ABSTRACT
Four prominent aspects of the establishment of meaning are to be found in the reading experience: a view of the world through the eyes of the literary character; the reparation of the capacity to symbolize; active reading; and twinship as a transformational interpretation. The reader withdraws to the literary space, repairs his thinking processes and reorientates himself in both the real world and his inner world. He establishes new meanings in his existence and re-establishes himself as a sentient, thinking, reflective subject.
This process is illustrated in J. Semprún’s book Literature or Life (1994) mentioned in Chapter 1, as well as in Eva Hoffman’s book Lost in Translation (1989). The latter tells the story of a newly arrived immigrant in the United States from Poland who slowly regains her sense of self through her transference toward the language itself and toward a twin literary immigrant. She beautifully describes how her development in acquiring her English reading is interwoven with a psychological development, gradually repairing her symbolic function, granting her foreign life new meaning and integrating her old sense of self into her new identity.
