Abstract
The study explores how readers from an ethnic minority or from an ethnic majority negotiate their cultural identities within a multicultural context. It examines to what extent readers who were either Chinese-Canadian or Euro-Canadian become personally implicated in their reading experiences. Readers were asked to comment on passages that they found striking in two texts, a philosophical and a narrative text written in English by the Chinese author Lin Yutang. It was found that differences between the two ethnic groups of readers occurred only in response to the narrative text. Here a style of reading indicating familiarity with Chinese culture, comparison between the reader's life world and the world of the text, and explicit reference to cultural contrasts, was more frequent among Chinese-Canadian readers; in contrast, a style of commentary that combined evocative elaboration with a form of identification that situated the reader within the implicit “we” of the text, was more frequent among Euro-Canadian readers. These styles of reading suggest different forms of self-implication during reading that can be described respectively as similes or metaphors of personal identification.
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