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How literary can literariness be?: Methodological problems in the study of foregrounding
Abstract
In literary theory, there are two common proposals about the nature of literature: that literariness is a distinctive characteristic of literary texts and that literariness is mostly characterized by highly foregrounded textual features. Our studies focused on the effects of genre expectations. In two experiments, we examined whether particular rhetorical figures (features, such as oxymora, synesthesia, and personification) are processed differently when readers think they are embedded in literary sentences. Participants were first induced to think that the sentences they were reading were taken either from literary texts (literary group) or from newspaper articles (news group). They then read sentences containing rhetorical figures and control sentences that did not contain figurative language. Results of Experiment 1 were consistent with prior research indicating that genre expectations influence how a text is processed (Zwaan, 1991, 1994). Moreover, specifically in the news group, genre expectations similarly affect reading times for sentences with rhetorical figures and sentences containing low frequency and long words, suggesting that foregrounding presents a lexical challenge elicited by micro-level linguistic and rhetorical “obstacles.” However, Experiment 2 did not replicate the findings of Experiment 1. These conflicting results prompt consideration of the limitations of an exclusive focus on foregrounding; in literary texts there is always an interchange between backgrounding and foregrounding elements.
... When operating with concepts such as 'literariness' or 'literary quality', one must always be aware of their historical and cultural nature. There does not exist something as a universally valid standard of literariness (Salgaro 2015). Even the polarity that we discussed, opposing literary quality to the ability to elicit empathic responses, is likely to be the product of a very specific idea of literary quality, that can be traced back to European modernism. ...
Scholars of postcolonial studies have highlighted the role played by identity features in both the production and the reception of literary works. In this paper, we apply computational methods to a corpus of reviews of South-African post-colonial novels, downloaded from the Goodreads platform, in order to assess the influence of sociocultural and intersectional factors on the level of appreciation and identification potential of narratives. In particular, we investigate the effect, on the one hand, of the reader’s ethnicity and, on the other, of the work’s literary prestige on the appreciation and the empathic transportation elicited by narratives in the reader. To operationalize our hypotheses, we collected information on the reviewers’ country of provenance (self-declared by Goodreads users) and on the book’s critical appreciation (via either the award of or the nomination for a literary prize). Such information was compared with: (a) Goodreads star rating scores, indicative of success in the online reading community; (b) usage of empathy lexicon (identified via the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count tool – in short LIWC), indicative of the reader’s identification in the narrative. Results indicate that readers typically empathize more with works that reflect themes from their own country and tend to award them with slightly higher ratings. Furthermore, we found that critically appreciated books, though collecting higher ratings, elicit a smaller empathic response in the reader than those that did not win or were not nominated for any literary prize.
... See Erlich ([1955] 1965;Steiner (1984);Douthwaite (2000);Berlina (2017).115 "Literariness" is actually a term introduced by Roman Jakobson in 1921(Salgaro 2015). ...
“Science” is a historically variable, connotationally rich, and contested term. No single institution, individual, or group of individuals can claim de nitional authority over its meaning. The use of “science” carries weight and credibility in society, at least in many sectors. Yet while “science” is a contested term over which no one can claim de nitional authority, science is de ned and carried out in practice around the world daily. It is de ned in dictionaries and mission statements by scienti c organizations, in education guidelines and high school curricula, in media coverage and science ction novels, and in popular science books.
In this dissertation, Daniel Helsing analyzes the construction of the universe, science, and human kind in contemporary mainstream AngloAmerican popularizations of physics and astronomy. He shows that popularizers use literary techniques and rhetorical strategies to construct and explain science, to represent the universe and humankind’s place in the universe, and to evoke aesthetic and emotional responses in their readers.
... Such findings underline the importance of deviation from expected patternshere the outstanding arousal level of a single word in a text -for stylistic foregrounding effects (cf. Salgaro, 2015). ...
This perspective paper discusses four general desiderata of current computational stylistics and (neuro-)cognitive poetics concerning the development of (a) appropriate databases/training corpora, (b) advanced qualitative- quantitative narrative analysis (Q2NA) and machine learning tools for fea- ture extraction, (c) ecologically valid literary test materials, and (d) open- access reader-response data banks.
