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Children's Literature in Education

, Volume 46, Issue 4, pp 394–409 | Cite as

Resisting Focalisation, Gaining Empathy: Swedish Teenagers Read Irish Fiction

  • Eva Fjällström
  • Lydia Kokkola
Original Paper
First Online:

Abstract

Resisting the will to empathise with a focalised character is assumed to be difficult for young readers, yet empirical evidence on how they actually respond is limited. This paper combines recent insights gleaned from cognitive literary studies with a small-scale empirical study of thirty-five Swedish adolescents reading an Irish short story in order to investigate how teenagers respond to a text which is strongly focalised through a single character. The students were asked to rewrite the events in the story from another character’s point of view. Their texts were coded and analysed, as were follow-up interviews with six students. The findings indicate that Swedish-speaking teenage readers rarely have difficulty resisting focalisation, but they often struggle with irony.

Keywords

Focalisation Empathy Adolescent reading Mind-reading Irony English as a foreign language 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The research for this article was funded by The Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Arts, Communication and EducationLuleå University of TechnologyLuleåSweden

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