Speaker: Lovro Škopljanac @lskoplja
Affiliation: University of Zagreb
Title: Adjectives and Identities: Evidence of Literary Perspectives From Everyday Readers
Abstract (long version below): This paper advocates a specific application of aesthetics “from below” as a welcome addition to ESL. It employs a similar methodology, basing its findings on qualitative interviews gathered from a large number of contemporary readers in one European country. Their views and opinions on literature are analyzed in two steps, focusing first on how they talked about perspectives in general (mostly using adjectives), and second on the identification of readers’ perspectives with literary characters. This is done in order to answer the main research question of the paper: What kind of perspectives do readers assume and identify in everyday reading?
Long abstract
As demonstrated by the accelerating acceptance and integration of innovations such as digital humanities and artificial intelligence – whose products include manipulations, analyses, and productions of literary texts – literature may successfully be reduced to textual and non-textual parameters, even with minimal human intervention. This procedure has been active and dominant within empirical studies of literature, as well, and more broadly in formalist and structuralist approaches, which has yielded a wealth of data. However, it has also resulted in at least one major oversight concerning literary reception. As has recently been noted, “empirical studies of literature have not yet systematically investigated the verbal concepts readers use for communicating their aesthetic perceptions and evaluations of literature and the range and distribution of these concepts as dependent on specific genres of literature.” (Knoop et al. 2016, 35)
The authors immediately offer their solution to this oversight from a more specific German perspective, advocating “an aesthetics ‘from below’ as proposed by Fechner (1876), [for which] it is crucial to collect data on how readers themselves verbally represent their aesthetic experiences and expectations rather than to rely on expert evaluations and experimenter-selected rating scales only.” (ibid., 36) They demonstrate the advantages and results of their method on a sample of 1544 German-speaking research participants who were asked „to list adjectives that they use to label aesthetic dimensions of literature in general and of individual literary forms and genres in particular.” (ibid., 35)
A similar methodology is proposed in this presentation, which bases its findings on data gathered from a large number of contemporary readers (N=1000) in a single European country, who participated in qualitative interviews about their views and opinions on literature. Their answers are transcribed and analyzed in two steps which lead to an answer to the main research question of this paper: What kind of perspectives do readers assume and identify in everyday reading?
The first step involves extraction and presentation of the words – usually adjectives – which the readers used to represent their thoughts about perspectives in general. These may be divided into the three basic parts of literary circulation (examples of adjectives used in brackets): authors (“authorial”, “personal”), texts (“philosophical”, “fresh” “expected”), and readers themselves (“new”, “today’s”, “safe”). Several dozen adjectives are presented and systematized, along with the potential importance of identifying such general perspectives. Very briefly, assuming a certain viewpoint might function as a sort of motivation for reading, and more precisely, as a form of eudaimonic fulfillment, as noted elsewhere: “We could thus say that eudaimonia is not about feeling better, but feeling more complete, acquiring a broadened or deepened perspective of what it means to be human.” (Koopman 2015, 21)
The second step focuses on a specific sort of perspective which was most numerous among the total of about 200 such examples, and that is the perspective of textual characters. More specifically, we look into the phenomenon of identification, as preliminary results indicate that more than half of the readers have reported some sort of character identification. Taking some cues from the discussions at the IGEL conference in 2022, the examples of readers taking on characters’ perspectives are analyzed as a form of identification, as it always “implies the taking of a specific character’s perspective on the story events. (Appel et al. 2021,185)
This sort of link between identification and perspective(-taking) is important because, for instance, “[p]eople tend to share the perspective and motivation of those mediated others whom they perceive as more similar to themselves” (Kuzmičová and Bálint 2019). This might stay true when applied to literary characters, and looking into how readers themselves perceive identification can also help us better understand the claim that “differences in readers’ emotional susceptibility to a literary work can be partially explained by the closeness or distance of the events and the situations of the characters to readers’ own lives.” (Pirlet and Wirag 2017, 40)
Finally, a large number of qualitative data points makes it possible to see the nuances which are not present in quantitative data, such as what kind of characters do contemporary readers tend to identify with in the first place. Some results show that readers “identified more with the perspectivizing character than with the antagonizing character, regardless of the opinion of the characters” (de Graaf et al. 2012, 814), and others indicate that “[e]specially contemporary and ‘multiperspective’ works quite frequently present abhorrent, disgusting, or at least undesirable feelings which are cognitively understood by readers, but which evoke negative feelings instead of emphatic sharing.” (Nünning 2015, 106) The emotional and moral valence of characters who readers identify with may be more accurately recognized by using a broader sample, presented in the paper. In that way, the perspectives which readers take, particularly while identifying themselves with a textual construct, may enable us to take in a fuller perspective of literature itself.
References
Appel, M., Hanauer, D., Hoeken, H., Krieken, K. V., Richter, T., & Sanders, J. (2021). The Psychological and Social Effects of Literariness: Formal Features and Paratextual Information. In D. Kuiken & A. M. Jacobs (Eds.), Handbook of Empirical Literary Studies (pp. 177–202). De Gruyter. The Psychological and Social Effects of Literariness: Formal Features and Paratextual Information
De Graaf, A., Hoeken, H., Sanders, J., & Beentjes, J. W. J. (2012). Identification as a Mechanism of Narrative Persuasion. Communication Research, 39(6), 802–823. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650211408594
Knoop, C. A., Wagner, V., Jacobsen, T., & Menninghaus, W. (2016). Mapping the aesthetic space of literature “from below.” Poetics, 56, 35–49. Redirecting
Koopman, E. M. (Emy). (2015). Why do we read sad books? Eudaimonic motives and meta-emotions. Poetics, 52, 18–31. Redirecting
Kuzmičová, A., & Bálint, K. (2019). Personal Relevance in Story Reading. Poetics Today, 40(3), 429–451. Personal Relevance in Story Reading | Poetics Today | Duke University Press
Meretoja, H., Isomaa, S., Lyytikäinen, P., & Malmio, K. (2015). Values of Literature. BRILL. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401212052
Pirlet, C., & Wirag, A. (2017). Towards a ‘Natural’ Bond of Cognitive and Affective Narratology. In M. Burke & E. T. Troscianko (Eds.), Cognitive Literary Science (pp. 35–54). Oxford University Press. Towards a ‘Natural’ Bond of Cognitive and Affective Narratology | Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between Literature and Cognition | Oxford Academic