... Such findings underline the importance of deviation from expected patternshere the outstanding arousal level of a single word in a text -for stylistic foregrounding effects (cf. Salgaro, 2015). ...
This perspective paper discusses four general desiderata of current computational stylistics and (neuro-)cognitive poetics concerning the development of (a) appropriate databases/training corpora, (b) advanced qualitative-quantitative narrative analysis (Q2NA) and machine learning tools for feature extraction, (c) ecologically valid literary test materials, and (d) open-access reader-response data banks. In six explorative computational stylistics studies, it introduces a number of tools that provide QNA indices of the foregrounding potential at the sublexical, lexical, inter- and supralexical levels for poems by Shakespeare, Blake, or Dickens. These concern lexical diversity and aesthetic potential, sentiment analysis, sublexical sonority scores or phrase structure, and topics analysis. The results illustrate the complex interplay of stylistic features and the necessity for theoretical guidance and interdisciplinary cooperation in selecting adequate training corpora, QNA tools, test texts, and response measures.
This paper addresses one of the controversial issues in the literary domain: literariness. The literary artist is conscious of his social responsibility to society as the image-maker and the voice of the voiceless. His art should not be subjected to ridicule. Literariness has been given a colouration by text-oriented critics to mean a form of defamiliarization of text and meaning. This dimension sees the text with specific features which must be inherent to authenticate its literariness. However, the conventionalist approach of the text with emphasis on meaning and the readers-response, attempts to shape a more robust discussion on the subject of literariness. The method adopted in this study is a textual-analytical approach of Wale Okediran’s Tenants of the House, Strange Encounters, Boys at the Border and The Weaving Looms. The novels are comparatively discussed to demonstrate the literariness in them while attesting to the creative ingenuity of the author. The conclusion reached is that literariness in a literary work is subject to the fecundity of the text, the consciousness of the critic; his ideological stance and mental deportments, and contextual factors enveloped around the text.
This research explores how the syntactic structures in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) are
used and their impacts on EFL readers. This work aims at investigating a comprehensive exploration
of the syntactic structures and their influence on readers’ comprehension. When a reader faces such
disordered syntactic structures in an African American literary text, particularly in Beloved’s novel,
he/she will have a positive and negative impact on perceptual understanding. This study uses the
qualitative method to provide analytical and exploratory research. The qualitative method analyzes
data gathered from Beloved’s text with the focus on the syntactic structures employed by the writer.
Therefore, the results suggest that Morrison wrote with her own vernacular variety, which is African
American Vernacular English (AAVE). This reveals that the author uses disarranged syntactical
elements such as incoherent simple sentences, disorganized compound-complex sentences,
capitalization of the entire words and phrases, and punctuation i.e. misused commas. Other
syntactical features are found to indicate Morrison’s writing style include: the use of double
negation, deletion of some letters from words and phrases, and the use of colloquialism. This
research concludes that Morrison apparently presents syntactic structures in her novel Beloved in
disorganized and unstructured mode. These structures cannot be understood by EFL readers since
they use the act of reading literary works for the purpose of obtaining foreign language proficiency.
This paper presents series of historiometric studies that exemplify the value of “citation analysis” as an empirical approach to professional literary-critical interpretation, especially with respect to the question of the “literariness” of literary texts. Specifically, the studies show that professional interpreters of Wordsworth’s poetry, across more than a century of time and despite widely varying critical approaches, tend to pay more attention to and therefore more frequently cite lines that involve prospective enjambments. Lines involving nominative noun phrase and retrospective enjambments, however, did not reveal the same correlation with frequency of citation. The studies thus suggest that literariness does indeed have a relatively stable textual component that may be discriminated through citation analysis of professional interpretations of individual literary texts by authors writing in distinct genres of literature and in different periods in literary history.
