Hypernotes on Reading Stages

• pleasure: This usually involves "a willing suspension of belief" as you inhabit the created world.
• naturalization:  "That's the way life is, as I know it." Often this response involves "translating" the text into situations or persons that seem familiar to us. Elements in the text which do not "naturalize" easily are often ignored or even distorted.
• responding: Sympathizing or hating, accepting or resisting the situation and/or characters. Such a response generally begins with "I like..." or "I don't like..."
• recognition:  "I recognize that feeling, situation, person, story, etc. and appreciate it being put in words."
• identification: Vicarious connection with characters, events, situations; making them part of your world rather than joining theirs.
• discovery "Imaginative experience...is an immense sensibility ...The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the conditions of feeling life, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it." Henry James, The Art of Fiction
• Critical dialogue: To some degree, this kind of reading is re-writing, teasing out a "hidden" story or implications.
• Analytical-critical: Involving text analysis, self analysis, and analysis of literary and cultural repertory of both
• formal:  Focus on language, rhetoric, genre, point of view, etc.
• Questioning the text: Looking for oppositions, contradictions in the text, as well as challenges of initial oppositions, conflicts.
• Your own response: Your changing focus, approach, identification
• Intratextual (i.e. dramatic): The relation of the part to the whole; the primary level of literary understanding.
• Authorial: The relationship of text to author, and to author's other works. This requires being familiar with the author's life, works, and recurrent preoccupations.
• Historical: The relation of text to milieu. How has a text reflected or helped to create its culture?
• Allusive: The relation of text to other texts, past and present or "intertextuality." (the reader's familiarity with texts presupposed by the writer)
• Generic: The relation of text to other texts of a similar kind, past, present, and future. Unlike Allusive Context, this consists of diachronic (cross-time) questions of literary typology not necessarily linked to authorial intent or deliberate allusions.
• Philosophical: The relationship of the text to the world of ideas, past, present, and future. It may include how the text can be mapped onto specific religious or philosophical systems or ideologies (e.g. Christianity, Marxism, Freudian or Jungian psychology, feminism, etc.)
• Subjective: The relationship of the text to the reader's experience. Although this context is often overlooked in criticvism (since, by its nature, it is not subject to any kind of rigorous argumentation or research), it is nonetheless the primary reason that authors write: to engage a reader's sympathetic interest by appealing to commonalities of experience.