Abstract
Thus far, I only introduced one example of an application performed by an ordinary reader: the thoughts to which Harry Mulisch’s The Black Light gave rise in the mind of the young man called Art. This example was taken from Els Andringa’s empirical study “The Interface between Fiction and Life: Patterns of Identification in Reading Autobiographies” (2004). Andringa recruited six male and six female Dutch students aged between 22 and 32 and asked them to describe their histories as readers; in that way she was able to collect twelve “‘reading autobiographies’ in which subjects report their own reading histories by writing down their memories of books, reading experiences, and reading behaviors”.1 Andringa uses the autobiographical texts to discuss developmental aspects of reading and gender differences in reading. She directly quotes many of her informants.
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Notes
Ibid., p. 94; the comment in square brackets is Appleyard’s. The Outsiders (New York: Viking Press, 1967) tells the story of a young boy growing up in a tough neighbourhood; gang fights play a pivotal role in the novel. Hence my assumption (below) that Chris is actually thinking of life in the streets.
I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929), p. 3.
Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 71 (the quote) and 191, note 16 (the student’s name). It is convincing and unusual that Keen is able to give us the real names of several of the readers who contributed to her research.
Original editions: Louisa M. Alcott, Little Women, or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, illustrated by May Alcott (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1868);
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York and London: J. Appleton and Company, 1920).
I read the following editions: Louisa M. Alcott, Little Women; Good Wives, introduction Grace Rhys (London: Dent, 1908);
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence: Authoritative Text, Background and Contexts, Sources, Criticism, ed. Candace Waid (New York: Norton, 2003).
Susanne Kramer, Lesen im Alltag: Persænliche Mitteilungen über Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen mit Literatur (Hamburg: no publisher [diss., Dr. der Philosophie], 1996), p. 11. All quotations from sources that are not in English are my own translations.
Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Beschreibung eines Dorfes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966). Kaschnitz’s book exists in several editions, and we do not know which of them Elenor read, but as far as I understand they only differ paratextually.
I read the edition from 1979: Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Beschreibung eines Dorfes, with twelve pictures by Monika Wurmdobler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979).
Corinna Pette, Psychologie des Romanlesens: Lesestrategien zur subjektiven Aneignung eines literarischen Textes (Weinheim and Munich: Juventa Verlag, 2001).
Javier Marías, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1994). Pette’s subjects read the German translation: Morgen in der Schlacht, denk an mich, trans. Carina von Enzenberg and Hartmut Zahn (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998). For my own part, I read the Swedish translation, I morgon under striden, tänk på mig, trans. Kerstin Cardelús and Karin Sjæstrand (Stockholm: Forum, 1998). There is also an English translation: Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997).
Art Graesser, Victoria Pomeroy, and Scotty Craig, “Psychological and Computational Research on Theme Comprehension”, in Thematics: Interdisciplinary Studies, ed. Max Louwerse and Willie van Peer (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002), pp. 19–34; here, p. 20. It is worth emphasizing that this is merely one particular definition of the word “theme” in one of its several senses. The understanding of a theme as a main “subject” or “topic” (rather than a main “message” or suchlike) is in fact probably more widespread and is also exemplified by the remark by Ms. E. that is reported later.
Richard III, 5.4.113–14 and 5.4.141–42. I am quoting from William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard III (1592?), ed. John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 341 and 342.
Norman Holland, 5 Readers Reading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975). See, e.g., p. 128 in Holland: “A reader responds to a literary work by assimilating it to his own psychological processes, that is, to his search for successful solutions within his identity theme to the multiple demands, both inner and outer, on his ego.”
The results Richards reports in his Practical Criticism have been put in question in an article by Colin Martindale and Audrey Dailey, “I.A. Richards Revisited: Do People Agree in Their Interpretations of Literature?” Poetics 23 (1995), pp. 299–314. Martindale and Dailey partly replicated Richards’ study, finding agreement rather than disagreement among readers. I find it obvious, however, that Martindale and Dailey are addressing a different issue than Richards. They are clearly pointing to readers’ extensive consensus about verbal meaning, while every nuance of perceived sense is typically of concern to literary criticism: critics simply mean something partly different by “meaning” than linguists and psychologists do. Furthermore, it would be somewhat misleading to say that Richards’ real interest was in interpretation — what concerned him most was the reader’s literary experience as a whole, and readers’ experiences of a text certainly vary. Several well-documented studies of readers reading the same text — by Richards, Holland, Pette, and others — demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt, through extensive and no doubt authentic quotation from readers, that considerable individual differences can be found in reasonably competent readers’ reactions to the same text.
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© 2012 Anders Pettersson
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Pettersson, A. (2012). Examples of Application. In: The Concept of Literary Application. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_2
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