The judgment and ultimately the success of creative products should be determined by their properties. However, it has not been considered so far whether the same applies to books. Earlier research has found an inverted u-relationship between originality of stimuli and their success. Linguistic originality as a text feature could influence the success of books as creative products in a natural experiment. The present historiometric study investigated whether originality predicts the popularity in a significant sample, the most best-selling English books from 200 years. Originality was calculated based on word frequency using a commercial service. Popularity was assessed with a composite measure including indicators like the number of sold copies. Regression analysis indicated originality had a direct linear effect on popularity, partially moderated by the time of first publishing. That is, while originality was generally beneficial for the success of a bestseller, the same originality was more appreciated at a later point in time. This is the first quantitative study supporting the long-held assumption that the evaluation of creative narratives is influenced by temporal context. The fact that some works like The Great Gatsby got more appreciation when they were re-discovered may reflect a general principle rather than mere exceptions.
Although poetry reception is often considered to be a highly emotional process, psychological research on emotional experiences when reading poetry is anything but abundant. Most research on poetry reception addresses the influence of poetic devices like meter and rhyme on readers' comprehension, appreciation, and the recollection of the poem. Empathic reactions and emotional involvement as described, for example, in studies on reading narratives are rarely discussed. Here, we propose that poetry is predisposed to induce a variety of different kinds of affective responses and feelings. In particular, we put forward the mood empathy hypothesis, according to which poems expressing moods of persons, situations, or objects should engage readers to mentally simulate and affectively resonate with the depicted state of affairs. We report evidence that this resonance can lead to the experience of the depicted mood itself, or some feeling closely associated with it, a process similar to empathy as a kind of Einfühlung or feeling in. Our results are interpreted in the larger frame of the neurocognitive poetics model of literary reading (Jacobs, 2011, 2014). In line with the model's postulate that backgrounding elements facilitate emotional involvement while foregrounding features promote aesthetic evaluation, we identified different predictors for both processes: familiarity and situational embedding were the main factors mediating mood empathy, and aesthetic liking was best predicted from foregrounding features like style and form. By supporting the mood empathy hypothesis, these findings open new perspectives for future studies on literary reading and poetics.
A neurocognitive poetics model of literary reading is developped in the light of classical theories on rhetoric, poetics, and aesthetics, as well as recent results from neurocognitive studies of reading.
p>Neste capítulo 13, que tem o mesmo nome da obra a que pertence, "Is there a text in this class?", Stanley Fish tenta demonstrar, a partir de um diálogo real mantido entre um colega de faculdade e urna aluna, que a apreensão dos significados de um texto qualquer depende não da pré-existência de significados determinados ligados ao texto, mas da inserção dos interlocutores dentro de um mesmo sistema interpretativo e de uma mesma comunidade interpretativa. Isso inclui as circunstancias, crenças e suposições que cercam a produção do texto. Noutros termos, a comunicação se dá dentro de situações que supõem uma estrutura de pressuposições e práticas relevantes com relação a objetivos e propósitos pré-existentes. O Autor tenta igualmente demonstrar como essa maneira de conceber a inteligibilidade dos textos não conduz, como temem os seus adversarios, nem ao solipsismo nem ao relativismo.</p
This study examines how reading habits affect people's sensitivity to word distributions in literary and non-literary writing. We manipulated eight literary and non-literary passages, creating modified versions that had lower word chunk frequencies but higher individual word frequencies than the originals. Subjects were then asked to rate the passages' quality of writing. Results showed that subjects with more experience reading literary writing (literary readers) gave higher ratings to original literary passages, while subjects with less literary reading experience (non-literary readers) preferred modified versions. Subjects with both types of reading habits rated original versions of non-literary passages higher. This indicates that literary readers are sensitive to frequencies of word chunks containing words that appear more frequently in the literary genre, while non-literary readers are not. We suggest that, over time, people can acquire slightly different representations of the probabilistic structure of language through their specific linguistic exposure.
Psychonarratology is an approach to the empirical study of literary response and the processing of narrative. It draws on the empirical methodology of cognitive psychology and discourse processing as well as the theoretical insights and conceptual analysis of literary studies, particularly narratology. The present work provides a conceptual and empirical basis for this interdisciplinary approach that is accessible to researchers from either disciplinary background. An integrative review is presented of the classic problems in narratology: the status of the narrator, events and plot, characters and characterization, speech and thought, and focalization. For each area, Bortolussi and Dixon critique the state of the art in narratology and literary studies, discuss relevant work in cognitive psychology, and provide a new analytical framework based on the insight that readers treat the narrator as a conversational participant. Empirical evidence is presented on each problem, much of it previously unpublished.
