David S. Miall

Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories☆

The notion that stylistic features of literary texts deautomatize perception is central to a tradition of literary theory from Coleridge through Shklovsky and Mukaiovslj to Van Peer. Stylistic variations, known as foregrounding, hypothetically prompt defamiliarization, evoke feelings, and prolong reading time. These possibilities were tested in four studies in which segment by segment reading times and ratings were collected from readers of a short story. In each study, foregrounded segments of the story were associated with increased reading times, greater strikingness ratings, and greater affect ratings. Response to foregrounding appeared to be independent of literary competence or experience. Reasons for considering readers’ response to foregrounding as a distinctive aspect of interaction with literary texts are discussed.

A feeling for fiction: becoming what we behold

Feelings during literaryreading can be characterized at four levels. First, feelings such as enjoyment, pleasure, or the satisfaction of reading are reactions to an already interpreted text [Spiel 9 (1990) 277]. While providing an incentive to sustain reading, these feelings playno significant role in the distinctivelyliteraryaspects of text interpretation. Second, feelings such as empathyor sy mpathywith an author, narrator, or narrative figure are involved in the interpretive processes bywhich a representation of the fictional world is developed and engaged [Poetics 23 (1994) 125]. Although serving an important mimetic role within text comprehension, these feelings, too, do not derive from the distinctivelyliteraryaspects of reading. Third, feelings of fascination, interest, or intrigue are an initial moment in readers’ response to the formal components of literarytexts (narrative, stylistic, or generic). Although serving to capture and hold readers’ attention [Poetics 22 (1994) 389], these aesthetic reactions onlyanticipate a fourth level of feeling that is the main focus of the present discussion: the modifying powers of feeling. We propose that aesthetic and narrative feelings interact to produce metaphors of personal identification that modifyself-understanding. We also argue that the concept of catharsis (the conflict of tragic feelings identified byAristotle) identifies one particular form of a more general pattern in which aesthetic and narrative feelings evoked during reading interact to modifythe reader. We illustrate these interactions with examples

Beyond the schema given: Affective comprehension of literary narratives

Abstract The narratives studied by schema-based models or story grammars are generally simpler than those found in literary texts, such as short stones or novels. Literary narratives are indeterminate, exhibiting conflicts between schemata and frequent ambiguities in the status of narrative elements. An account of the process of comprehending such complex narratives is beyond the reach of purely cognitive models. It is argued that during comprehension response is controlled by affect, which directs the creation of schemata more adequate to the text. Several properties of affect that make it appropriate for this model of narrative are discussed. A short story by Virginia Woolf is analysed in the light of the proposed model. A study with readers of the story is described, which illustrates the process of schema formation: Shifts in the relative importance of story phrases across the reading and the comments made by readers point to a process of schema creation under the control of affect. It is argued that ...

Beyond text theory: Understanding literary response

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. The main differences between text theories and defamiliarization theory are discussed. We offer a historical perspective on the theory of defamiliarization from Coleridge to the present day, and mention some empirical studies that tend to support it.

Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing Facilitates Attentional Orienting

Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) is a controversial treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder that requires clients to make rapid eye movements while revisualizing a traumatic event. Although seemingly effective, the process by which EMDR exerts its effects is poorly understood. We propose that EMDRs eye movements facilitate the orienting response, i.e., the attentional adjustment to unexpected stimuli. Since the orienting response has been implicated in spontaneous transformations of dream content during REM sleep, we reasoned that, similarly, activation of the orienting response during EMDR may facilitate content transformations in traumatic memories. To examine this hypothesis, 25 undergraduates completed 20 seconds of eye movements or 20 seconds of visual fixation before each of two tasks: 1) a covert visual attention task, in which a cue indicated the likely position of a subsequent target, and 2) a sentence rating task, in which sentences with either metaphoric or non-metaphoric endings were rated for strikingness. Repeated measures ANOVAs indicated that the eye movement manipulation facilitated attentional adjustments to targets presented in invalidly cued locations and increased the extent to which metaphoric sentence endings were found striking. Together these results suggest that the eye movements in EMDR induce attentional and semantic flexibility, thereby facilitating transformations in the clients narrative representation of the traumatic event. The implications of these findings for theories of dream formation and metaphor comprehension are also considered.

What is literariness? Three components of literary reading

It is now widely maintained that the concept of literariness has been critically examined and found deficient. Prominent postmodern literary theorists have argued that there are no special characteristics that distinguish literature from other texts. Similarly, cognitive psychology 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 reach of current situation models. Such findings suggest a three‐component model of literariness involving foregrounded stylistic or narrative features, readers’ defamiliarizing responses to them, and the consequent modification of personal meanings.

Anticipation and feeling in literary response: A neuropsychological perspective

Anticipation and feeling are taken to be significant components of the process of literary reading, although cognitive theories of reading have tended to neglect them. Recent neuropsychological research is described that casts light on these processes: the paper focuses on the integrative functions of the prefrontal cortex responsible for anticipation and on the contribution of feeling to the functions of the right cerebral hemisphere. It is shown how feelings appear to play a central role in initiating and directing the interpretive activities involved in such complex activities as reading. In particular, a key feature of literary texts that captures and directs response is foregrounding, that is, distinctive stylistic features: these defamiliarize and arouse feeling. Such responses are likely to be mediated by the right hemisphere, which is specialized to process novelty. An analysis of the neuropsychological mechanisms implicated in response to foregrounding suggests how readers discriminate among competing interpretive possibilities, and how other important elements of literary response such as imagery, memory, and self-referential themes and concerns are recruited. Several studies are cited indicating that response to various characteristic components of literary texts is mediated by this hemisphere, including the prosodic aspects of foregrounding, figurative language, and narrative structure. This hemisphere also provides the context for elaborating and contextualizing negative feelings, a process related to Aristotles notion of catharsis. It is argued that the neuropsychological evidence sketched in this paper provides a more reliable basis for future theoretical and empirical studies of literary reading.

Affect and narrative: A model of response to stories

Abstract Literary narratives are primarily about people, their experiences, behaviour and goals, and about relationships between people. Recent studies in social cognition have suggested that affect is the primary medium in which social episodes and information about the self are represented. It is argued that theories of text processing that adopt an information processing model are overlooking a key component in how we respond to narrative. The affective modes by which we understand people and ourselves may direct the information processing aspects of story response. An affect-based model of literary narrative is outlined in this paper, in which it is argued that three properties of affect are implicated in story understanding: self-reference, anticipation, and domain-crossing. By their means, affect plays a constructive role in guiding response to ambiguities and conflicts at the level of schemata. Two empirical studies are reported which provide support for the model.

Locating Self-Modifying Feelings Within Literary Reading

Self-modifying feelings during literary reading were studied in relation to the personality trait, absorption. Participants read a short story, described their experience of 3 striking or evocative passages in the story, and completed the Tellegen Absorption Scale (Tellegen, 1982). Compared to readers with either low or moderate absorption scores, those high in absorption were more likely to report affective theme variations and self-perceptual shifts, especially during an emotionally complicated portion of the story. Further analyses indicated that, rather than emotional involvement per se, the relationship between absorption and self-perceptual shifts was mediated by the interaction between theme variations and a style of expressive reflection called metaphors of personal identification.

