Existing research on communication on Twitter has largely ignored the question of how users make sense of the fragmentary tweets with which they are presented. Focusing on the use of Twitter for ...political reporting in post-revolutionary Egypt, this article argues that the production of mental stories provides readers with a mechanism for interpreting the meaning of individual tweets in terms of their relationships to other material. Drawing on contemporary narratology, it argues that Twitter exhibits key elements of narrativity, but that a creative reading process is nonetheless required to transform this incipient narrativity into coherent, sense-making mental narratives. This foregrounding of the reader’s creative role makes stories on Twitter highly fluid and dynamic. Through reference to classic critical theory, I propose that this nonetheless represents an evolution rather than a radical break from earlier forms of narrative reception, which in many cases demanded similarly creative reading practices.
This research aims to explore the ways in which reading English literature enhances the reading skills of Chinese college students in the language. A questionnaire was used to carry out the study ...with 36 students. The pilot population of this study is first-year to fourth-year students at Liaoning University. The study puts emphasis on the effectiveness of English literature reading in improving reading skills and reading comprehension. Sixty students participated in the study by means of an experiment. In the experiment class, the teacher uses reading skills to teach English literature, however, in the control class, the teacher uses a traditional literature teaching method. SPSS version 29.0 was offered to test whether the experimental students’ literature reading grades have risen with reading skills. SPSS is a software package used for statistical analysis in social science research and other fields. A wide range of abilities for data management, data analysis and data documentation are available with IBM's SPSS programme. Researchers and analysts use SPSS to perform various statistical analyses such as descriptive statistics, inferential statistics and multivariate analyses. The study indicates that teaching English literature reading skills enhances college students’ reading comprehension proficiency and grades.
Reader response research in stylistics Whiteley, Sara; Canning, Patricia
Language and literature (Harlow, England),
05/2017, Letnik:
26, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article introduces the special issue. In it, we argue that research into reader response should be recognised as a vital aspect of contemporary stylistics, and we establish our focus on work ...which explicitly investigates such responses through the collection and analysis of extra-textual datasets. Reader response research in stylistics is characterised by a commitment to rigorous and evidence-based approaches to the study of readers’ interactions with and around texts, and the application of such datasets in the service of stylistic concerns, to contribute to stylistic textual analysis and/or wider discussion of stylistic theory and methods. We trace the influence of reader response criticism and reception theory on stylistics and discuss the productive dialogues which exist between stylistics and the related fields of the empirical study of literature and naturalistic study of reading. After offering an overview of methods available to reader response researchers and a contextualising survey of existing work, we argue that both experimental and naturalistic methods should be regarded as ‘empirical’, and that stylistics is uniquely positioned to embrace diverse approaches to readers and reading. We summarise contributions to the special issue and the valuable insights they offer into the historical context of reader response research and the way readers perceive and evaluate texts (either poetry or narrative prose). Stylistic reader response research enables both the testing and development of stylistic methods, in accordance with the progressive spirit of the discipline, and also the establishment of new and renewed connections between stylistic research and work in other fields.
This article considers how readers engage with Sylvia Plath's poetry collection Ariel (1965) - deemed as particularly 'difficult' - on Goodreads, in the context of online amateur reviewing. George ...Steiner's (1978) fourfold typology of difficulty (contingent, modal, tactical and ontological) informs our approach and leads us to explore the ways in which difficulty is talked about and dealt with, especially since the poetry genre faces resistance in educational settings, as Peter Benton (2015) points out. Our discussion stems from a qualitative analysis of 25 positive and 25 negative Goodreads reviews of Ariel, from which we derive an inductive typology of readerly attitudes. We find that, across the positive/negative spectrum, three readerly attitudes prevail that can be aligned with particular reader types: The Self-Deprecator, The Re-Reader, and The Senser. The Self-Deprecator emphasises their lack of poetic skills, which makes literary difficulty hard to overcome. The Re-Reader foregrounds their need to engage with Ariel further to increase their appreciation of it. The Senser focuses on the feelings and sensations experienced, which means that difficulty is not construed as a barrier to meaningful receptive experiences. We argue the above-mentioned categories enhance our comprehension of the wide array of readers discussing poetry online.
The vocabulary choice and language used in expressing sadness vary in different cultures, even in the smallest scale of cultural group, i.e., family. There have not been many studies done to explore ...Indonesian EFL students’ word choices and expressions related to expressing sadness and empathy. The purpose of this study was to explore how the 11 EFL second-year university students in Basic Reading and Writing class expressed sadness as written in their personal reflective writings. The data was analyzed using mixed methods to obtain valid and reliable results. These second-year university students were assigned to read a picture book, ‘Sad Book’, or to watch and listen to the video version as a part of an activity in class. Their reflective writings were analyzed using content analysis to identify the corpus used by the students and using the appraisal framework to capture the variety of their attitudinal linguistic occurrence in expressing sadness and empathy. The findings illustrate that the highest attitudinal marker in expressing sadness is ‘affect’, followed by ‘judgment’ and ‘appreciation’. The use of the picture book, ‘Sad Book’, assists the EFL students to be more engaged in their reflective writing and thus the highest marker of ‘affect’ exists due to their ability to project their aesthetic stance. Implications for English language learning for adult learners are addressed at the end of this article.
Characters are a vital aspect of today’s transmedia practices. Combining theories on fictional persons from Japanese and Euro-American practices, this book discusses video game characters embedded in ...our popular media culture in which they are constantly produced and re-imagined. This book introduces the dynamic game character, a type of game character with a development structure that consists of multiple outcomes in a game. Through their actions and choices, players can influence these game characters’ identities and affect their possible destinies. Games subvert the idea that fictional persons must maintain a coherent identity. This book shows that dynamic game characters challenge strategies of top-down control through close readings of the Mass Effect series, Persona 5, Hades, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and more. It is directed to all scholars interested in the topics of transmedia storytelling, video games, characters, and Japanese narratology.
This article is based on the premise that mandated reading in literature classrooms may be perceived as an imposition and disliked by students. Attempts to address that scenario have suggested that ...text selection should be given more consideration to promote reading engagement, particularly by choosing texts which are familiar to the lifeworlds of students. Aside from ideas of familiarity and student preferences in reading, this article argues that text selection could also take into account text potentialities, as proposed by Louise Rosenblatt, from which three aspects are discernible; potentiality for participation, potentiality for a sustained reading experience, and potentiality for an enjoyable reading experience. These aspects of potentiality are illustrated and discussed through the literature classroom experiences of two Malaysian pre‐university English literature students. This article contends that ideas of text potentiality help us interpret students' responses to mandated texts and informs discussion among curriculum constructors and teachers about text selection in the literature classroom.
Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's ...experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.
Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's ...experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.
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