PAKISTANI UNDERGRADUATES’ PERCEPTIONS AFTER LEARNING ENGLISH LITERATURE: EXPLORING CHANGES IN CULTURAL IDENTITY OF THE UNDERGRADS IN TERMS OF A CULTURALLY DISTANT NOVEL

Abstract

This work investigates the influences on the cultural identity of the Final Year literature students at Institute of English Language and Literature, University of Sindh, Jamshoro after reading Henry Fielding’s the History of Tom Jones. It is part of the subject Fiction
taught to them in their fourth year of the Bachelor Studies Degree Programme. Wolfgang Iser’s Reader Response Theory is used as a theoretical framework to guide this study. The findings are based on data supplied by 10 participants, who read Tom Jones as a part of
their fiction course through interviews. The key findings of this study suggested that the semi-comic novel Tom Jones is not culturally close to the cultural context of the students and majority of the participants averted to reading about the culture which is not related to their own culture and their core cultural identity remained intact or quite minutely influenced. The key findings also suggested that the process of reading is the process of judgment and learning of the cultural values and morality. This study is valuable for the curriculum developers of literature, teachers of literature, and students of literature too at public universities who are exposed to different cultural habits through the literary texts. The findings of this study are also valuable in terms of knowing the students’ perceptions regarding their connection with text and connection of text with their reality as these two are the specific components taken from Iser’s theory to guide this study.