Empirical Studies of Literature -- Miall & Kuiken, 1998

Miall and Kuiken, 1998

Miall, David S., & Don Kuiken. "The Form of Reading: Empirical Studies of Literariness." Poetics 25 (1998): 327-341.
index

Summary

In their article, Miall and Kuiken argue that poststructuralist theories, which have been dominant in literary studies over the past decades, represent a threat to the cultural function of literature and contribute to the decreasing importance literature has for the general public. This is partly due to the "disjunction between professional concerns and the interests of ordinary readers outside of the academy" (328). The highly ideological and theory focused approaches of poststructuralists, disregard the broader reading public and its interests and alienate beginning literary students from literature itself.

In particular, poststructuralism has rejected the formalist notion that distinct formal features constitute the 'literariness' of literary works of art. According to critics such as Fish (1980) and Culler (1981), whether a text is regarded as literary has nothing to do with its inherent qualities, but rather is determined by the conventions of an interpretive community.

Similarly, Schmidt (1982) refers to the notion of literariness based on formal features of texts as an 'ontological fallacy'. According to him, it is the 'aesthetic convention' readers take on which will lead them to judge a text as literary or not. Zwaan's (1991) study has provided some support for this suggestion, although, as Miall and Kuiken point out, the texts employed "were carefully chosen to avoid manifestly 'literary' features" (332).

More importantly though, Miall and Kuiken make the point that literary experience is not only contingent on extra-textual factors, like these critics claim, but that patterns of response to formal textual features are systematic and to some degree predictable. They posit that "our psychobiological and psychological organization predispose us to bestow such features with the kind of attention we then recognize as characteristically literary" (331). This is in line with empirical research on foregrounding carried out by van Peer (1986) and Miall and Kuiken (1994).

In their article, Miall and Kuiken critically review studies by Hoffstaedter (1987) and Hanauer (1996) that investigate the role of conventions in judgments on literariness, and review findings of their own (1994) which suggest that literariness is to some extent located in foregrounded formal features. They come to the conclusion that all studies support the claim that "poetic features determine text processing regardless of context" (Miall & Kuiken, 333). Furthermore, the results of these studies point to the fact that literary training does not influence the responses to foregrounding in literary texts (linguistic competence does). The level of literary expertise did, however, seem to affect the intensity of the ratings, a finding Hanauer interpreted as supporting the conventionalist position.

Miall and Kuiken in contrast, pointing to the significant correlation between responses, show that Hanauer's findings support the formalist position that formal features within a text will initiate a poetic processing by readers: "Foregrounding, then, elicits a more immediate, vivid, and personal response from a reader" (337).

Building on this evidence, Miall and Kuiken propose a model of literary processing in which feeling plays a key role. Foregrounding, they argue, will prompt defamiliarization and arouse feeling, and the ensuing uncertainty will demand a recontextualization of the textual material by the reader that may lead to self modification : "Feeling may be the route to relevant concepts, memories, or experiences that the reader has not yet applied to understanding the text (338). According to the authors, one of the main functions of literature, which has its origin in a "cultural ecology" (339) that can be traced back to prehistory, is "to equip us to better understand and respond to our environment. Literature is able to do this by invoking and reshaping our feelings 'offline', that is, in isolation from behaviors and actions in the every day world that have real consequences" (340).

Critique

In their article "The Form of Reading", Miall and Kuiken address a number of questions fundamental to literary studies. They propose an alternative perspective on literature and an approach to literary studies that guides the way out of the self-defeating impasse poststructuralist theorists have lost themselves in.

