Does it Matter Where You Read? Situating Narrative in Physical Environment

Kuzmičová, Anežka

doi:10.1111/comt.12084

Cited by 35 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 23 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…on-line or face-to-face discussions). Its findings would not only enrich our knowledge of the effects of a given textual feature, but also help overcome the challenges inherent to collecting reader response data in the laboratory (see also Kuzmičová, 2016).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Literature and readers’ empathy: A qualitative text manipulation study

Kuzmičová

Mangen

Støle

et al. 2017

Language and Literature

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Several quantitative studies (e.g. Kidd & Castano, 2013a;Djikic et al., 2013) have shown a positive correlation between literary reading and empathy. However, the literary nature of the stimuli used in these studies has not been defined at a more detailed, stylistic level. In order to explore the stylistic underpinnings of the hypothesized link between literariness and empathy, we conducted a qualitative experiment in which the degree of stylistic foregrounding was manipulated. Subjects (N = 37) read versions of Katherine Mansfield's 'The Fly', a short story rich in foregrounding, while marking striking and evocative passages of their choosing. Afterwards, they were asked to select three markings and elaborate on their experiences in writing. One group read the original story, while the other read a 'non-literary' version, produced by an established author of suspense fiction for young adults, where stylistic foregrounding was reduced. We found that the non-literary version elicited significantly more (p < 0.05) explicitly empathic responses than the original story. This finding stands in contradiction to widely accepted assumptions in recent research, but can be assimilated in alternative models of literariness and affect in literary reading (e.g. Cupchik et al., 1998). We present an analysis of the data with a view to offering more than one interpretation of the observed effects of stylistic foregrounding.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Literature and readers’ empathy: A qualitative text manipulation study

Kuzmičová

Mangen

Støle

et al. 2017

Language and Literature

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As such, a theory of narrativity sensitive to how humans actually experience narrative must consider, to at least some extent, the impact lived experience has on the co-construction of narrative. Cognitive theories of narrative have largely moved toward a focus on the real-life situatedness of reading: Anezka Kuzmicova's work, for instance, has recently explored the specific role one's surrounding environment might play in the experience of reading (Kuzmicova 2015), and Marco Caracciolo (2014) has built on the work of cognitive psychologists such as Richard Gerrig (1993) in exploring the extent to which readers' personal histories and lived experience necessarily plays into the experience of narrative fiction.…”

Section: Weak Narrativity Extremely Weak (Less Prototypical) Fairly Wmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eighteen hours of salmon: On the narrativity of slow TV

Irving

2017

Frontiers of Narrative Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Slow TV programs are long, uninterrupted broadcasts of relatively mundane activities, focusing on topics ranging from train rides along the coast of Norway to the chopping, stacking, and burning of firewood. This article argues that slow TV problematizes the standard conception of narrativity, especially in terms of a conceptual narrative/non-narrative boundary. Moving away from the idea of narrative-as-concept, I argue for an understanding of narrativity more sensitive to readers' actual experience and a further nuanced understanding of the range of weak-narrativity texts. A text deemed conceptually "non-narrative" by theorists can still be experienced as narrative by readers and/or viewers, supplementing given texts or programs with personal experiences to effectively narrativize the non-narrative; narrative, I argue, is better thought of as a state that is achieved, rather than a concept that exists within a text. The article ultimately suggests a gradient of weak narrativity in order to consider new forms of experimental narrativity without collapsing its different types.Keywords: narrativity, slow TV, cognitive narratology, visual narrative Popular consumption of weak narrativityMainstream television audiences are largely familiar, if only implicitly, with experimental forms of narrativity. A case in point is Seinfeld, a hugely successful American sitcom in the 1990 s that was billed as "a show about nothing." The show features Jerry Seinfeld, a New York City-based comedian, playing a looselyfictionalized version of himself. In an exceptionally metafictional turn in a Season 4 episode entitled "The pitch," Jerry and his friend George Costanza (a fictionalized version of Larry David, a co-creator and writer of Seinfeld) are sitting in a diner brainstorming ideas for a television show. After a round of banter about the vaguely similar-sounding words "salsa" and "seltzer," George suggests that

show abstract

“…The narrative is then likely to enhance this reader's phenomenal experience of her own environment, say the pressure of physical pillows behind her back or a breeze that happens to be cooling down her skin on a hot day. The overlap between physical and fictional environment may also prop her enactive mental imagery of the situation rendered in the narrative (Kuzmičová 2016). In such cases of relatively close overlap, the physical environment can thus affect mental imagery in a manner precisely opposite to within-modality interference as mentioned earlier in Section 3.1.…”

Section: Third Misconceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In highly pleasurable environments, aesthetic transfer may also occur in the opposite direction. In other words, even a crowded bus can become a distinctly nice and cosy place to be in with an aesthetically pleasing book, and a relatively distressing book can afford a more fluent and pleasing experience once you get off the bus to read on a romantic park bench (for more on this see Kuzmičová 2016).…”

Section: Third Set Of Consequences For Text Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%