Reading process

The act of reading a literary text involves a different set of issues. There is a major indeterminacy in literary reading, springing from the readers' individual experiences and feelings (in addition to a rather sophisticated set of literary competencies for recognizing structures and genres special to literature): this makes the process impossible to simulate by any known computer method. While there is some evidence that various literary features, including stylistic variations and manipulations of plot in narratives, tend to constrain the reading process in ways that are partly predictable, no study has yet gathered systematic evidence to show what determines the interaction of readers with literary texts: the process is extremely complex, and we have hardly begun to ask what the major variables might be. Thus, until we understand the reading process better, we can make little use of the computer as a facility for presenting or examining literary reading, and to treat such texts solely as information is to disregard the most significant feature that makes them literary.