We analyse applications of Aren's law and identifiy some interesting problems. Attentation must be paid to the distinction of intra-textual and intertextual perspectives. It seems reasonable that Aren's law is valid only within the framework of particular text sorts, or discurse types. The law seems to express specific tendencies which can be submitted to observation only in case of large data material.
It is now widely maintained that the concept of literariness has been critically examined and found deficient. Prominent postmodern literary theorists have argued that there are no special characteristics that distinguish literature from other texts. Similarly, cognitive psychology has often subsumed literary understanding within a general theory of discourse processing. However, a review of empirical studies of literary readers reveals traces of literariness that appear irreducible to either of these explanatory frameworks. Our analysis of readers’ responses to several literary texts (short stories and poems) indicates processes beyond the explanatory reach of current situation models. Such findings suggest a three‐component model of literariness involving foregrounded stylistic or narrative features, readers’ defamiliarizing responses to them, and the consequent modification of personal meanings.
The 'state of literature' in a visual culture is analyzed against the background of a theoretical semiotic framework based upon the distinction between three types of signs: one-place images, two-place symbols, and three-place structures. It is argued that literature is linguistic mimetic meta-representation. The semiotic perspective allows us to deal, in a productive way, with a number of key issues in literary theory (such as 'literariness,' literature versus entertainment, and literary diachrony). Moreover, a methodology for the study of literature and the arts in culture is proposed, consisting of three complementary approaches or 'strategies': the phenomenological, the hermeneutical, and the empirical.
In May 2002, previously unknown early drafts of what was to become the third chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses surfaced. Joyce worked these drafts into the manuscript that is now known as the `V.A.3-Buffalo' manuscript, in its turn the antecedent of the fair copy forming part of the so-called Rosenbach manuscript on which the published Gabler edition of Ulysses is based. In the study presented in this article, I chose three passages from the earliest drafts and found their corresponding passages in the V.A.3-Buffalo manuscript, and the published text (amounting to a total of nine text passages). In both manuscripts the first layer (before revisions) was chosen, to have the greatest possible difference between versions. After dividing the texts into roughly sentence-length segments, I conducted a foregrounding analysis on all segments of the nine texts and quantified the foregrounding devices. The objective of the presented study was to investigate whether results of past empirical studies of foregrounding, which have concentrated on poems or fairly straightforward narratives would hold true for such complex texts as James Joyce's Ulysses. To measure reader responses to the foregrounding of the texts, ratings on strikingness and affect, as well as reading times per segment were recorded. These responses proved to correlate significantly with the numerical foregrounding index per segment. Additionally, a salient framework is proposed for the study of manuscript materials.
Self-modifying feelings during literary reading were studied in relation to the personality trait, absorption. Participants read a short story, described their experience of 3 striking or evocative passages in the story, and completed the Tellegen Absorption Scale (Tellegen, 1982). Compared to readers with either low or moderate absorption scores, those high in absorption were more likely to report affective theme variations and self-perceptual shifts, especially during an emotionally complicated portion of the story. Further analyses indicated that, rather than emotional involvement per se, the relationship between absorption and self-perceptual shifts was mediated by the interaction between theme variations and a style of expressive reflection called metaphors of personal identification.
This is a simplified English version of the Neurocognitive Model of Literary Reading from our book "Gehirn und Gedicht" (Brain and Poem). It hypothesizes a dual-route processing of texts with poetic features: a fast, automatic route for (implicit) processing texts which mainly consist of 'background' elements informing the reader about the 'facts' of a story; and a slower route for (explicit) processing of foregrounded text elements. The fast route is hypothesized to facilitate immersive processes (transportation, absorption) through effortless word recognition, sentence comprehension, activation of familiar situation-models, and the experiencing of non-aesthetic, narrative or fiction emotions, such as sympathy, suspense, or 'vicarious' fear and hope. The slow route is assumed to be operational in aesthetic processes supported by explicit schema adaptation, artefact emotions, and the ancient neuronal play, seek, and lust systems. The model’s hypotheses are discussed in the light of neurocognitive studies on facts vs. fiction reading, the comprehension and aesthetic appreciation of figurative language, and poetry reception.
