Search

Multimodal novels rely extensively on the interaction of verbal and visual codes to construct meaning. It has been theorized that multimodal features of the multimodal novel shape our reading-induced imagery and our emotional reactions while reading. However, there is a lack of empirical testing behind existing approaches to multimodal novels. The current study aims to empirically investigate the effects of foregrounded multimodal features and foregrounded narrative features on reading-induced imagery and readers’ emotional reactions in the reading process of multimodal novels. The results disconfirmed that differences between unusual and usual mind styles were traceable to multimodal vs. monomodal versions of these selected narratives. Reading about unusual mindstyles, instead of multimodal features, is suggested to have effects on changing perception of self and others, and thus on transformative reading.

Stylistics, understood as the study of the language of literary texts and a method for textual analysis, is a product of the twentieth-century formalists’ concern for the systematising of literary interpretation. However, since the institutionalisation of literature around the end of the nineteenth century, literary scholars have tended to keep borders between language and literature very clear-cut and have resisted methods that could bear resemblance to those used in natural sciences. Interest in quantitative approaches to stylistics has been on the rise since the advent of personal computers, mainly in the form of studies in which measurement and comparison of linguistic items can be checked electronically. Stylostatistics finds application in forensic authorship analysis, which looks for legal evidence for authorship attribution. Forensic stylometry has also been quite useful in detecting genuine confessions, in spotting plagiarism, and even authors of computer viruses.

Online book reviews offer a valuable large-scale resource for studying how books affect readers. We verify whether the findings of empirical typologies of in-depth fiction reading apply to online book reviews. We ask whether the same linguistic characteristics that typify in-depth reading experiences apply to online Dutch book reviews and whether the poetics of reading differ across reviewing platforms and across reviewers. A corpus of 634,607 online Dutch book reviews from seven platforms is probed. Results show reviews across different platforms are similar in their distributions of syntactic features and all types of word groups related to sentiment, cognition, space, time and motion, but textual characteristics of online reviews change in relation to length, corroborating previous findings (Fialho, 2012).

Drawing on the dehabituation theory of literature (Miall, 2006), transformative reading (Fialho, 2019) is grounded on a notion of literariness characterized by three key components of response to literary texts: foregrounded textual or narrative features, readers’ defamiliarizing responses to them, and the consequent modification of personal meanings. This study focuses on the third key component, exploring what forms of reading transform the reader’s self as well as his or her perceptions of others. A total of 78 thematic semi-structured in-depth interviews on a short story (Study 1, N=48) and on books that have changed readers’ lives (Study 2, N=30) were conducted with native speakers of English. Data analysis followed Lex-Nap methodology (Fialho, 2012). Preliminary findings indicate a replication of previous results. Types of transformative reading seem to be two-fold: “situation-centered” and “protagonist-centered”, providing a fuller description of how literary reading might impact and modify readers’ self-other constructs.

The aim of this panel is to debate the challenges and opportunities offered by online reviews for measuring the impact that books can have on readers (Boot and Koolen, 2020). The focus is specifically on culture- and language- specificity, thus we will compare insights from the analysis of Korean, English, Italian, German, and Dutch reviews. Digital social reading platforms – like Goodreads, Lovelybooks, or Naver Books – host millions of reviews and, thus, offer unique possibilities for research into literature, reading, and reader response (Rebora et al., 2021; Walsh and Antoniak, 2021). Computational tools are especially relevant, given the large amount of available data, but finding associations between textual features, cultural conventions (e.g. genre), and cognitive, affective, 94 Digital Humanities 2022 and aesthetic responses is not a straightforward task (Koolen et al., 2020; Pianzola et al., 2020). By comparing research done with different platforms, datasets, and languages, we aim at improving the methods that we employ, in a dialogue involving both data-driven insight and theoretical reflection on literature and readers. Questions that we will address are: what aspects of a book’s impact on readers can reviews help us to measure? What are the limitations of online book reviews for studying impact? How do we know to what extent these review texts reflect the actual reading experiences? What are unwanted, confounding influences (e.g. reviewers projecting a favourable self-image, socially desired responses, aspects of identity formation, fake reviews). How do online book reviews differ from experimentally controlled gathering of reader responses (lab studies, questionnaires, psychologically validated scales) (Lendvai et al., 2020)? How do platforms for reviewing and social interactions around books influence reviewers and t

One major research area in the empirical study of literature pertains to the role of foregrounding (i. e., stylistic deviations and parallelism) in the reading process. The associated phenomena are arguably key to understanding what distinguishes literary reading and essential for the investigation of its impact on readers’ interpretation and aesthetic appreciation. We trace the origins of the concept back to Aristotle and follow various theoretical elaborations in the works of twentieth-century literary scholars and linguists, right up to the moment when developments took an empirical turn. We will see that the original scholarly assumptions were inspiration for an impressive amount of qualitative (e. g., think-aloud studies and in-depth interviews) and quantitative (e. g., experiments, neurocognitive studies) research. The results have deepened our insights about the way textual foregrounding affects readers’ experiences and how these experiences may be associated with carry-over effects (e. g., critical thinking abilities). Besides the state of the art in all the relevant lines of research, we offer readers a comprehensive overview of the many remaining problems that require further (perhaps interdisciplinary) study.

This quasi-experimental study assessed the effects of the newly developed Transformative Dialogic Literature Teaching (TDLT) intervention on 15-year-old students' insight into human nature, eudaimonic reasons for reading, use of reading strategies, and motivation for literature education. Six TDLT units centered around short stories about “justice and injustice”. Students were stimulated to engage in internal dialogues with stories and in external dialogues with peers about stories and reading experiences. TDLT students (n = 166) were compared to students who received regular literature teaching (RLT) focused on analysis of literary texts (n = 166). Analysis of quantitative and qualitative data indicated that TDLT fostered students’ insight into human nature, eudaimonic reasons for reading, reported use of strategies to deal with difficulties in literary texts, and motivation for literature education, whereas RLT did not. Strategy use and one motivational factor mediated effects of TDLT to a small extent. Limitations and implications are discussed.

Learning from literature: empirical research on readers in schools and at the workplace.