What is literariness?

Empirical traces of reading

David S. Miall and Don Kuiken
Departments of English and Psychology,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2E5
David.Miall@ualberta.ca / dkuiken@psych.ualberta.ca
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/reading/index.htm
Paper presented at the VIth Biannual IGEL Conference, Utrecht, August 26-29, 1998
Abstract
It is now widely maintained that the concept of "literariness" has been critically examined
and found deficient. Prominent literary theorists have argued that there are no special
characteristics that distinguish literature from other texts. Similarly, cognitive science has
often subsumed literary understanding within a general theory of discourse processing.
However, a review of empirical studies of literary readers reveals traces of literariness that
appear irreducible to either of these explanatory frameworks. Our analysis of readers'
responses to several literary texts (short stories and poems) indicates processes beyond the
explanatory power of current inferential or situation models. Such findings suggest a
three-component model of literariness involving foregrounded text features, readers'
defamiliarizing responses to them, and the modification of personal meaning as a
consequence. We argue that feeling, not cognition, is the primary vehicle for the
processes of literary understanding.
What is literariness? Empirical traces of reading
What sort of activity is the reading of literature? There are several different
answers to this question, depending on the theoretical commitment of the respondent. It
may, for example, be explained as a type of discourse processing amenable to cognitive
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analysis. Or it might be the outcome of rhetorical devices designed to promote a
particular ideology. Theories of both kinds, whether based in psychology or in
postmodern criticism, no longer privilege literary texts as distinctive: both assume that any
text, whether said to be literary or not, depends on functions common to all texts, and that
there are no unique functions apparent in the act of literary reading. In this paper we will
offer a challenge to these conceptions. We will suggest that literariness, defined as a
distinctive mode of reading, is identifiable through three key components of response. We
will point to studies falling outside the domains of discourse processing and postmodern
criticism that offer empirical traces of one or more of these components of literariness.
We begin with a specific short example that shows evidence of all three components.
In a recent empirical study of response with 30 participants, we invited readers of
two Coleridge poems to talk aloud about passages in the poems they found striking or
evocative. In this paper we will focus on one participant's responses (a more detailed
report on this study is given in a parallel paper at this conference by Sikora, Kuiken, and
Miall). Here is the participant's response to the opening of Coleridge's poem "The
Nightingale," which begins "No cloud, no relique of the sunken day / Distinguishes the
West . . ." The participant is describing why these lines are striking:
Because of the way that he says, a sunken day, and there is no relique, so
there's nothing there. I like it because it's unusual to see the days sunken,
instead of the sun. I think that's what gives it it's sense of desolation. I just
picture this huge, huge expanse of sky with really nothing else on the
horizon. There's also kind of a sense of timelessness because relics are
something that are old and sunken it sounds like a sunken ship, something
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that's been there for hundreds of years and nobody knows about it, but it's
something that's happening right now and it's kind of before dark but after
day. It's just kind of a nothing time, well not a nothing time but a time that
can't be described, that can't be categorized.
In this example we detect three components of literary response that characterize
literariness in our perspective. More specifically, we propose that all three must be
present and must interact for literariness to be created.
First, this reader comments on the style of the poem, "the way" it is written:
"Because of the way that he says, a sunken day, and there is no relique." The first
component of literariness in this example is a use of language distinctive to literature: a
metaphor ("sunken day") and an unusual word ("relique"). Second, the reader has been
struck by this language, remarking that "it's unusual to see the days sunken, instead of the
sun": the more usual or familiar locution, the sunken sun, has been replaced here, leading
the reader to experience a sense of defamiliarization. Third, the reader is prompted to
reflect on the meaning of this unusual phrase, a meaning that appears to be not
immediately obvious since several feelings and images are called to mind before a certain,
provisional conclusion is reached: it means, she says, "a nothing time . . . a time that can't
be described, that can't be categorized." In other words, the reader has been prompted to
put in place a new sense of time: her difficulty in formulating appropriate words implies
that this insight is a novel one. Thus the third component of literariness, to be more
specific, is the modification or transformation of an existing concept or feeling. Here, the
reader's available concepts for time have been challenged, and an alternative concept put in
place.
