The document summarizes a study on how readers approach and interpret a text as they begin reading. The study found that readers develop initial impressions and tentative understandings based solely on the text presented, without knowledge of author or other context clues. The document also discusses how texts have symbolic meaning but poems are actively constructed by readers' responses and transactions with the text. It notes that some theories of interpretation fail to recognize the dynamic and personal nature of each individual reader's experience.

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2.The Poem as Event
Literature in ELS
For: Dr. Shireena Basree
By: Rahmawati Othman

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STUDY: -Graduates students in English (male + female) – given a text
-Start writing as soon as they began reading
-No author’s name / no other identification
STUDY INTEREST: - What happen when readers has to start with the text on
the page
- What paths readers’ approach/ tentative 1st
impression

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2 major functions of the unique
patterns of signs that constitutes
the text:

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Text: the printed signs in their
capacity to serve as symbols
Poem: what active readers make of
their responses to the set of verbal
symbols
- refer to the whole category of aesthetic
transactions between readers and texts

7. +Post-Romantics: seeing behind the text,
the figure of the author.
-preoccupation with the bond casts aside the
idea of reader’s creativity
* once creative activity ended- what
remains is a text.
* bringing poem into being requires a
reader if not the author himself.
Critical Theory & practice: fail to
recognize:
-the readers’ dynamic, personal & unique
activities
* T.S. Elliot:“…a valid interpretation…must
be at the same time an interpretation of my own
feeling when I read it.”

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Try this:
Gone is the legend of my life.
Stabbed through my heart,
slashed opened my vein.
Bleeding profusely,
scarring eternally.
Thank you. Now we move on to listen to what
Miss has to say about the rest of the chapter.