt the text. In fact. Text is always constant and unchanged. Somehow text also has gaps and readers are supposed to fill the gaps with their knowledge in order to gain the aim of the text. Text only becomes the guidance and controller for readers. In first reading, readers are trying to make meta-perspective (assumption) and then they make adaptation based on their assumptions. In short, the text is inadaptable but us.