This article introduces the special issue by outlining the current state of research into the role of textual-linguistic features in eliciting narrative empathy. Firstly, we address the complexities ...around defining the term ‘narrative empathy’ and provide some definitional criteria. We then review the ways in which the role of language in narrative empathy has been studied to date in narratology, literary studies, empirical study of literature and stylistics. Based on this review, we argue that stylistic approaches allow for the much-needed exploration of specific linguistic techniques that may contribute to narrative empathy, while also taking into account other contextual factors to address the local nature of reading effects. Finally, we summarise how the contributions to this special issue showcase the affordances of stylistic analysis for the study of narrative empathy and offer new insights into the ways narrative empathy is elicited during the reading process.
Reader response research in stylistics Whiteley, Sara; Canning, Patricia
Language and literature (Harlow, England),
05/2017, Volume:
26, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
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.
Based on Kuzmičová's 1 phenomenological typology of narrative styles, we studied the specific contributions of mental imagery to literary reading experience and to reading behavior by combining ...questionnaires with eye-tracking methodology. Specifically, we focused on the two main categories in Kuzmičová's 1 typology, i.e., texts dominated by an "enactive" style, and texts dominated by a "descriptive" style. "Enactive" style texts render characters interacting with their environment, and "descriptive" style texts render environments dissociated from human action. The quantitative analyses of word category distributions of two dominantly enactive and two dominantly descriptive texts indicated significant differences especially in the number of verbs, with more verbs in enactment compared to descriptive texts. In a second study, participants read two texts (one theoretically cueing descriptive imagery, the other cueing enactment imagery) while their eye movements were recorded. After reading, participants completed questionnaires assessing aspects of the reading experience generally, as well as their text-elicited mental imagery specifically. Results show that readers experienced more difficulties conjuring up mental images during reading descriptive style texts and that longer fixation duration on words were associated with enactive style text. We propose that enactive style involves more imagery processes which can be reflected in eye movement behavior.
Memories of Literature in Croatia Škopljanac, Lovro; Ostojić, Luka; Rončević, Velna
Journal of open humanities data,
01/2024, Volume:
10
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The data represents the outcome of 1,005 interviews with as many interviewees in Croatia, conducted between 2021 and 2023. They were collected with a twofold purpose: to inquire what kind of literary ...texts non-professional readers remember, and to discover how they remember them. The findings are divided into six sections, focusing mostly on the texts and authors which were remembered by the readers, along with some quantitative data on their reading circumstances. The overall dataset’s reuse potential is discussed, pointing to potential examples within reader reception, and explaining what obstacles may be encountered by those who wish to reuse it.
Woolf’s work has been the object of several studies concerned with her experimental use of techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation. These investigated the way in which different ...perspectives coexist and alternate in her writing, suggesting that the use of such techniques often results in ambiguous perspective shifts. However, there is hardly any empirical evidence as to whether readers experience difficulty while reading her narratives as a result of these narrative techniques. This article examines empirically readers’ responses to extracts from Woolf’s two major novels – To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway – to provide evidence for whether Woolf’s techniques for the presentation of characters’ voices, thoughts and perspectives represent a challenge for readers. To achieve this, a mixed-methods approach that combines a stylistic analysis with a detailed questionnaire has been employed. Selected extracts that were hypothesised to be complex due to the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue were modified by substituting these with less ambiguous modes of consciousness presentation, such as direct speech or direct thought. Readers’ responses to the modified and unmodified versions of the same extracts were compared: results show that the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue increases the number of perspectives identified by readers, suggesting that this technique increases the texts’ difficulty, laying a more solid ground for future investigations.
Our topic is an under-theorized type of closed simile in which the ground represents a non-salient feature of the source term (e.g.,
, as opposed to a standard simile, e.g.,
). The non-standard ...simile introduces a semantic difficulty, a result of the unexpected mismatch between ground and source. Since they are highly prevalent in poetic texts there is special interest in investigating the ways subjects attempt to comprehend such similes. To that end, we have asked 62 subjects to interpret pairs of similes distinguished only by the salience of the ground. We identify 5 response types and find that these are unevenly distributed across the two simile types (standard and non-standard). The structural difference between the two kinds of similes, therefore, evokes different interpretational strategies. Additionally, we find that the non-standard simile entails a hit-or-miss potentiality, creating conditions for either an insightful interpretation or a rejection of any possibility of its coherent comprehension.
