- Home
- e-Journals
- Scientific Study of Literature
- Previous Issues
- Volume 2, Issue, 2012
Scientific Study of Literature - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2012
Volume 2, Issue 2, 2012
-
Style in nineteenth century fiction: A Multi-Dimensional analysis
Author(s): Jesse Egbertpp.: 167–198 (32)More LessRecent years have seen substantial advances in ‘corpus stylistics’, which is the use of corpora and computational techniques to study literary style. Corpus stylistics has produced analyses of otherwise imperceptible features of literary style. However, studies in corpus stylistics have rarely considered the full set of core linguistic features. The present study explores literary style through the application of Multi-Dimensional analysis. Stylistic variation along three dimensions is accounted for using a large, principled corpus of fiction. The dimensions of variation are interpreted as ‘Thought Presentation versus Description’, ‘Abstract Exposition versus Concrete Action’, and ‘Dialogue versus Narrative’. These three dimensions are then used to compare the styles of nineteenth-century fiction between authors, and the range of stylistic variation among the novels of individual authors. The findings are interpreted qualitatively and with reference to previous analyses of author style.
-
Climbing the ladder to literary Heaven: A case study of allegorical interpretation of fiction
Author(s): Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. and Natalia Blackwellpp.: 199–217 (19)More LessThis study examined university students’ interpretations of a passage from the novel “The Anthologist” that notably described a poet’s career as his clinging onto an infinitely tall ladder leading up into the blinding blue. Understanding this excerpt requires readers to engage in “metaphor processing” where one applies a metaphoric reading to some instance of language or a situation to obtain allegorical meaning, as opposed to “processing metaphor” in which individual words and phrases are given metaphoric meaning. Students’ interpretations of both the individual segments and the entire text revealed significant allegorical abilities, many of which we centered on their elaboration of the common metaphorical theme LIFE IS A JOURNEY. But participants also clearly created textured, personal readings of fictional texts that gave each interpretive act it own unique, creative flavor. Although this study focused on the “products” of people’s interpretation for allegory, we speculate on the cognitive “processes” required for readers to produce their rich, detailed understandings of allegory in fiction.
-
Internally focalized narration from a linguistic point of view
Author(s): Tobias Klauk, Tilmann Köppe and Edgar Oneapp.: 218–242 (25)More LessMost definitions of the narratological notion of internal focalization are cast in terms of what the text represents, namely some character and her point of view. In being thus couched in representational terms, definitions of internal focalization do not mention any linguistic surface properties of the respective text. In this paper, we search for a way to specify the relation between linguistic surface properties and internal focalization. We start by giving a standard narratological account of internal focalization that is fully couched in representational terms. In the next section, we develop a brief but precise theory of linguistic perspective that operates on the text surface. This theory and our linguistic take on internal focalization then rest on the idea of shifted indexical expressions. Our account makes a clear empirical prediction in claiming that the interpretation of an internally focalized sentence will contain variables which will all be bound by the perspective holder. We thus conclude that internal focalization implies linguistic perspective in the sense that the focal character is always the linguistic perspective holder. Hence, our account states a necessary condition for internal focalization in linguistic terms.
-
The Experiencing Questionnaire: Locating exceptional reading moments
Author(s): Don Kuiken, Paul Campbell and Paul Sopčákpp.: 243–272 (30)More LessThe Experiencing Questionnaire (EQ) is a 58-item instrument recently developed to assess some relatively uncommon but theoretically significant types of reading experience. Derived from the phenomenological conception of “experiencing,” it promises psychometrically sound access to the generative and self-altering aspects of literary reading. Results of preliminary studies indicate that EQ scales are reliable, that profiles of EQ scales differentiate theoretically relevant orientations toward literary reading (e.g., objective engagement, subjective engagement, secular enactive engagement, spiritual enactive engagement), and that the interactive combination of selected EQ scales reflects apex moments (sublime disquietude, sublime enthrallment) during literary reading.
-
The right word in the left place: Measuring lexical foregrounding in poetry and prose
Author(s): Dmitrii Yurievich Maninpp.: 273–300 (28)More LessThis work describes a large-scale empirical study that quantifies two aspects of lexical foregrounding in literary texts: the unpredictability (unexpectedness) and constrainedness (irreplaceability) of individual words in context. The data are generated by a Web-based literary game where players guess words in fragments of real texts. The results shed new light on the nature of the distinction between poetry and prose and on the role of formal constraints in poetry. In particular, traditional poetry tends to have higher constrainedness than prose and comparable unpredictability, while avant-garde poetry is characterized by higher unpredictability than prose and comparable constrainedness.
-
Theory of Mind and embedding of perspective: A psychological test of a literary “sweet spot”
Author(s): Douglas Whalen, Lisa Zunshine and Michael Holquistpp.: 301–315 (15)More LessTheory of Mind (ToM) has been proposed to explain social interactions, with real people but also with fictional characters, by interpreting their mind as well as our own. “Perspective embedding” exploits ToM by placing events in characters’ minds (e.g., “he remembered she was home”). Three levels of embedment, common in literature, may be a “sweet spot” that provides enough information about a character’s motivation, but not a confusing over-abundance. Here, we use short vignettes with 1 or 3 characters and 0–5 levels of perspective embedding in two reading studies to see whether these preferences might be related to processing ease. Self-paced readers were fastest with one level of embedment, increasingly slower as embedment increased; vignettes without embedment were approximately as slow as level 4. With both self-paced and imposed timing, error rates on probe questions increased only at the fifth level. Readers seem to prefer literary texts in which ToM operations are obvious due to embedding of perspectives within the narrative but still somewhat challenging.
Most Read This Month
Article
content/journals/22104380
Journal
10
5
false
