EVALUATING THE INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITY, EVIDENCE FROM EXPERT AND NOVICE READERS

This research provides and empirical test of the construct known as the 'interpretive community' (Fish, 1980). Fish argues that an interpretive community is a group of like-minded individuals who share similar assumptions about how a text should be read. This idea was tested by comparing interpretive strategies used by two groups of readers: literary experts (postgraduate students in English literature enrolled at a British university), and literary novices (undergraduate students in a technical field of study). Individuals in each of these communities were asked to read and respond to short stories derived from three literary traditions: (1) science fiction, (2) modern British fiction, and (3) postmodern fiction. Responses to each of the stories were assessed by a variety of measures that evaluated readers' understanding, enjoyment, and appreciation of the texts. The results showed that experts and novices exhibited distinct patterns of response across the three story types providing preliminary support for the theory. These results are compared with current findings in cognitive psychology concerning expert/novice differences in non-literary domains. © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.