Compares several methods of presenting text, including a new paradigm that produces reading-time data with many of the characteristics of naturally occurring eye-fixation data. In the "moving window" condition, a reader presses a button to see each successive word in a text, and the previous word is removed when a new word appears. 35 undergraduates read short passages under cumulative, moving-, and stationary-window conditions. The moving-window condition most closely resembled gaze durations. Results suggest that readers initiate the processing of each word as soon as they encounter it rather than buffer words and delay processing. It is considered that the tendency to immediately process text might interact with other techniques for text presentation, such as the rapid serial visual presentation condition. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This article investigates whether expectations about discourse genre influence the process and products of text comprehension. Ss read texts either with a literary story or with a news story as the purported genre. Subsequently, they verified statements pertaining to the texts. Two experiments demonstrated that Ss reading under a literary perspective had longer reading times, better memory for surface information, and a poorer memory for situational information than those reading under a news perspective. Regression analyses of reading times produced findings that were consistent with the memory data. The results support the notion that readers differentially allocate their processing resources according to their expectations about the genre of a text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Our life is full of stories: some of them depict real-life events and were reported, e.g. in the daily news or in autobiographies,
whereas other stories, as often presented to us in movies and novels, are fictional. However, we have only little insights
in the neurocognitive processes underlying the reading of factual as compared to fictional contents. We investigated the neurocognitive
effects of reading short narratives, labeled to be either factual or fictional. Reading in a factual mode engaged an activation
pattern suggesting an action-based reconstruction of the events depicted in a story. This process seems to be past-oriented
and leads to shorter reaction times at the behavioral level. In contrast, the brain activation patterns corresponding to reading
fiction seem to reflect a constructive simulation of what might have happened. This is in line with studies on imagination
of possible past or future events.
The right hemisphere's role in language comprehension is supported by results from several neuropsychology and neuroimaging studies. Special interest surrounds right temporoparietal structures, which are thought to be involved in processing novel metaphorical expressions, primarily due to the coarse semantic coding of concepts. In this event related fMRI experiment we aimed at assessing the extent of semantic distance processing in the comprehension of figurative meaning to clarify the role of the right hemisphere. Four categories of German noun noun compound words were presented in a semantic decision task: a) conventional metaphors; b) novel metaphors; c) conventional literal, and; d) novel literal expressions, controlled for length, frequency, imageability, arousal, and emotional valence. Conventional literal and metaphorical compounds increased BOLD signal change in right temporoparietal regions, suggesting combinatorial semantic processing, in line with the coarse semantic coding theory, but at odds with the graded salience hypothesis. Both novel literal and novel metaphorical expressions increased activity in left inferior frontal areas, presumably as a result of phonetic, morphosyntactic, and semantic unification processes, challenging predictions regarding right hemispheric involvement in processing unusual meanings. Meanwhile, both conventional and novel metaphorical expressions induced BOLD signal change in left hemispherical regions, suggesting that even novel metaphor processing involves more than linking semantically distant concepts.
The experiments reported in this paper deal with the relationship between specific formal textual features, i.e. graphic and phonetic information, and the reader's literary educational background in the categorization of poetic texts. In two experiments, the research method of Information Integration Theory was employed in order to test two hypotheses relating to the radical conventionalist and traditional positions on the role of specific formal textual features in the categorization of poetic texts. Twenty subjects from expert or novice literary reading experience backgrounds were, in two experiments, required to rate two parallel sets of graphically and phonetically manipulated poems. The results reveal that subjects are sensitive to the manipulations of graphic and phonetic information and use the same additive information integration rule in making poetic text categorization judgements. The expert literary readers were found to assign significantly higher ratings to all versions of the manipulated poems than the novice readers.
