The view of the reading process presented here has not been derived from such experiments. Rather, these offer reinforcemen and confirmation for the transactional as a conceptual model. This seems to do greatest justice to the results of prolonged observation of readers encountering texts, and to provide a solution for current confusions in literary theory. Thus, a reader revising his interpretation may be considered analogous to the person looking at the distorted room. In the light of what he brings to the transaction, the reader arrives at a tentative interpretation and then tests it by further study of the text or by comparison with others' interpretations of it. He seeks to find in the verbal symbols the source of his and others' interpretations. He may discover thahe ignored some elements or that he projected on it response irrelevant to the text. Out of this may come a reinterpretation of the text, that is, the structuring of a new kind of experience in relation to it. This simply is a further development of the
transactional process that begins with the first effort to derive
even the simplest level of meaning from the text.