Latitude’s Reviews > The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach > Status Update

“For this reason, expectations are scarcely ever fulfilled in truly literary texts” Excuse me???

This world, however, does not pass before the reader’s eyes like a film. The sentences are “component parts” insofar as they make statements, claims, or observations, or convey information, and so establish various perspectives in the text. But they remain only “component parts” — they are not the sum total of the text itself.

“A literary text must therefore be conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader’s imagination in the task of working things out for himself, for reading is only a pleasure when it is active and creative. In this process of creativity, the text may either not go far enough, or may go too far, so we may say that boredom and overstrains form the boundaries….”