Over the past decades, poststructuralists have been sawing away at the very branches they are sitting on in their literary departments. By categorically rejecting the idea of literariness they have been theorising away their object of study. As Miall and Kuiken point out, this has led to nearly comical anxiety in critics such as Culler (330), who in the same breath defy the notion of a canon and replace it by that of an elite of literary critics in possession of the knowledge and tools necessary to arrive at valid interpretations. One could add to Miall and Kuiken's arguments that such theorising, besides being utterly presumptuous and a-historical by ignoring the long tradition of literary criticism ranging back at least to Aristotle, has no validity from an epistemological perspective. The a priori assumptions, or organising principle(s) operating in the background to endow the 'fissures' of the text with meaning are not made transparent. Instead, the impression is created that poststructuralist analyses are conducted from an objective 'vacuum'. From the perspective of second order cybernetics,[1] one ideology is simply replaced by another. 1. For more info see: Second-Order Cybernetics and Ethics and second-order cybernetics

However, the issue of cultural determinism remains for empirical investigations and hermeneutical approaches alike, even if it is not an 'either - or' situation, like some critics such as Fish (1980) like to suggest (Fish's model can be falsified by pointing to the possibility of communication between cultures; the negotiation of a common ground). In "The Form of Reading" Miall and Kuiken do not propose solutions to the problem of what Popper (1963) termed the 'Oedipus effect' ("the influence of a theory or expectation or prediction upon the event which it describes", 39), and which resembles the argument on which Fish's (1980) notion of the 'interpretive community' hinges. This is a concern for any scientific endeavour though, and the line between scientific rigour and reductionism can be a thin one. Where feasible, one possibility to counter the 'Oedipus effect' could be to design empirical studies as 'double blind'.

Another important issue Miall and Kuiken address in their article is that their proposed approach, while drawing on formalist theory, is not in line with the idea of an 'affective fallacy'. Instead, they argue that all hypotheses generated by formalist analyses must be validated empirically by studying the responses of real readers of texts. Thus, they offer a solution to the problematic issue of the 'relevance' of poetic/literary features. Riffaterre (1966) for instance criticized Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss for ignoring to what extent readers even took notice of the literary features that were identified in their extensive inventories. In Miall and Kuiken's model the relevant features emerge by way of analysing real readers' responses to literary texts.

Foregrounding plays the prominent role in the authors' model of literary processing: "The encounter with foregrounded features plays a formative role in the interpretive effort of a reader" (339). Further, Miall and Kuiken posit that models developed in the field of discourse processing are inadequate for the study of literary response, since aesthetic responses "involve schema creation rather than schema extension or modification" (339). Implicit here is Miall and Kuiken's notion that aesthetic response ('aesthetic feeling') precedes and shapes cognitive processing, and prompts self-modifying feelings which "restructure the reader's understanding of the textual narrative and, simultaneously, the reader's sense of self" (2002, 223).

Although I would fully agree that feelings play a central role in literary response and self-modification, I would argue that cognitive processing of thematic features may precede and prompt the affective responses, and in turn trigger self-modification. Of course, since the identification of distinctive literary thematic features seems unreasonable, this would not be of much help in defining literariness, so a focus on the formal features seems justified. Nevertheless, I believe that close attention needs to be given to the methodology of recording readers' responses and specifically what causal connections are drawn, since measured responses attributed to formal devices could in fact be registering the effect of thematic features.

References

Culler, J., 1981. The pursuit of signs. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Fish, S., 1980. Is there a text in this class'? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hanauer, D.. 1996. Integrations of phonetic and graphic features in poetic text categorization judgements. Poetics 23, 363-380.
Hoffstaedter, P., 1987. Poetic text processing and its empirical investigation. Poetics 16, 75 91.
Miall, D.S., & D. Kuiken, 1994. Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories. Poetics 22, 389-407.
Miall, D. S., & Kuiken, D., 2002. A feeling for fiction: becoming what we behold. Poetics 30, 221-241.
Popper, K. R., 1963. Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul.
Schmidt, S., 1982. Foundations for the empirical study of literature: The components of a basic theory. Trans. R, de Beaugrande. Hamburg: Buske.
Zwaan, R.A., 1991. Some parameters of literary and news comprehension: Effects of discourse-type perspective on reading rate and surface structure representation. Poetics 20, 139-156.
Van Peer, W., 1986. Stylistics and psychology: Investigations of foregrounding. London: Croom Helm.

