SOURCE: Carlsson, Maj Asplund. “Readers' Experience of Textual Meaning: An Empirical Approach.” Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy 35-36 (spring-fall 1996): 67-79.

In the following essay, Carlsson applies reader-response criticism to a survey of readers' interpretations of two different stories: The Giving Tree, by Silverstein, and “The Law,” by Franz Kafka.

I.

Research on reader response has generally agreed upon the fact that interpretation of a literary text is neither universal nor idiosyncratic in its nature. The purpose of the reader's project of interpretation is not primarily to find the invariant meaning: “What did the author mean?” nor the individual response: “What does it mean to me?” but rather to find a textual solution of a wider and more decontextualized kind: “What does it mean?” Then, taking a text which is relatively obscure, how do readers actually find liberty to develop a personal meaning and where is...