ABSTRACT
Many of our emotional responses to literature, however, do not involve identifying personally with any of the characters. Sometimes an event, situation, or image represented in a literary work will trigger a pleasant or unpleasant memory that will influence our reading experience and, therefore, our interpretation of the work. There are several different kinds of reader-response theory, but they all have one important thing in common. They all believe that readers play an active role in making meaning when they read. While our personal responses can thus play a very positive role in our understanding of literature, it is not unusual for a personal response to cause us to misunderstand a literary work in part or as a whole. For most literary texts have enough ambiguitiesthings that can be interpreted in more than one way-to allow numerous readings that would be considered legitimate by most instructors.