The present study concentrates on the relation between sentence length (SL) and word length (WL) as a possible factor in text
classification. The dependence of WL and SL is discussed in terms of general system theory and synergetics; the results achieved
thus are relevant not only for linguistic studies of text classification, but for the study of other complex systems, as well.
Brain-electric correlates of reading have traditionally been studied with word-by-word presentation, a condition that eliminates important aspects of the normal reading process and precludes direct comparisons between neural activity and oculomotor behavior. In the present study, we investigated effects of word predictability on eye movements (EM) and fixation-related brain potentials (FRPs) during natural sentence reading. Electroencephalogram (EEG) and EM (via video-based eye tracking) were recorded simultaneously while subjects read heterogeneous German sentences, moving their eyes freely over the text. FRPs were time-locked to first-pass reading fixations and analyzed according to the cloze probability of the currently fixated word. We replicated robust effects of word predictability on EMs and the N400 component in FRPs. The data were then used to model the relation among fixation duration, gaze duration, and N400 amplitude, and to trace the time course of EEG effects relative to effects in EM behavior. In an extended Methodological Discussion section, we review 4 technical and data-analytical problems that need to be addressed when FRPs are recorded in free-viewing situations (such as reading, visual search, or scene perception) and propose solutions. Results suggest that EEG recordings during normal vision are feasible and useful to consolidate findings from EEG and eye-tracking studies.
Research in experimental aesthetics suggests a relation between complexity and novelty on the one hand and hedonic value on the other (Berlyne, 1980). Defining foregrounding as deviation from daily language, the concept seems closely associated with novelty, and therefore a relation may be expected between the degree of deviation and readers' aesthetic appreciation. Also, deviation is assumed to be the key to understanding style, and leads readers in their interpretation of a text. These hypotheses are confirmed by recent evidence (Miall and Kuiken, 1994; Hakemulder, 2004; Zyngier, van Peer and Hakemulder, in press). The present study aims to enhance control over potential factors, refining the assessment of readers' background variables, and excluding interference of text factors other than deviation. For this purpose six versions of one poetry line were written, with an ascending degree of foregrounding from the first to the sixth line. More than 300 participants were assigned randomly to a total of 13 groups. Some read one of the six lines of a poem. To other groups, adjacent lines were presented hierarchically or in a large difference in degree of foregrounding (four lines apart in the hierarchy). Participants evaluated the single line they had been assigned to, or compared their two lines on a number of items measuring aesthetic appreciation, evaluation of aesthetic structure, and perceived cognitive, emotive, social and attitudinal impact. In addition, they completed a questionnaire on reading habits. It was hypothesized that higher degrees of deviation would lead to higher scores on these measures. Part of the predictions was confirmed by the results.
What literature is, how it works, and why it exists at all are some of the fascinating questions that the theory of foregrounding tries to answer. The term 'foregrounding' refers to specific linguistic devices, i.e., deviation and parallelism, that are used in literary texts in a functional and condensed way. These devices enhance the meaning potential of the text, while also providing the reader with the possibility of aesthetic experience. According to the theory of foregrounding, literature - by employing unusual forms of language - breaks up the reader's routine behavior: commonplace views and perspectives are replaced by new and surprising insights and sensations. In this way, literature sustains or creates individual self-awareness of automatized actions and preconceptions. It thus contributes to general creativity and development in societies. The theory of foregrounding is one of the few literary theories that has been tested empirically for its validity.
A rhetorical figure can be defined as an artful deviation in the form taken by a statement. Since antiquity dozens of figures have been cataloged, ranging from the familiar (rhyme, pun) to the obscure (antimetabole). Despite the frequent appearance of rhetorical figures in print advertisements, their incorporation into advertising theory and research has been minimal. This article develops a framework for classifying rhetorical figures that distinguishes between figurative and nonfigurative text, between two types of figures (schemes and tropes), and among four rhetorical operations that underlie individual figures (repetition, reversal, substitution, and destabilization). These differentiations in the framework are supported by preliminary validation data and are linked to suggested consumer responses. The article also considers the theoretical import of the proposed framework for future research on rhetorical structure in advertising. Copyright 1996 by the University of Chicago.
