each staging point or level of development are also progressive and cumulative. As a
reader progresses from one level to the next s/he does not, snake-like, shed old
strategies like a worn out skin, but develops those strategies for increasingly complex
purpose, as well as adopting new strategies. For example, the reader’s predictive and
interpretative activity can range from merely anticipating what might happen next, to a
continual questioning of the text at each reading moment, reinterpreting the significance
of short- and long-term past events and modifying expectations of possible alternative
short- and long-term outcomes. Similarly, the mental images readers form range from
pictorial stereotypes to complex emotional associations; the literary and cultural
repertoires readers draw on vary according to the range and complexity of their reading
and cultural experiences; and the reader’s active hermeneutic process of filling in
textual gaps involves formulating connections (between events, characters and narrative
points of view) of increasing subtlety and complexity.
Reading Literature: a Developmental Model578 TEENAGERS READING: DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES OF READING LITERATURE
1 The implied author is Wayne Booth’s term for the ‘real author’s second self’ (Booth 1961), the
kind of person the text implies the author is, and possessing the kinds of values the text implies
that author has. The implied author represents the ideal aspirations of the real author.
2 The implied reader (Iser 1978) is the kind of reader the real reader is invited by the implied
author to become, at least temporarily, so as to participate in the production of the text’s
meaning.