Document created October 20th 2005

Miall and Kuiken, 1998
Miall, David S., & Don Kuiken. "The Form of Reading: Empirical Studies of Literariness." Poetics 25 (1998): 327-341.	index
Summary
In their article, Miall and Kuiken argue that poststructuralist theories, which have been dominant in literary studies over the past decades, represent a threat to the cultural function of literature and contribute to the decreasing importance literature has for the general public. This is partly due to the "disjunction between professional concerns and the interests of ordinary readers outside of the academy" (328). The highly ideological and theory focused approaches of poststructuralists, disregard the broader reading public and its interests and alienate beginning literary students from literature itself.
In particular, poststructuralism has rejected the formalist notion that distinct formal features constitute the 'literariness' of literary works of art. According to critics such as Fish (1980) and Culler (1981), whether a text is regarded as literary has nothing to do with its inherent qualities, but rather is determined by the conventions of an interpretive community.
Similarly, Schmidt (1982) refers to the notion of literariness based on formal features of texts as an 'ontological fallacy'. According to him, it is the 'aesthetic convention' readers take on which will lead them to judge a text as literary or not. Zwaan's (1991) study has provided some support for this suggestion, although, as Miall and Kuiken point out, the texts employed "were carefully chosen to avoid manifestly 'literary' features" (332).
More importantly though, Miall and Kuiken make the point that literary experience is not only contingent on extra-textual factors, like these critics claim, but that patterns of response to formal textual features are systematic and to some degree predictable. They posit that "our psychobiological and psychological organization predispose us to bestow such features with the kind of attention we then recognize as characteristically literary" (331). This is in line with empirical research on foregrounding carried out by van Peer (1986) and Miall and Kuiken (1994).
In their article, Miall and Kuiken critically review studies by Hoffstaedter (1987) and Hanauer (1996) that investigate the role of conventions in judgments on literariness, and review findings of their own (1994) which suggest that literariness is to some extent located in foregrounded formal features. They come to the conclusion that all studies support the claim that "poetic features determine text processing regardless of context" (Miall & Kuiken, 333). Furthermore, the results of these studies point to the fact that literary training does not influence the responses to foregrounding in literary texts (linguistic competence does). The level of literary expertise did, however, seem to affect the intensity of the ratings, a finding Hanauer interpreted as supporting the conventionalist position.
Miall and Kuiken in contrast, pointing to the significant correlation between responses, show that Hanauer's findings support the formalist position that formal features within a text will initiate a poetic processing by readers: "Foregrounding, then, elicits a more immediate, vivid, and personal response from a reader" (337).
Building on this evidence, Miall and Kuiken propose a model of literary processing in which feeling plays a key role. Foregrounding, they argue, will prompt defamiliarization and arouse feeling, and the ensuing uncertainty will demand a recontextualization of the textual material by the reader that may lead to self modification : "Feeling may be the route to relevant concepts, memories, or experiences that the reader has not yet applied to understanding the text (338). According to the authors, one of the main functions of literature, which has its origin in a "cultural ecology" (339) that can be traced back to prehistory, is "to equip us to better understand and respond to our environment. Literature is able to do this by invoking and reshaping our feelings 'offline', that is, in isolation from behaviors and actions in the every day world that have real consequences" (340).
Critique
In their article "The Form of Reading", Miall and Kuiken address a number of questions fundamental to literary studies. They propose an alternative perspective on literature and an approach to literary studies that guides the way out of the self-defeating impasse poststructuralist theorists have lost themselves in.
