Some scholars argue that only a change of metre signals the beginning of a new poem in Horace’s Odes. Woodman has objected that, if this were the case, the juxtaposition of poems in the third and ...second asclepiadic metres, which begin with the same two metrical lines, would mislead the reader into thinking that a poem was continuing, only to realize belatedly at the third line that a new poem had begun, ‘a cruel and pointless trick’. This article explores the positive potential of such a trick, which I term false non-closure, to produce pointed, subtle, and complex poetic and thematic effects. The move is situated within Roman poets’ wider practice of springing surprises, twists, and tricks on readers, including Horace’s own use of false closure and shifts of direction. The process of misreading, correcting, and re-reading, always coloured by the initial misreading, forces the reader to reflect on her interpretation of each ode and on the relationships, continuity, and discontinuity, between them, as well as on the very act of reading. The cases of Carm. 1.14–15 and 1.23–24 are examined in detail, and an explanation given for the absence of the trick at 1.5–6 and 4.12–13.
This article reports on two researchers’ experiences of navigating children’s night-time sleep, in relation to reading best-selling parenting books, published by professionals in the UK in the last ...20 years. We felt we were ‘getting it wrong’ where we so badly wanted to ‘get it right’ for our children, because they did not sleep like the books described: silent, solitary, separate and for 12 uninterrupted night-time hours. It was also not possible to ‘read’ the advice without owning our own positionality: in particular our classed, professional identities. Perhaps this is always the case in research, and we should ‘treat our bias as a resource’ as seminal life history work urges. We found we could not but take the advice personally, which tended to focus on behaviour-orientated strategies within the routines and rituals around night-time sleep. We harness an under-studied approach within Early Childhood research, Reader-Response theory, which argues reading is a transaction; the reader brings personal context to the text at the same time as gleaning information from it. Seeing reading as a transaction helps us understand how our identities feed into our reading: our readings shape, but also are shaped by our contexts.
This qualitative experimental study examines the utilization of an Extensive Reading Programme from the perspective of ESL students' reader responses. It seeks to examine the kind of written ...responses produced by the mediocre and low proficiency ESL students based on the Reader Response Approach, the outcome of using Reader Response Approach in the Extensive Reading Programme, and the ESL students' experiences towards the Extensive Reading Programme. The study was conducted for a duration of three months in a secondary school. The participants of this study included an ESL teacher and six Form 4 students, comprising three females and three males. The researcher documented data through four sources: classroom observations, interviews with the teacher and students, response journals, and examination marks. Findings indicated that the Extensive Reading Programme and the use of the Reader Response Approach enabled the students to come up with various statements and benefited their language development. The findings of the study suggest that the Extensive Reading Programme and Reader Response Approach should be a part of the curriculum in secondary schools as they help in improving students' language proficiency. The study proposes a guideline for implementing an Extensive Reading Programme and Reader Response Approach in the language classroom, which ESL educators can adopt.
PurposeConsumers have pervasively relied on mobile reviews in digital economy. However, little knowledge exists regarding how customers adopt several mobile reviews to make purchasing decisions. With ...the assistance of reader-response theory, this study investigates how the consistency of product reviews, in terms of their adherence to both other reviews and the prior experience of the customer, affect perceived quality, confirmation of the customer's expectations, the customer's level of trust in the seller and the consequent purchase intention.Design/methodology/approachBased on a scenario simulation and an online experiment to collect data, the authors employed AMOS to test the proposed hypotheses using survey data collected from 314 customers in Study 1 and 420 consumers in Study 2.FindingsThe results indicate that global consistency positively and significantly contributes to confirmation, perceived quality and trust in sellers while sequential inconsistency positively and significantly influences perceived quality. Meanwhile, purchase intention is positively and significantly promoted by confirmation, perceived quality and trust in sellers, and initial valence has some moderating effects on these relationships.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the understanding of how customers apply product reviews to make purchasing decisions from a new angle. It also elucidates the way in which the perceived consistency of product reviews affects how reviewers are perceived and the consequent effect of these perceptions on a customer's purchase intentions.
