Empirical Literary Studies: An Introduction

Reading and analysing short story collections: An empirical study of readers' interpretation process of Benni'sIl bar sotto il mare

“…As such, reader-oriented approaches to SSCs might want to change their focus from the – idealised – reader to the notion of ‘the statistical reader’ (Bortolussi and Dixon, 2003: 43–49), that focusses on both general and idiosyncratic processes of defined readers. In doing so, reader-oriented readings and analyses of SSCs become testable hypotheses necessary to achieve empirical validity, which improves our understanding of the literary experience of flesh-and-blood readers (Alber and Strasen, 2020: 9).…”

“…As a consequence, following the tradition of the field of Empirical Literary Studies (Alber and Strasen, 2020), it seems indispensable to empirically examine the processes guiding real flesh-and-blood readers’ interpretation of a collection. In particular, it seems relevant to investigate the roles played by both story recall and appreciation in the identification of topics and the construction of the interpretation of an SSC.…”

“…However, although Müller-Wood (2018: 34) has advocated for the use of actual reading behaviour as the starting point for reader-oriented SSC-theory, SSC scholarship has abstained from testing its findings using flesh-and-blood readers. Consequently, the description of the reading process remains largely speculative and appears to lack empirical insights in the reading and interpretation mechanisms of actual flesh-and-blood readers (see Alber and Strasen, 2020: 7–9).…”