The Reading Process of The Joy Lock Club

10.7085/WJ.200205.0005

王寂岑

subjective reading ； reader response

文藻學報

16期（2002 / 05 / 01）

1 - 14

英文

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club is widely read in the east and the west. As an acclaimed work of Asian American writing, it is very interesting to see how Asian readers interpret it. Professor Hardy C. Wilcoxson at the Chinese University of Hong Kong released his study of the responses of 40 fourth-year and 20 first-year English major in 1997. His study applied David Bleich's interpretation of the reading process in Subjective Criticism. My intention is to find out how students of the similar age group and training background in Taiwan read and feel about the same text. In this experiment, except the single question regarding the level of difficulty in reading, students are not asked of any specific questions. They can freely express their responses and choices of favorite/most impressed characters and episodes. My focus is not in the comparison of the responses of the two places. Rather, it is to find out what factors may govern the process of reading. Coincidentally, these responses, to a certain degree, also exemplify David Bleich's reader response theories that he concludes in Subjective Criticism. At the end of this study , I try to answer the debate over the long-existing dilemma in the teaching of literary work in an attempt of finding a possible solution.