| I. This study undertook to develop a critical approach to teaching readers. With close attention to readers' interpersonal behavior, attitude toward fiction, and the stylistics, and points of view of four texts (Mansfield's "Miss Brill," Hanley's "The Butterfly," Hemingway's "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," Cheever's "The Enormous Radio"), this study was to determine whether a scheme for teaching readers wherein (a) text and reader were viewed as equally important and (b) a means for perceiving and recording reader behavior, could be developed.;The need for this study was indicated by literature promoting category systems of labeling response; by research ignoring the individual reader's role. Further, while arguments exist regarding the need to consider the reader's attitude toward, and experience with fiction, few studies have regarded either.;II. Investigation of response was predicated upon textual (word count) division into four separate, consecutive sections; readers responded to each in regard to three questions. One week later, they responded to the undivided text, and a discussion followed. The method yields a full view of how response develops, how it proceeds in that development, and what influences its development. The method demonstrated that readers form an organizing principle and assemble information to maintain it, but this principle can change; that they reject or revise perceptions; that radical changes occur upon further reading and among response modes; that recall is important in reformulation of meaning; that categorization is most concrete at the oral level; that variables influencing response fluctuate in instrumentality.;III. Close observation of four randomly selected readers' interpersonal behavior determined their character profiles, based upon Karen Horney's systematization of personality, which served to reveal how character influences response. Results of readers' personality inventories (The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, and the Interpersonal Checklist), scored after response analysis, confirmed the accuracy of observation for response analysis. Moreover, results of a 65-item questionnaire revealed how and where past instruction and personal predilections effected response.;IV. Stylistic investigations, and analyses of points of view were employed and the results were factors in response analysis to determine where, and how these textual elements affect the meaning making process. The stylistic investigation consisted of analyzing sentence structure (especially clause embedding), verb density, and abstract nouns, and the readers' responses showed the influence of textual style and how style contributes to attitude toward a text, and the events and characters offered. Analysis revealed that the points of view in the texts were significant influences in perception of information.;V. The study concludes that there are four variables--reader character and attitude toward fiction, the point of view, and the style of the text; that the range and scope of response renders category systems of labeling response inadequate; and, that because the textual domain is governed by point of view and style, and because response to it cannot be divorced from attitude or character of its maker, these are the four constituent variables accounting for response. |
