Scientific Study of Literature - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2014

This study describes two eye tracking experiments investigating the processing of poetry with and without enjambments. In Experiment 1, poetic fragments with authentic prospective (syntactically incomplete) or retrospective (syntactically complete) enjambments were investigated; in Experiment 2, enjambments were created — for the purpose of the experiment — from poetry that did not originally contain enjambments. We hypothesized that the layout of the text in poetic fragments would affect the degree to which integrative processes take place: in case of prospective enjambments, the syntactic incompleteness may preclude integration at the end of the line (before going to the next line), whereas retrospective enjambments may cause considerable re-interpretation at the next line. We indeed found significant differences in reading patterns between prose and poetry, poetry with and without enjambment, and poetry with prospective and retrospective enjambment. We interpret these results as favoring a dynamic model of language processing, where the amount and type of integration is determined by syntactic (in)completeness, semantic (in)completeness, but also the physical layout of the text.

What is a genre? What distinguishes a genre like science fiction from other genres? We convert texts to data and answer these questions by demonstrating a new method of quantitative literary analysis. We state and test directional hypotheses about contents of texts across the science fiction, mystery, and fantasy genres using psychometrically validated word categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We also recruit the work of traditional genre theorists in order to test humanists’ interpretations of genre. Since Darko Suvin’s theory is among the few testable definitions of science fiction given by literary scholars, we operationalize and test it. Our project works toward developing a model of science fiction, and introduces a new method for the interdisciplinary study of literature in which interpretations of literary scholars can be put to the test.

This study examined the relationship between reading literary novels and generating predictive inferences by analyzing a corpus of Japanese novels. Latent semantic analysis (LSA) was used to capture the statistical structure of the corpus. Then, the authors asked 74 Japanese college students to generate predictive inferences (e.g., “The newspaper burned”) in response to Japanese event sentences (e.g., “A newspaper fell into a bonfire”) and obtained more than 5,000 predicted events. The analysis showed a significant relationship between LSA similarity between the event sentences and the predicted events and frequency of the predicted events. This result suggests that exposure to literary works may help develop readers’ inference generation skills. In addition, two vector operation methods for sentence vector constructions from word vectors were compared: the “Average” method and the “Predication Algorithm” method (Kintsch, 2001). The results support the superiority of the Predication Algorithm method over the Average method.

This study examined the use of literature as a coping strategy among people who had experienced loss, comparing it to the use of music. Theory suggested that these artistic media can facilitate insight, recognition, support, relaxation, new emotions, and/or distraction. Among 198 respondents, 64 (32%) reported using neither medium during their grief period, 65 (33%) used only music, 19 (10%) used only literature, and 50 (25%) used both. Using artistic media was related to an emotional experience of the loss in two ways: 1) preference for emotion-focused coping was greater among those who used artistic media, 2) those who had used artistic media also reported greater impact of the loss. Reading was most strongly associated with distraction and listening to music with recognition. For those using both media, this suggests a coping process that alternates between distraction and recognition, in line with the Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement.