Approaches to text comprehension that focus on propositional, inferential, and elaborative processes have often been considered capable of extension in principle to literary texts, such as stories or poems. However, we argue that literary response is influenced by stylistic features that result in defamiliarization; that defamiliarization invokes feeling which calls on personal perspectives and meanings; and that these aspects of literary response are not addressed by current text theories. (Miall & Kuiken, 1994a)
Foregrounding (Jan Mukarovský)
the range of stylistic effects that occur in literature, whether at the phonetic level (e.g., alliteration, rhyme), the grammatical level (e.g., inversion, ellipsis), or the semantic level (e.g., metaphor, irony).
Foregrounding enables literature to present meanings with an intricacy and complexity that ordinary language does not normally allow.
Defamiliarisation (Viktor Shklovsky)
Stylistic devices do more than convey familiar meanings: the function of the literary image "is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception of the object -- it creates a 'vision' of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it." (1917/1965, p. 18)
Literary response follows a distinctive course in which
The interpretive process involves a phasic sequence, initiated by defamiliarizing story features that require the reader to go beyond the schema that initially guided comprehension. Evidence from our studies shows that during such a phasic cycle, readers' feelings shape response to the unfolding narrative by facilitating shifts in perspective and then in interpretation. (Miall & Kuiken, 1998)
Evaluative feelings toward the text, such as the overall enjoyment, pleasure, or satisfaction of reading a short story
Narrative feelings are prompted by events and characters in the imagined world of the text.
Useful to subdivide narrative feelings into those that involve reactions to other characters (e.g., sympathy with a character) and those that are shared with other characters (e.g., empathywith a character).
In either form, narrative feelings regularly mirror the text. When readers feel sympathy for a story character, for example, their feelings often reflect the attitudes expressed by a sympathetic narrator.
To engage a scene in a text mimetically, such as imagining oneself in the position of a character, draws upon the same social skills that enable us to understand others and maintain an appropriate stance towards them.
Aesthetic feelings reflect heightened interest, what readers have in mind when they report that passages within a text are so striking that they capture and hold their attention.
They are prompted by the formal (generic, narrative, and stylistic) features of a text
In response to such foregrounded features, readers slow their reading and report greater uncertainty.
Since it is these moments that especially challenge the reader’s existing framework for understanding, aesthetic feelings may motivate attempts to revise and reconstruct this interpretive framework (Miall and Kuiken, 1995a)
Self-modifying feelings that restructure the reader’s understanding of the textual narrative and, simultaneously, the reader’s sense of self.
The experience of feelings in one situation leads to the re-experiencing of those feelings in situations that are similar. This tendency to reinstate previously experienced feelings within similar settings has given rise to the notion of affective scripts (Tomkins, 1979).
While it is commonplace that feelings are ‘‘generalized’’ across situations in which there are conventionally similar settings, characters, and actions (e.g., feelings about paying the waiter in the familiar restaurant script), the theory of affective scripts goes further: conventionally different narrative elements may seem ‘‘the same’’ by virtue of the progression of feelings that are common to them.
Similarities in feeling may transcend conventionally(non-affectively) scripted boundaries—in ways that are often unique to the individual. As Bower and Cohen (1982, p. 329) rather aptly point out, such boundary crossings can be the source of affective similes and metaphors: for me, a driving test ‘‘is’’ (or ‘‘is like’’) an argument with a colleague—they somehow ‘‘feel’’ the same.
During literary reading, when foregrounding accentuates aesthetic feeling and narrative feelings cross conventionally scripted boundaries, the readers’ sense of self will sometimes be imaginatively challenged.
For example, one reader [R220] concluded that Julia exemplified aspects of herself when she was young: ‘‘I ended up, after the finishing of the reading, with admiration for the character, because I guess I felt a real kinship with her. She was a character, not unlike myself as a child. I would have liked to save that trout.’’ This reader was gently surprised by the emergence of her admiration for Julia; it recalled a sometimes submerged ‘‘heroic’’ aspect of her younger self. Through such challenges and departures, literary reading has the capacity to alter the narratives we weave about who we are or wish to become.
The Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ), provides scales that measure seven different aspects of readers' orientation toward literary texts: Insight, Empathy, Imagery Vividness, Leisure Escape, Concern with Author, Story-Driven Reading, and Rejection of Literary Values. (Miall & Kuiken, 1995)