| Reading or receiving literature is an enterprise that concerns the reader’s or receiver’s attempt to interpret a single text in different ways. The reading experience, in this case, is intensely private and highly subjective. The real reader – it is too difficult to have an ideal reader – has his or her own idiosyncratic background, context, expectations, and interpretive strategies. Thus, research in psychology (especially schema theory), social history, gender studies, or other fields, is valid. This paper tries to fathom the slippery domain that concerns what happens when we read a certain literary text, what sensations and visions that immerse us while we are reading. It attempts to validate the opinion that the general function of literature is to affirm, refresh, reinforce, or change a reader’s schemata. |