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orientation but a re-incarnation of the source text. Source authorship
is discredited and discarded; full confidence is placed in the reader
to breath a fresh life into a lifeless physical object,ie. the work of
the original author. But what kind of reader, if ever there was any
such reader, could be entrusted to embark on such a hazardously
explorative expedition? Reading theorists identified this kind of
reader and dubbed him the 'ideal reader'. The concept of the 'ideal
reader', if it existed at all, implies another twin concept, that of an
'ideal reading', which would evolve a norm-governed prototypical
reading model. Could such a model ever be worked out? I am rather
cynical about this, simply because our reading strategies, diverse as
they are, cannot be stereotyped. The reader-text relationship is not
norm-free; it is governed and, to a considerable extent, determined by
conventions extractable from the semantic charters peculiar to specific
cultures. This explains that when given a given text, readers
implementing different culture-specific reading strategies come up with
equally different interpretations of the same text.
Norman Holland ( Readers Reading , 1975, p44) reached the same
conclusion. Assuming that the work does not possess an inherent
unity, and that it is unified in different ways by the activity of
readers, Holland gave personality tests to five undergraduates to find
out how they reacted to certain stories which they had read. "By so
informal a procedure", he reports, "I was hoping to get out free
associations to the stories". He discovered a significant correlation
between their free associations to the stories and their
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