Over the past decades, poststructuralists have been sawing away at the very branches they are sitting on in their literary departments. By categorically rejecting the idea of literariness they have been theorising away their object of study. As Miall and Kuiken point out, this has led to nearly comical anxiety in critics such as Culler (330), who in the same breath defy the notion of a canon and replace it by that of an elite of literary critics in possession of the knowledge and tools necessary to arrive at valid interpretations. One could add to Miall and Kuiken's arguments that such theorising, besides being utterly presumptuous and a-historical by ignoring the long tradition of literary criticism ranging back at least to Aristotle, has no validity from an epistemological perspective. The a priori assumptions, or organising principle(s) operating in the background to endow the 'fissures' of the text with meaning are not made transparent. Instead, the impression is created that poststructuralist analyses are conducted from an objective 'vacuum'. From the perspective of second order cybernetics,[1] one ideology is simply replaced by another.	1. For more info see: Second-Order Cybernetics and Ethics and second-order cybernetics
However, the issue of cultural determinism remains for empirical investigations and hermeneutical approaches alike, even if it is not an 'either - or' situation, like some critics such as Fish (1980) like to suggest (Fish's model can be falsified by pointing to the possibility of communication between cultures; the negotiation of a common ground). In "The Form of Reading" Miall and Kuiken do not propose solutions to the problem of what Popper (1963) termed the 'Oedipus effect' ("the influence of a theory or expectation or prediction upon the event which it describes", 39), and which resembles the argument on which Fish's (1980) notion of the 'interpretive community' hinges. This is a concern for any scientific endeavour though, and the line between scientific rigour and reductionism can be a thin one. Where feasible, one possibility to counter the 'Oedipus effect' could be to design empirical studies as 'double blind'.
Another important issue Miall and Kuiken address in their article is that their proposed approach, while drawing on formalist theory, is not in line with the idea of an 'affective fallacy'. Instead, they argue that all hypotheses generated by formalist analyses must be validated empirically by studying the responses of real readers of texts. Thus, they offer a solution to the problematic issue of the 'relevance' of poetic/literary features. Riffaterre (1966) for instance criticized Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss for ignoring to what extent readers even took notice of the literary features that were identified in their extensive inventories. In Miall and Kuiken's model the relevant features emerge by way of analysing real readers' responses to literary texts.
Foregrounding plays the prominent role in the authors' model of literary processing: "The encounter with foregrounded features plays a formative role in the interpretive effort of a reader" (339). Further, Miall and Kuiken posit that models developed in the field of discourse processing are inadequate for the study of literary response, since aesthetic responses "involve schema creation rather than schema extension or modification" (339). Implicit here is Miall and Kuiken's notion that aesthetic response ('aesthetic feeling') precedes and shapes cognitive processing, and prompts self-modifying feelings which "restructure the reader's understanding of the textual narrative and, simultaneously, the reader's sense of self" (2002, 223).
Although I would fully agree that feelings play a central role in literary response and self-modification, I would argue that cognitive processing of thematic features may precede and prompt the affective responses, and in turn trigger self-modification. Of course, since the identification of distinctive literary thematic features seems unreasonable, this would not be of much help in defining literariness, so a focus on the formal features seems justified. Nevertheless, I believe that close attention needs to be given to the methodology of recording readers' responses and specifically what causal connections are drawn, since measured responses attributed to formal devices could in fact be registering the effect of thematic features.
References
Culler, J., 1981. The pursuit of signs. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Fish, S., 1980. Is there a text in this class'? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hanauer, D.. 1996. Integrations of phonetic and graphic features in poetic text categorization judgements. Poetics 23, 363-380. Hoffstaedter, P., 1987. Poetic text processing and its empirical investigation. Poetics 16, 75 91. Miall, D.S., & D. Kuiken, 1994. Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories. Poetics 22, 389-407. Miall, D. S., & Kuiken, D., 2002. A feeling for fiction: becoming what we behold. Poetics 30, 221-241. Popper, K. R., 1963. Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul. Schmidt, S., 1982. Foundations for the empirical study of literature: The components of a basic theory. Trans. R, de Beaugrande. Hamburg: Buske. Zwaan, R.A., 1991. Some parameters of literary and news comprehension: Effects of discourse-type perspective on reading rate and surface structure representation. Poetics 20, 139-156. Van Peer, W., 1986. Stylistics and psychology: Investigations of foregrounding. London: Croom Helm.