Each taped reading test began with a brief questionnaire in which subjects were asked to give authors and titles of specific nineteenth-century American and British literary works and to explain briefly what they knew about nineteenth-century American and British history and culture. The purpose of these questions was to see how much literary and/or cultural knowledge the subjects possessed. According to Wolfgang Iser in The Act of Reading, one’s ability to read complex literature is partly dependent on one’s knowledge of what he calls the “repertoire” of the text, “the form of references to earlier works, or to social and historical norms, or to the whole culture from which the text has emerged” (69). With Bleak House, this knowledge is crucial.
The results from the questionnaire revealed that most of these subjects could not rely on previous knowledge to help them with Bleak House; in fact, they could not remember much of what they had studied in previous or current English classes. When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own. The majority also could not [End Page 4] access any detail on the information they recalled; they could mention the Industrial Revolution, for example, but could not define what it was. These results suggest that the majority of the subjects in our study were not transferring the literary texts or information from previous classes into their long-term memories.
