This paper explores Korean university students` responses to the Afro-American text, Sula, focussing on cross-cultural gender differences. For this research, two kinds of questionnaires are used with two groups of students (undergraduates and graduates), who were all unfamiliar with Sula as a literary text. Firstly, the response preference questionnaire originally designed by Alan C. Purves was used to investigate Korean university students` ways of reading. Its categorizations are Engagement-Involvement, Perception, Interpretation, and Evaluation. Superficially, the two groups responded to the text in similar ways, preferring Perception, Engagement-Involvement, Interpretation, and Evaluation in that order. However, the sub-categories they chose show that the undergraduate students preferred to get objective knowledge from the text, while graduate students gained more enjoyment from the reader`s freedom to fill in the gaps in the text. Secondly, a thematic questionnaire was used to investigate gender differences among the readers. In both groups, women students responded to nine questions from a gender sensitive perspective, while men students responded from a gender neutral perspective. The individual reader`s distance from the text was more visible in the responses of men students than in those of women. Moreover, the response pattern was also different according to gender. Men students paid more attention to facts or episodes in the text, while women students paid more attention to the human relationships or the development of the story.