Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories

Miall, David S.; Kuiken, Don

doi:10.1016/0304-422x(94)00011-5

Cited by 329 publications

(293 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Perhaps most notably, Cupchik (1994) and Kneepens and Zwaan (1994) have identified different types of feeling response, and Oatley (1999Oatley ( , 2002 has described reading as a form of simulation in which emotion is central. Our own research, begun by Miall (1988Miall ( , 1989 and continuing in collaboration (Miall and Kuiken, 1994;, has focused on how feeling functions within reading experience. We have asked whether feeling may guide the reader's interpretive activity, doing so at a level more fundamental than the cognitive aspects of reading about which more is known.…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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. We have found that aesthetic feelings in this sense are prompted by the formal (generic, narrative, and stylistic) features of a text and that, in response to such foregrounded features, readers slow their reading and report greater uncertainty (Miall and Kuiken, 1994). 2 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).…”

Section: The Contributions Of Feeling To Literary Readingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, our observations suggest that, although aesthetic feelings may be evoked widely among any readers who are responsive to variations in linguistic form, self-modifying feelings are evident only among certain readers-and among them only some of the time. The aesthetic effects of foregrounding occur in relation to norms of language use outside of literature, and therefore any readers with general linguistic skills will respond to foregrounding by finding it striking, evocative, and interpretively challenging (Miall and Kuiken, 1994). In contrast, only some readers, perhaps those who become absorbed in experiential reading (Miall and Kuiken, 1995b) will develop a coherent and self-modifying understanding of the meaning of foregrounded passages.…”

Section: Empirical Evidence Of Self-modifying Feelingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A feeling for fiction: becoming what we behold

Miall

Kuiken

2002

Poetics

Self Cite

162

139

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Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Contributions Of Feeling To Literary Readingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Empirical Evidence Of Self-modifying Feelingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A feeling for fiction: becoming what we behold

Miall

Kuiken

2002

Poetics

Self Cite

162

139

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“…Well-written literary texts often include stylistic techniques such as metaphor or foregounding (cf. Miall & Kuiken, 1994), and literary texts were found to be more transporting than prose developed for the purpose of an experiment (Green & Brock, 2000). Likewise, disrupting the text structure and thereby reordering the events (while keeping the content intact) leads to lower transportation scores (e.g., Gnambs, Appel, Schreiner, Richter, & Isberner, 2014; Wang & Calder, 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Argument Strength and the Persuasiveness of Stories

Schreiner

Appel

Isberner

et al. 2017

Discourse Processes

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Stories are a powerful means to change people’s attitudes and beliefs. The aim of the current work was to shed light on the role of argument strength (argument quality) in narrative persuasion. The present study examined the influence of strong versus weak arguments on attitudes in a low or high narrative context. Moreover, baseline attitudes, interindividual differences in working memory capacity, and recipients’ transportation were examined. Stories with strong arguments were more persuasive than stories with weak arguments. This main effect was qualified by a two-way interaction with baseline attitude, revealing that argument strength had a greater impact on individuals who initially were particularly doubtful toward the story claim. Furthermore, we identified a three-way interaction showing that argument strength mattered most for recipients who were deeply transported into the story world in stories that followed a typical narrative structure. These findings provide an important specification of narrative persuasion theory.

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“…The multi-factor model of literary reading contains (our simplified versions of) two theoretical positions within the field of reader response studies on underlying processes that lead to empathy and reflection: the idea of reading literature as a form of role-taking proposed by Oatley (e. g., 1994; and the idea of defamiliarization through deviating textual and narrative features proposed by Miall and Kuiken (1994;. We argue that these positions are in fact complementary.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework

Koopman¹,

Hakemulder²

2015

Journal of Literary Theory

153

141

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Various scholars have made claims about literature's potential to evoke empathy and self-reflection, which would eventually lead to more pro-social behavior. But is it indeed the case that a seemingly idle pass-time activity like literary reading can do all that? And if so, how can we explain such an influence? Would the effects be particular to unique literary text qualities or to other aspects that literary texts share with other genres (e. g., narrativity)? Empirical research is necessary to answer these questions. This article presents an overview of empirical studies investigating the relationship between reading and empathy, and reading and selfreflection. We reveal those questions in the research that are not addressed as of yet, and synthesize the available approaches to literary effects. Based on theory as well as empirical work, a multi-factor model of literary reading is constructed.With regard to reading and empathy, the metaphor of the moral laboratory (cf. Hakemulder 2000) comes close to a concise summary of the research and theory. Being absorbed in a narrative can stimulate empathic imagination. Readers go along with the author/narrator in a (fictional) thought-experiment, imagining how it would be to be in the shoes of a particular character, with certain motives, under certain circumstances, meeting with certain events. That would explain why narrativity can result in a broadening of readers' consciousness, in particular so that it encompasses fellow human beings. Fictionality might stimulate readers to consider the narrative they read as a thought experiment, creating distance between them and the events, allowing them to experiment more freely with taking the position of a character different from themselves, also in moral respects. Literary features, like gaps and ambiguous characterization, may stimulate readers to make more mental inferences, thus training their theory of mind. However, apart from literature possibly being able to train basic cognitive ability, we have little indication for the importance of literary imagination over narrative or fictional imagination.Regarding self-reflection, while there is no convincing evidence that literary texts are generally more thought-provoking than non-literary texts (either narrative

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Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories

Cited by 329 publications

References 22 publications

A feeling for fiction: becoming what we behold

A feeling for fiction: becoming what we behold

Argument Strength and the Persuasiveness of Stories

Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework

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