This article presents reflective writing manifestation in Reader-response literary analysis. The article is aimed at finding out how the reflective writing is manifested in the students ...Reader-response of literary analysis. The writer carried out the study by analyzing the students portfolio documents of their reflective essays responding to three literary works. Fourteen students enrolling Literary Criticism Subject at a private university in West Java took part in the present research. Literary Criticism subject was chosen as the object of the current study, considering that the students in enrolling the subject were not merely introduced to literature, but also were led to be able to evaluate, describe, and analyze literary works. The study revealed some findings. Firstly, Reader-response prompts were helpful in giving aids to the students that they give the students idea how to write down their ideas and thoughts in minds. However, as the second finding, most students tend to keep their focus on the feeling section. Some of them were proven to be more critical by questioning things happened in the stories, yet they still had no idea how to analyze and evaluate the questions they had. The last finding, the writer noticed that none of the students relate their reflective essays to relevant literature to support their opinion. The writer considered that this occurred due to their lack of knowledge and practice of critical thinking and critical writing.
The digital media probed the transition from page-turners to navigators of web pages through endlessly connected hypertexts, as reading has moved from papyrus to print to digital devices. Hypertext ...fictions are sui generis, revolutionizing aspects of authorship and readership in the literary arena. Reading hypertext fiction requires subjective responses to the medium’s semiotics and interpretation. This new form of narrative fiction renders less scholarly attention. This paper presents the dynamics of the shift in readership from print to digital media using hypertext fiction. This paper methodically emphasizes neglected issues and merits of this new genre of literature, determining the readers’ response to two digital hypertext fictions: Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue by and Deena Larsen’s Disappearing Rain. The study was assessed through classroom discussions and questionnaires with 61 students to determine whether the hypertext fictions elevate the passivity of the reading process, the impact of its features on the readers, and whether the medium can establish its implication as a new reading paradigm. This paper implies the significance of exploring hypertext fiction as a detrimental genre in literature.
Cap Go Meh is an Indonesian picture book with interreligious and multiethnic themes and has been translated to English and been awarded for promoting multiculturalism. Studies that focus on reader ...response to interreligious theme of children’s literature are scarce. This study examines a reading engagement of a group of Muslim preservice to Cap Go Meh read aloud. Using a framework of reader response theory that pays attention to cultural influences including religions, this qualitative study posed a question: How do Indonesian Muslim preservice teachers respond to the multicultural story in Cap Go Meh. The respondents’ writing responses generated two major themes. One was concerned with how the preservice teachers relate to Cap Go Meh and how its narrative leads to their reflections about diversity. The other one focused on how the participants might extend the story of Cap Go Meh and highlighted the preservice teachers’ concerns with the role of adults (parents) in the story. Additional data from one participant could potentially show a case for furthering literary experiences using multicultural children’s literature. The researchers note that responses to sensitive issues such as religious diversity occur mostly in a context where there is encouragement from teachers. In this case, it is crucial to highlight the importance of bringing multicultural children’s literature like Cap Go Meh as a medium to discuss the lives and perspective of others.
Existing research on communication on Twitter has largely ignored the question of how users make sense of the fragmentary tweets with which they are presented. Focusing on the use of Twitter for ...political reporting in post-revolutionary Egypt, this article argues that the production of mental stories provides readers with a mechanism for interpreting the meaning of individual tweets in terms of their relationships to other material. Drawing on contemporary narratology, it argues that Twitter exhibits key elements of narrativity, but that a creative reading process is nonetheless required to transform this incipient narrativity into coherent, sense-making mental narratives. This foregrounding of the reader’s creative role makes stories on Twitter highly fluid and dynamic. Through reference to classic critical theory, I propose that this nonetheless represents an evolution rather than a radical break from earlier forms of narrative reception, which in many cases demanded similarly creative reading practices.
This research aims to explore the ways in which reading English literature enhances the reading skills of Chinese college students in the language. A questionnaire was used to carry out the study ...with 36 students. The pilot population of this study is first-year to fourth-year students at Liaoning University. The study puts emphasis on the effectiveness of English literature reading in improving reading skills and reading comprehension. Sixty students participated in the study by means of an experiment. In the experiment class, the teacher uses reading skills to teach English literature, however, in the control class, the teacher uses a traditional literature teaching method. SPSS version 29.0 was offered to test whether the experimental students’ literature reading grades have risen with reading skills. SPSS is a software package used for statistical analysis in social science research and other fields. A wide range of abilities for data management, data analysis and data documentation are available with IBM's SPSS programme. Researchers and analysts use SPSS to perform various statistical analyses such as descriptive statistics, inferential statistics and multivariate analyses. The study indicates that teaching English literature reading skills enhances college students’ reading comprehension proficiency and grades.
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