Foreword Introduction Part I: Approaches and methods 1. Style and Choice 2. Style, Text and Frequency 3. A Method of Analysis and some Examples 4. Levels of Style Part II: Aspects of style 5. Language and the Fictional World 6. Mind Style 7. The Rhetoric of Text 8. Discourse and Discourse Situation 9. Conversation in the Novel 10. Speech and Thought Presentation Passages and topics for further study Further reading Bibliography Index of works discussed General index
So wie im Titel dieses Abschnittes dürfte wohl die verbreitetste Antwort auf die Frage lauten, was Literaturwissenschaftler in ihrer Disziplin tun. Aber so plausibel diese Antwort auch klingen mag, so problematisch ist fast jedes Wort in ihr.
Narratives enable readers to vividly experience fictional and non-fictional contexts. Writers use a variety of language features to control these experiences: They direct readers in how to construct contexts, how to draw inferences and how to identify the key parts of a story. Writers can skilfully convey physical sensations, prompt emotional states, effect moral responses and even alter the readers' attitudes. Mind, Brain and Narrative examines the psychological and neuroscientific evidence for the mechanisms which underlie narrative comprehension. The authors explore the scientific developments which demonstrate the importance of attention, counterfactuals, depth of processing, perspective and embodiment in these processes. in so doing, this timely, interdisciplinary work provides an integrated account of the research which links psychological mechanisms of language comprehension to humanities work on narrative and style.
This article compares two approaches to genre analysis: Biber’s multidimensional analysis (MDA) and Tribble’s use of the keyword function of WordSmith. The comparison is undertaken via a case study of conversation, speech, and academic prose in modern American English. The terms conversation and speech as used in this article correspond to the demographically sampled and context-governed spoken data in the British National Corpus. Conversation represents the type of communication we experience every day whereas speech is produced in situations in which there are few producers and many receivers (e.g., classroom lectures, sermons, and political speeches). Academic prose is a typical formal-written genre that differs markedly from the two spoken genres. The results of the MDA and keyword approaches both on similar genres (conversation vs. speech) and different genres (the two spoken genres vs. academic prose) show that a keyword analysis can capture important genre features revealed by MDA.
THE average duration of eye fixations in reading places constraints on the time for lexical processing. Data from event related potential (ERP) studies of word recognition can illuminate stages of processing within a single fixation on a word. In the present study, high and low frequency regular and exception words were used as targets in an eye movement reading experiment and a high-density electrode ERP lexical decision experiment. Effects of lexicality (word vs pseudoword vs consonant strings), word frequency (high vs low frequency) and word regularity (regular vs exception spelling-sound correspondence) were examined. Results suggest a very early time-course for these aspects of lexical processing within the context of a single eye fixation.
The purpose of this paper is to develop a more comprehensive view on text comprehension, which encompasses both emotional and cognitive aspects. We take prevailing — cognitive — models of text comprehension as a starting-point. In discussing the role of emotions on the basis of the models, we arrive at an integration of emotional and cognitive aspects. A tentative framework is presented, based on the available empirical data.
This paper traces the historical development of the use of statistical methods in the analysis of literary style. Commencing with stylometry’s early origins, the paper looks at both successful and unsuccessful applications, and at the internal struggles as statisticians search for a proven methodology. The growing power of the computer and the ready availability of machine-readable texts are transforming modern stylometry, which has now attracted the attention of the media. Stylometry’s interaction with more traditional literary scholarship is also discussed.
The notion that stylistic features of literary texts deautomatize perception is central to a tradition of literary theory from Coleridge through Shklovsky and Mukařovský to Van Peer. Stylistic variations, known as foregrounding, hypothetically prompt defamiliarization, evoke feelings, and prolong reading time. These possibilities were tested in four studies in which segment by segment reading times and ratings were collected from readers of a short story. In each study, foregrounded segments of the story were associated with increased reading times, greater strikingness ratings, and greater affect ratings. Response to foregrounding appeared to be independent of literary competence or experience. Reasons for considering readers' response to foregrounding as a distinctive aspect of interaction with literary texts are discussed.