A novel distinction is proposed between two types of closed similes: the standard and the non-standard. While the standard simile presents a ground that is a salient feature of the source term (e.g. ...meek as a lamb), the non-standard simile somewhat enigmatically supplies a non-salient ground (e.g. meek as milk). The latter thus violates a deep-seated norm of similes and presents interpreters with unexpected difficulty, whereby the concept set up to be an exemplar of a quality is actually less than ideal to fulfil this role. The main question addressed here is how these two simile types are relatively distributed across poetic and non-poetic corpora. We elaborate the criteria for what constitutes the non-standard simile, including separating it out from adjacent phenomena like the ironic simile (e.g. brave as a mouse), and go on to explain our operational criteria for salience. Then, we report culling 329 closed similes from an anthology of poetry and 350 closed similes from two corpora of non-poetic discourse, the Corpus of Historical American English and the British National Corpus. An independent judge rated the salience of each ground-and-source pair of each of the similes, presented in randomized order. Results show that while the standard simile is found in both types of discourse, the non-standard kind is only marginally present in the non-poetic corpora but makes up over 40% of the similes in the poetic corpus. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for theories of poetic language and literariness.
This article examines recent theories of fictional characters, and raises the issue of how far characters can be understood with reference to human intersubjectivity. On the one hand, empirical ...research based on theories of rhetorical narrative ethics shows that phenomena such as sympathy and empathy are very relevant for the ways readers describe their imaginative connection with fictional characters. On the other hand, traditional narratology emphasizes that readers also engage with fiction as an artefact. This article focuses on the similarities and differences in these two conceptions of what engagement with fictional characters is, and asks how much of what readers get out of fiction depends on what is portrayed, and how much is the product of their enactment of form. Building on some yet unpublished results of an empirical testing conducted earlier by Sklar, as well as narratological and cognitive analyses of the concept of character, we examine our respective theoretical intuitions and set out a cognitive-rhetorical position that we both share. In that process we also clarify the ways in which cognitive literary studies can speak to the larger purpose of reading.
A tendency by literary stylisticians to overlook the role of the author in the generation of literary meaning has been a significant source of tension between linguistic approaches to literariness ...and other practices in the discipline, such as text-editing and literary biography. Recently, however, efforts have been made to close this gap, with a branch of stylistics, cognitive poetics, claiming to have developed a new and empirical method of integrating an appreciation of authorial imagination and creativity into the study of readers’ responses to the language of literary texts. We examine these claims critically, testing the grounds of assertions about scientific rigour in relation to demands about model testing and falsifiability associated with the scientific study of literature more generally. We then explore how some other methodologies, technologies and insights associated with this last branch of the discipline might be brought to bear on the topic of authorial intention, with the aim of determining whether, and in what ways, our understanding of authorial intention, and its role in literary processing, might be furthered through empirical enquiry.
The article uses two previous studies of non-professional, empirical readers of literature in order to constitute and compare their cultural memories about literary works which they have read and ...remembered well. It is based on the premise that individual memories of such works can, in aggregate, serve as an indicator of more wide-ranging preferences in a given culture. It is argued that this rather unique methodological and theoretical framework situates the paper at the crossroads of comparative literature, comparative cultural studies, and memory studies. Two samples of readers from distinct nations and cultures are analyzed: 90 interviewees from Croatia, and a 100 interviewees from the United States of America. There is a comparison and discussion of the two samples, including some basic characteristics pertaining to the respondents (gender, age). More importantly, the article examines basic characteristics of the texts that they had discussed, such as the genres and periods in which they can be situated. There are three main conclusions, applicable to both cultures: 1) readers tend to best remember novels written since the nineteenth century; 2) major and minor literary cultures have distinct ways of remembering their national writers and languages; 3) well-remembered books are closely tied to the national culture, or a “nuclear cultural family” of literary texts.
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