Reading poems: an empirical and intercultural study

Abstract

This article aims to reveal in a comparative and empirical way how subjects with English cultural backgrounds or Chinese cultural backgrounds read, engage with and interpret literary texts and how they respond to the culturally loaded discourse by writers from the same or different cultural backgrounds. The study is made to see if the Chinese subjects are more responsive to the imagery poems than English subjects and if there are different sequences in their image formation. It intends to reveal how different cultural and linguistic schemata are used by subjects from both Chinese and English cultures when they read culturally sensitive literary materials and to exemplify how the subjects read and respond in terms of their different schemata which result in the differences and similarities in their interpretations and responses in their literary reading.