The experiment reported in this paper investigates the genre-specific hypothesis of reading in relation to the reading of poetry and encyclopedic items. Based on previous empirical research and theoretical positions, three hypotheses which differentiate between the reading of poetry and encyclopedic items in relation to surface information recall, reading time and self evaluations of levels of comprehension were proposed and tested. Using a within subjects design, 38 participants read and recalled four encyclopedic items and four poems. Random sampling methods were employed to choose the authentic texts used in this study. The results support all three of the genre-specific hypotheses and demonstrate the following processing differences between poetry and encyclopedic texts: (1) Reading poetry involves higher levels of surface information recall than encyclopedic texts; (2) Encyclopedic items are read at a faster rate than poems; (3) Poems are considered to be more difficult to understand than encyclopedic items. Accordingly, this study offers some empirical support to the genre-specific hypothesis of reading.
This paper examines the assumption that there are specific control systems which regulate the comprehension of a particular discourse type, by altering parameters of basic comprehension processes. It focuses on some parameters for the comprehension of literary and news stories. This is done by presenting the same set of texts to two different groups of subjects, once as news stories, and once as literary stories. Two hypotheses are derived from theoretical assumptions concerning literary and news comprehension. The first one states that compared with a news perspective, a literary perspective imposes a slower reading speed. The second states that, compared with newspaper reading, literary reading results in a stronger surface structure representation. Reading-time measurements and memory tasks provide support for both hypotheses. The paper concludes that a combination of on- and off-line methods to study parameters of literary (and news) comprehension is both possible and necessary.
The assumption that formal features in literary texts typically shape response, which has been a theme of literary theory almost since its beginnings, has been rejected by poststructuralist critics. If formal features are considered, they argue, this is because social or institutional conventions direct readers' attention to them. We argue that this claim is unsupported by empirical study. Studies designed to confirm the conventionalist position in fact show the reverse. Our examination of readers' judgements of literariness in two studies, Hoffstaedter (1989) and Hanauer (1996), and a review of our own findings (Miall and Kuiken, 1994), suggest that response to formal features is based on human psychobiological, cognitive, and psycholinguistic processes. We conclude with some observations about why response to formal features may be a significant part of literary reading.
The average duration of eye fixations in reading places constraints on the time for lexical processing. Data from event related potential (ERP) studies of word recognition can illuminate stages of processing within a single fixation on a word. In the present study, high and low frequency regular and exception words were used as targets in an eye movement reading experiment and a high-density electrode ERP lexical decision experiment. Effects of lexicality (words vs pseudowords vs consonant strings), word frequency (high vs low frequency) and word regularity (regular vs exception spelling-sound correspondence) were examined. Results suggest a very early time-course for these aspects of lexical processing within the context of a single eye fixation.
Proverbs tend to have meanings that are true both literally and figuratively (i.e., Lightning really doesn't strike the same place twice). Consequently, discourse contexts that invite a literal reading of a proverb should provide more conceptual overlap with the proverb, resulting in more rapid processing, than will contexts biased towards a non-literal reading. Despite this, previous research has failed to find the predicted processing advantage in reading times for familiar proverbs when presented in a literally biasing context. We investigate this issue further by employing both ERP methodology and a self-paced reading task and, second, by creating an item set that controls for problems with items employed in earlier studies. Our results indicate that although people do not take longer to read proverbs in the literally and proverbially biasing contexts, people have less difficulty integrating the statements in literal than figurative contexts, as shown by the ERP data. These differences emerge at the third word of the proverbs.
Exploration of the real world usually expresses itself through a perceptual behaviour that is complex and adaptive -- an interplay between external visual and internal cognitive states. However, up to now, the measurement of electrophysiological correlates of cognitive processes has been limited to situations, in which the experimental setting confined visual exploration to the mere reception of a strict serial order of events. Here we show -- exemplified by the well known old/new effect in the domain of visual word recognition -- that an alternative approach that utilizes brain potentials corresponding to eye fixations during free exploration reveals effects as reliable as conventional event-related brain potentials.