Neuro Humanities Studies

David S. Miall, Don Kuiken,

What is literariness? Three components of literary reading


Source: Discourse Processes, 28
Year: 1999

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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 threecomponent model of literariness involving foregrounded textual or narrative features, readers' defamiliarizing responses to them, and the consequent modification of personal meanings.

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