Scientific Study of Literature - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012

Building on findings in evolutionary psychology, we constructed a model of human nature and used it to illuminate the evolved psychology that shapes the organization of characters in nineteenth-century British novels. Characters were rated on the web by 519 scholars and students of Victorian literature. Rated categories include motives, criteria for selecting marital partners, personality traits, and the emotional responses of readers. Respondents assigned characters to roles as protagonists, antagonists, or associates of protagonists or antagonists. We conclude that protagonists and their associates form communities of cooperative endeavor. Antagonists exemplify dominance behavior that threatens community cohesion. We summarize results from the whole body of novels and use them to identify distinctive features in the novels of Jane Austen.

We tested whether the genre of a literary text (essay as compared with short story) or its artistic merit would be primarily responsible for the variability in the self-perceived personality traits that individuals experience when they read. One hundred participants were randomly assigned to read either one of eight essays or one of eight short stories, matched for length, reading difficulty, and interest. The Big-Five personality traits were measured before and after reading. Genre did not affect variability in personality. Rather, participants who judged the text they read to be more artistic reported a greater variability in their personality trait profile after reading, independently of whether the text was an essay or a short story. Artistic merit appears to be associated with literature’s transformative effects through the instability in the self-perceived experience of the reader’s personality.

“Transportation into a narrative world” is a psychological mechanism through which narrative communication can affect beliefs (Green & Brock, 2000). Transportation, or psychological immersion into a story, entails imagery, emotionality, and attentional focus. Two studies (N = 92 and 126) suggested that when readers’ pre-reading emotional states match the emotional tone of a narrative, transportation into that narrative is increased. Low-arousal positive emotions (contentedness, thoughtful) also increase transportation. Transportation is also associated with greater story-consistent emotional response, even if the emotions evoked by the ending of the story are different from the emotional tone at the start of the story (and readers’ pre-reading emotions). Furthermore, labeling a narrative as fact versus fiction does not affect the intensity of emotional response.

The aim of the current study is to evaluate poetry writing as a way of second language (L2) learning by exploring the interaction between academic prose and the effect of writing Japanese poetry — haiku. This article first describes some critiques of using poetry in educational settings and discusses the nature of poetry writing at the tertiary level in L2 contexts. The study was designed as an intervention in which 20 EFL students in Japan produced pre- and post-argumentative essays and L2 haikus. The data obtained was submitted to statistical analysis, which showed that there was a significant difference in the use of linguistic features between pre- and post-tests indicating that the task of writing haiku affected the EFL students’ written performance in the post-argumentative essay. In addition, the L2 haiku corpus produced revealed the English haiku as short, personal, direct and descriptive poetry.

Previous research has shown that adolescent readers differ in their ‘online’ processing of literary texts. Differences were found in the extent to which these readers performed certain (meta)cognitive and affective activities while reading literary texts. However, readers might also differ in flexibility; that is, in the extent to which they vary their activities during reading. In this study we examined whether good and poor adolescent readers differ in flexibility. Nineteen Dutch students (ten known as good, nine known as poor literature readers) each read five stories while thinking aloud. Think aloud transcripts were analysed for the reading activities students performed. We used a multilevel model to estimate the mean changes in occurrence of activities during reading, as well as the variances between readers and stories. Results indicated that good readers were more flexible: they tended to change their reading activities both within and between stories, whereas poor readers showed more static patterns of response.

In this paper, we take up three novels: Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell (1848/2008), Shirley, published just afterwards by Charlotte Brontë, and North and South, published six years later by Gaskell. Each novel is a revoicing of previous works, and we shall present evidence that the last two directly and consciously revoice the first two. We argue that a form of revoicing we call “exaptation”, or the borrowing of formal devices for very different functions than those for which they initially evolved, can be observed on at least four different timescales: the genre, the author’s career, the novel’s characters and plot, and the exchanges of dialogue. With each book, we examine each timescale and then we look both quantitatively and qualitatively at the wordings of a request, a confession, and an act of violence. In this way, we hope to demonstrate how the early social realist novel developed devices for showing thought processes alongside the verbal processes and the physical activities of characters by devoicing speech, first as indirect discourse, then as quasi-direct discourse, and finally as unspoken understandings. It is, we argue, a way that is not very different from the way that the Russian psychologist Vygotsky hypothesized that children develop verbal thinking and inner speech from dialogue.

This article proposes and empirically tests a theoretical model in which need for cognition and affective disposition influence viewers’ transportation (absorption in a narrative) which in turn influences enjoyment of the narrative. Using two re-edited versions of the feature film Memento (Nolan, 2000) and the original film as treatments intended to produce varying levels of cognitive challenge, the researchers conducted an experiment with 91 participants. Structural equation modeling analysis results strongly support the model overall; strongly support need for cognition and affective disposition as significant influences on transportation; and strongly support for transportation influencing enjoyment. No significant support was found for the proposed moderating influence of cognitive challenge presented by the narrative on need for cognition or for cognitive challenge as a main influence on transportation.

We present exploratory research to propose that the Transportation-Imagery Model (Green & Brock, 2000) underlies how individuals form general evaluations in response to reading narratives, while the Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation Model (Oatley, 1999) underlies how individuals form personal evaluations in response to reading narratives. In our study, 100 participants first gave an indication of their own past drinking experiences. They then read a narrative about binge drinking, completed measures of general and personal risks of binge drinking, a transportation scale, and intentions to reduce alcohol intake. Participants who were more transported into the narrative reported binge drinking to be more risky in general but did not rate their own drinking behavior as risky. In contrast, participants who had reported drinking more thought binge drinking to be less risky in general, but that their own drinking behavior was more risky. Further, general risk perceptions were not predictive of intentions to reduce alcohol intake, whereas previous experience was predictive of such intentions. These exploratory findings are discussed with respect to how narratives influence individuals’ attitudes, and how they may offer new directions for future research.