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We suggest that the key to literariness is the interaction of these components:
response to literature, if it is distinctive, is characterized by a set of processes which
require analysis in terms of their form. Literature is unique not because of any special
content, contextual conditions (whether educational or market-driven), or ideological
functions, but because it sets in train a unique, linked set of psychological processes.
The three literary components can be summarized schematically in the following
way. First, literary texts contain distinctive features that stand out, or are "foregrounded"
(Mukarovsk's term) in contrast to ordinary uses of language. In the example we have
cited, the poem deploys distinctive stylistic features, but such features may also include
narrative elements such as shifts in point of view or deformations of the temporal
framework. In general, such features are identifiable in relation to the norms of language
or narrative apparent in ordinary discourse (e.g., the language of newspaper articles, or the
narrative structures they deploy), but they may also occur in relation to local norms
created by a prevailing style or narrative strategy of the text itself (Hunt & Vipond's
(1986) discourse evaluations are defined against local norms). Second, readers' attention
is captured by such features: they tend to find them striking and evocative, and the effect
of such features is usually to render a familiar concept or situation seem less familiar,
requiring extra interpretive effort of the reader. Third, the interpretive effort results in the
modification or transformation of readers' concepts or feelings, usually following an
interval during which readers search (not necessarily consciously) for an appropriate
context for locating or generating such new understanding. Our empirical studies tend to
show that feeling is the primary vehicle for this search. We suggest that these components
of literariness are not merely conventional, the result of acculturation: rather, they reflect
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aspects of our psychobiological inheritance that involve linguistic capabilities, feeling
expression, and self-perception. Drawing on these capacities literary response has a
critical function to play in alerting us to alternative perspectives on our self and on our
social and natural environment, perspectives that we suggest lead primarily to action
rather than mere cognitive change.
Several aspects of the view we have proposed challenge modern understanding of
literary response. In the next part of the paper we look critically at two representative
examples of such modern frameworks, and confront them with some empirical evidence
for the distinctiveness of literature. Our first example is taken from the arguments of a
postmodern critic, Barbara Herrnstein Smith in Contingencies of Value (1988).
As with other recent critics, such as Fish (e.g., 1989) or Eagleton (1983), for
Smith the most important questions relate to the meaning of literary texts. How does
literature come to have the value it does, leading us to give it the careful interpretive
attention we do? According to Smith, literary value is determined extrinsically: it is a
product of historical circumstances, so that what is deemed of value in one epoch may
well be valued quite differently or not at all in another (cf. Eagleton (1983), pp. 10-11). In
this view, there are no components of an evaluative judgement that are not derived from
the social position of the evaluator; nothing is dependent on the qualities of the work of
art itself: "there are no functions performed by artworks that may be specified as
generically unique" (p. 35). To the extent that a reader identifies features or properties of
a work for attention, these "are all the variable products of the subject's engagement with
his or her environment under a particular set of conditions" (pp. 31-2). Thus we are
asked to suppose that the reader we cited earlier singles out the metaphor in Coleridge's
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line because she has been subjected to certain educational practices that promote such
activities.
Smith suggests that those in control of aesthetic judgement (usually in academia)
expect texts to perform the functions they find proper or desirable, finding any other
functions irrelevant or improper. This controlling group is also said to deem as necessary
the conditions under which it engages with texts, other conditions being found irregular or
substandard (p. 41). This imputes much more power to the group than it possesses: our
own studies of student readers, such as the reader we have cited, show far more divergent
reading practices and variant understandings of literature than Smith's account would
allow. But this only becomes apparent through empirical study of actual readers. Both in
terms of the interpretations they make and in their valuations, readers go their own way,
especially when unconstrained by classroom structures of authority. That such reading is
not irresponsible or whimsical (p. 11, a spectre also raised by Fish, 1989, p. 83), is shown
by the persistant role of formal features of a text as an influence on the reading process
(Miall and Kuiken, 1994a).
The role of foregrounded features in transcending the cultural background of
readers is suggested by a study (currently in progress), based on Coleridge's long poem
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which contains 625 lines. Here, taking the extensive
critical literature on the poem from 1900 to 1991, we counted the occurrence of
quotations from the poem in over 160 articles and book chapters. Then, during the study
from which we have already cited, 30 readers nominated and commented on five passages
from the poem that they found striking. The frequency with which lines were selected
from the poem by the two groups (critics and student readers) was then compared: the
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correlation was highly significant, r(623) = .441, p < .0001. It is noticeable that the most
frequently selected lines of the poem are either high in foregrounding, or capture moments
of great narrative importance (usually ambivalent in meaning, hence the tendency to select
them for critical discussion). The poem thus appears to have the power to attract
attention in ways that transcend either time, literary experience, or critical perspective.