Emotions and the Structuring of Narrative Responses

Research that suggests the primacy of the emotions provides the context for a study of some of the processes sustained by the emotions during literary reading. In particular, the early processing of emotion in response to language, including narrative, is shown by several ERP (evokedresponse potentials) studies that focus on the first 500 msecs of response. These studies suggest the possibility that emotion plays a key role in subsequent cognitive processing, including the making of inferences, invoking the reader’s memory, or relating empathically to a character. Emotions evoked in these ways during literary reading embody a number of distinctive processes, and some of their implications are then examined here. These include selfreference (e.g., autobiographical memory), which may occur more often in response to literary than to other texts; anticipation (e.g., suspense, forming goals for characters), which also seems more frequent among literary readers; an inherent narrativity of emotions that prompts us to construe situations in narrative terms; a capacity of emotion to integrate experiences, whether through similarities across conventional boundaries or through a process in which one emotion modifies another; and a tendency to animism, the interpretation of objects and events through human emotions, especially in the early phases of response, prior to consciousness. 1. Psychology and Narrative Psychological studies of readers’ responses to narrative have so far paid little attention to the role of emotion and feeling, despite the extensive study of emotions that has been pursued by scholars in the fields of cognition and neuropsychology in the last decade or more. Hence, the special issue of this journal on Narrative and Emotions represents a timely 324 Poetics Today 32:2 development, offering new perspectives on some significant and, in certain cases, longstanding problems in narrative theory. The intended contribution of the present article is exploring the narrative functions performed by the ordinary emotions of the reader.1 My emphasis will fall on three particular aspects: (1) on the processes that shape narrative understanding initiated or sustained by the emotions, not on the emotional states that result from specific episodes or narrative endings; (2) on the reader’s experience of emotions while reading, not on emotions as a pathway to elaborating new interpretations of literary texts; and (3) on what it may be about the experience of emotions while reading literary narrative that makes such response distinctively literary, not on the phenomena of emotion in narrative discourse in general. Let me now explain the assumptions embedded in some of these statements. While interpretation is typically what literary scholars do, my approach is not concerned with them. My interest lies in how ordinary readers experiencing ordinary emotions construe literary narrative. Among readers who read for the pleasures and challenges that literary narratives afford, that is, “ordinary” or “common” readers, acts of interpretation as practiced in literature classrooms or scholarly writing are rarely to be found. While readers are interested, often intensely, in the significance of a literary text, this is because it engages them in reflecting on their own experience, or their sense of culture, or history. When such readers, moreover, empathize with the predicament of a protagonist, the everyday emotions and where they may lead hold the attention, enabling readers to immerse themselves in the text, and facilitating their recognition of the human significance of the experiences unfolding on the page. It is the properties and processes of such ordinary emotions that I examine here; in particular I look at how they are initiated, at their preconscious powers, at their relationship to the reader’s sense of self, their integrative capacities, and several other issues. The main emphasis, that which constitutes the new ground reviewed here, is the primacy of feeling or emotion as a process. This view, resting on recent research that has reversed the previous halfcentury’s priorities in the emotioncognition relationship, argues on neuropsychological evidence in particular that emotion is at the basis of, and shapes the purposes of, all cognitive activity (Ellis 2005: 17; Prinz 2004: 34–39). As Meir Sternberg (2003: 313, 382) pointed out several years ago, cognitivists made the mistake of setting “cognition against (at least above) emotion” under the 1. As Noël Carroll (1997: 191) has argued, we need to pay more attention to the gardenvariety emotions of readers responding to fiction. He mentions emotions such as fear, awe, pity, admiration, anger, in contrast to the desire or castration anxiety that is the concern of psychoanalytic treatments of emotion. Miall • Emotions and the Structuring of Narrative Responses 325 influence of “the party line that would put the cognitive before the affective (in temporal, causal, analytic, and/or scalar order).” This shift in perspective requires us to specify what distinguishes emotion and what processes it brings to narrative reading. Where possible I point to empirical research on the responses of readers that helps support the account of emotion proposed. This is an agenda that will leave little space for other key issues, particularly those belonging to narratology (for a treatment of feeling touching on narrative perspective, however, see Miall and Kuiken 2001); nor will I attempt to define emotion or feeling (Damasio 2003: 28–30, 85–86), or consider whether emotions form a natural kind (Griffiths 1997). 2. The Primacy of Emotion How might we understand the claim that feelings and emotions are primary when reading literary narrative? A preliminary indication of the validity of this claim is provided by an informal study I carried out recently in one of my classes, involving thirtytwo students. I asked the students to read a short story by Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour,” and choose two passages that they found striking; they then wrote a short commentary on their responses to the two passages. Analysis of the components of the responses (105 in all) showed that 16 percent referred to plot, 7 percent were selfreferential, 6 percent were on stylistic aspects, and 5 percent on the historical context of the story. However, 45 percent of the comments referred to the students’ own feelings while reading (e.g., amusement, conflict, confusion, curiosity, empathy, excitement, or irritation), while another 12 percent referred to the feelings of characters. Over half of the comments thus involved feeling, suggesting that feeling was a major component of readers’ experiences of this story. But the status of such comments remains in question. Are they an outcome of a prior interpretive process? Do they in themselves embody (at least in some instances) such a process? Or do they initiate acts of interpretation? And what further role might they play in developing the reader’s understanding? To consider this, I first look briefly at the interpretive context in which such feelings play a part. While we now know something of the cognitive processes of response to narrative, including findings from empirical work in the discourse processing paradigm (e.g., Bloome 2003), little of this work has addressed the issues at stake in literary as opposed to nonliterary narrative. Indeed, some distinguished scholars have argued that the same processes operate in both realms. Walter Kintsch (1998: 205), for example, claimed that “The comprehension processes, the basic strategies, the role of knowledge and 326 Poetics Today 32:2 experience, as well as the memory products generated, are the same for literary texts as for the simple narratives . . . used in our research. . . . The difference is in the ‘what,’ not the ‘how.’” Yet how the comprehension processes are taken up or motivated may demonstrate important differences in the case of reading a literary narrative. In an important respect, the question is one of priorities, as I suggest below: given the rate at which a reader processes the verbal stream of a narrative, sentence by sentence, the limited processing capacities of the human mind suggest that not all the comprehension and inferential processes that have been demonstrated by empirical researchers can be activated in parallel. Moreover, which processes are implicated must be determined, at least in part, by the reader’s sense of salience: what the reader at the moment may feel to be significant. The problem can be demonstrated by considering the range of inferential processes that have been proposed. In a recent paper (Miall 2008) I listed several of these, as follows. In discourse processing, Graesser and his colleagues (e.g., Graesser, Singer, and Trabasso 1994) suggest, on the basis of empirical studies, that six types of inference are generated online automatically, that is, within 650 milliseconds (msecs) of initial exposure to a narrative text. These include referential inferences (such as resolving anaphoric references), causal antecedents (enchaining the current proposition to what came before), a superordinate goal (i.e., the aims of a character), and a character’s emotional reaction. What is not generated automatically, but may be realized subsequently, includes causal consequence, reader emotion, author intent, and several other classes of inference cited by Graesser et al. Another class of inferences, socalled intermediate inferences that explain the consciousness of a character, is outlined by Alan Palmer (2004: 177). In cognitive linguistics, metaphoric mappings are said to provide an inferential basis for interpreting narrative (e.g., Popova 2002). Deixis theory provides another source for inferences, establishing and tracking the spatiotemporal context of a narrative (Duchan et al. 1995). The role of different representations of time in structuring narrative understanding (such as the