It is, at one level, quite true, as Smith says, that "literary value is not the property
of an object or a subject but, rather, the product of the dynamics of a system" (p. 15). But
what is missing from this account, we suggest, is that value follows from first having
noticed features of a literary text and having found them striking. "As readers and critics
of literature, we are within that system," states Smith; thus, because we "have particular
interests, we will, at any given moment, be viewing it from some perspective" (p. 16).
But, we suggest, it is that perspective that the encounter with the literary text calls into
question: if our interests were invariably in control, as Smith supposes, the striking nature
of the literary text would be inconceivable. But the strikingness of literature is a
phenomenon particularly attributable to the individual basis of our literary reading, where
it is the perspectives which we have, perhaps unconsciously, acquired from our culture
that are especially likely to be questioned. If this is correct, it points to the adaptive value
of literature in tuning our cognitive frames and providing us with greater flexibility,
especially in impelling us to reconsider our system of values.
A similar argument follows from the second main perspective in which literary
response has been examined, that of discourse processing. While proponents of discourse
analysis (e.g., Van Dijk, 1979, Graesser, 1981) have argued for the adoption of their
framework as an appropriate one for understanding comprehension of all texts, the
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methods of analysis provided appear to overlook some key components of the response to
literature (Miall, 1989; Miall and Kuiken, 1994b). Zwaan and his colleagues (1995) have
provided strong evidence of the reader's construction of what is called a situation model
during response to narrative: this consists of arguments (or propositions) and their
relationships (connections between referents) and the need to register shifts in time, space,
and narrative causation. The codings of the segments of a short story for these
components has been found to predict reading times, an indication of the varying
processing requirements that readers encounter in constructing the situation model with
each segment. A situation model, however, represents the array of cognitive processes
necessary for understanding any narrative, a perspective basic to all narrative
comprehension. It is this perspective that literary narratives seem particularly likely to
challenge.
While deviations in certain narrative elements such as time may be captured in part
by the situation model, other important influences on literary response fall outside its
scope. To examine this possibility, a reanalysis was made of responses to one of the
stories studied by Zwaan et al (1995), Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon Lover." The
segments of the story, as divided by Zwaan et al, were coded for foregrounding. These
codes and those for the situation model were then compared as predictors of reading times
in a regression analysis (thanks to Rolf Zwaan, who kindly sent us both the codings and
the reading time data from this study). In addition to foregrounding, we also included a
"perspective" code representing the point of view of the main character. While the overall
result, as expected, was very significant, F(9, 139) = 183.24, p = 0, our analysis showed
the influence of foregrounding on readers to be equal in its effects to the New Arguments
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component and stronger than any of the other variables of the situation model. It should
also be noted that foregrounding and New Arguments are independent influences on
reading times: partial correlation (controlling for number of syllables), r(147) = .059.
TABLE. Correlations of Individual Variables Following Multiple Regression Analysis of Story Factors
for "The Demon Lover" with Mean Reading Times as Dependent Variable
df = 147 Simple Partial
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Segment -.15 -0.21**
Syllables 0.94**** 0.84****
New Arguments 0.72**** 0.30****
Argument overlap 0.11 -0.07
Time 0.14 0.16*
Space 0.13 0.08
Cause 0.24*** 0.06
Perspective 0.21** -0.01
Foregrounding 0.72**** 0.26****
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*p < .05 **p < .025 ***p < .01 ****p < .005 (one-tailed)
The situation model components represent the basic blocks or prototypes of
comprehension that are probably obligatory for all readers and also probably virtually
identical for all readers. Foregrounding, in contrast, appears to provide a significant point
of departure for individual differences in response to a literary text, particularly since it
evokes feeling. Feeling appears to implicate the reader's self concept and to provide a
route to specific issues relating to the self, as well as to experiences or memories that may
provide a new interpretive context following the moment of defamiliarization. Thus, while
all readers appear to be sensitive to foregrounding in literary texts, their construals of its
meaning often differ widely, as studies such as the "Mariner" set of protocols demonstrate.
The modification or transformation of readers' concepts or feelings, the third
component we introduced earlier, is thus also specific to the individual reader: it is in this
respect, indeed, that literature seems to invoke what is individual in the individual. A
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second example from the same participant in the "Mariner" study shows the unfolding of
this process in response to the fifth passage from the poem selected by this reader. It is a
mode of response (shown in only some of the protocols in this study) that we term
enactment, since it seems to involve actively living through a particular experience
consequent on reading. The verse selected by the reader comes late in the poem:
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
(Mariner, 446 - 451)
I'm just going to share the emotion of being alone, in the dark, with this
threat. Knowing that there's nothing you can do about it, keeping on
walking and pretending it's not happening, just because there's no other
way to cope with it, you can't run from it. . . . I also sense there's no point
in fighting this because, like it's a guilt thing, he's the one that's responsible
for what's happened, he's the reason that this thing is following him, so
there is no point in trying to get away from it because, it's your fate. It's
just a bit of a reminder that everybody dies. Whatever's following him is
going to get him. You don't know how long it's going to go and you don't
know when it's going to get him, but you know that eventually that it will.
After exploring the feeling of being alone, the reader turns to the situation of the
protagonist: "it's a guilt thing, he's the one that's responsible," then makes an important
generalization that seems to include herself. In this way the response unfolds in successive
phases: a first awareness of a feeling with some personal relevance; the use of this feeling
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to locate a meaning for the poem, which is then applied to thinking about the position of
the protagonist. Finally, in what is perhaps the most interesting part of the commentary,
we see a convergence of the protagonist's situation with that of the reader: the "he" and
"you" appear to become interchangeable. Although "this thing is following him," "it's your
fate." The story understanding that emerges at this point appears to be "everybody dies."
While this is certainly not a profound insight in itself, the way in which it is reached has
made it personal to the reader, and enabled her to pursue a particular theme that seems to
have concerned her throughout her reading of the poem (her first comment was "I seem to
be picking on a bit of a theme of threatening").
In conclusion, the first two components of literariness, which include stylistic
features or striking features due to narrative, and the reader's defamiliarizing response to
them, are necessary but insufficient to identify literariness. The third component is
constituted by the reader's attempts to articulate the phenomena within the text that are
found striking and evocative of feeling. In our final example we have illustrated this
component with a form of articulation that we refer to as enactment: in such protocols
taken as a whole, we find readers progressively transforming an affective theme across
striking or evocative passages, becoming implicated in the existential concerns embodied
in those passages, and experiencing a blurring of boundaries between themselves and the
narrator.
We suggest that the conception of literariness can appropriately be grounded in
this three-leveled analysis. We also believe that further empirical studies are likely to
show that these interacting components of literary response are not only distinctive, but
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also rest on a unique configuration of psychological and somatic responses that are, in the
last analysis, derived from the adaptive functionality of literature in human evolution.
References
Eagleton, Terry (1983). Literary theory: An introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Fish, Stanley (1989). Doing what comes naturally: Change rhetoric, and the practice of
theory in literary and legal studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Graesser, A. C. (1981). Prose comprehension beyond the word. New York: Springer-
Verlag.
Hunt, R. A. & Vipond, D. (1986). Evaluations in literary reading. Text, 6, 53-71.
Miall, D. S. (1989). Beyond the schema given: Affective comprehension of literary
narratives. Cognition and Emotion, 3, 55-78.
Miall, D. S., & Kuiken, D. (1994a). Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect:
Response to literary stories. Poetics, 22, 389-407.
Miall, D. S., & Kuiken, D. (1994b). Beyond text theory: Understanding literary response.
Discourse Processes, 17, 337-352.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein (1988). Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for
Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Van Dijk, T. (1979). Advice on theoretical poetics. Poetics, 8, 569-608.
Zwaan, R. A., Magliano, J. P., & Graesser, A. C. (1995). Dimensions of situation model
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Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 386-397.
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Author's Notes
The authors would like to thank Rolf Zwaan for supplying the data form Zwaan et
al. (1995) that formed part of the analysis reported in this study. Also our particular
thanks to Kees Van Rees, whose persistant questions led us to formulate this response to
the problem, what is literariness.
The research reported here was supported in part by programme grant #53-10128
from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.