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What is literariness? Empirical traces of reading

David S. Miall and Don Kuiken
Departments of English and Psychology,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2E5
David.Miall@ualberta.ca / dkuiken@psych.ualberta.ca
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/reading/index.htm
Paper presented at the VIth Biannual IGEL Conference, Utrecht, August 26-29, 1998
Abstract
It is now widely maintained that the concept of "literariness" has been critically examined and found deficient.
Prominent literary theorists have argued that there are no special characteristics that distinguish literature from other
texts. Similarly, cognitive science 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 power of current inferential or situation models. Such findings suggest a
three-component model of literariness involving foregrounded text features, readers' defamiliarizing responses to
them, and the modification of personal meaning as a consequence. We argue that feeling, not cognition, is the primary
vehicle for the processes of literary understanding.
What is literariness? Empirical traces of reading
What sort of activity is the reading of literature? There are several different answers to this question, depending on
the theoretical commitment of the respondent. It may, for example, be explained as a type of discourse processing
amenable to cognitive 1 analysis. Or it might be the outcome of rhetorical devices designed to promote a particular
ideology. Theories of both kinds, whether based in psychology or in postmodern criticism, no longer privilege literary
texts as distinctive: both assume that any text, whether said to be literary or not, depends on functions common to all
texts, and that there are no unique functions apparent in the act of literary reading. In this paper we will offer a
challenge to these conceptions. We will suggest that literariness, defined as a distinctive mode of reading, is
identifiable through three key components of response. We will point to studies falling outside the domains of
discourse processing and postmodern criticism that offer empirical traces of one or more of these components of
literariness.
We begin with a specific short example that shows evidence of all three components. In a recent empirical study of
response with 30 participants, we invited readers of two Coleridge poems to talk aloud about passages in the poems
they found striking or evocative. In this paper we will focus on one participant's responses (a more detailed report on
this study is given in a parallel paper at this conference by Sikora, Kuiken, and Miall). Here is the participant's
response to the opening of Coleridge's poem "The
Nightingale," which begins "No cloud, no relique of the sunken day / Distinguishes the West . . ." The participant is
describing why these lines are striking:
Because of the way that he says, a sunken day, and there is no relique, so there's nothing there. I like it because it's
unusual to see the days sunken, instead of the sun. I think that's what gives it it's sense of desolation. I just picture this
huge, huge expanse of sky with really nothing else on the horizon. There's also kind of a sense of timelessness
because relics are something that are old and sunken it sounds like a sunken ship, something that's been there for
hundreds of years and nobody knows about it, but it's something that's happening right now and it's kind of before
dark but after day. It's just kind of a nothing time, well not a nothing time but a time that can't be described, that can't
be categorized.
In this example we detect three components of literary response that characterize literariness in our perspective. More
specifically, we propose that all three must be present and must interact for literariness to be created.
First, this reader comments on the style of the poem, "the way" it is written: "Because of the way that he says, a
sunken day, and there is no relique." The first component of literariness in this example is a use of language
distinctive to literature: a metaphor ("sunken day") and an unusual word ("relique"). Second, the reader has been
struck by this language, remarking that "it's unusual to see the days sunken, instead of the
sun": the more usual or familiar locution, the sunken sun, has been replaced here, leading the reader to experience a
sense of defamiliarization. Third, the reader is prompted to reflect on the meaning of this unusual phrase, a meaning
that appears to be not immediately obvious since several feelings and images are called to mind before a certain,
provisional conclusion is reached: it means, she says, "a nothing time . . . a time that can't be described, that can't be
categorized." In other words, the reader has been prompted to put in place a new sense of time: her difficulty in
formulating appropriate words implies that this insight is a novel one. Thus the third component of literariness, to be
more specific, is the modification or transformation of an existing concept or feeling. Here, the reader's available
concepts for time have been challenged, and an alternative concept put in place.
We suggest that the key to literariness is the interaction of these components: response to literature, if it is distinctive,
is characterized by a set of processes which require analysis in terms of their form. Literature is unique not because of
any special content, contextual conditions (whether educational or market-driven), or ideological functions, but
because it sets in train a unique, linked set of psychological processes.
The three literary components can be summarized schematically in the following way. First, literary texts contain
distinctive features that stand out, or are "foregrounded" (Mukarovsk's term) in contrast to ordinary uses of
language. In the example we have cited, the poem deploys distinctive stylistic features, but such features may also
include narrative elements such as shifts in point of view or deformations of the temporal framework. In general, such

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features are identifiable in relation to the norms of language or narrative apparent in ordinary discourse (e.g., the
language of newspaper articles, or the narrative structures they deploy), but they may also occur in relation to local
norms created by a prevailing style or narrative strategy of the text itself (Hunt & Vipond's (1986) discourse
evaluations are defined against local norms). Second, readers' attention is captured by such features: they tend to find
them striking and evocative, and the effect of such features is usually to render a familiar concept or situation seem
less familiar, requiring extra interpretive effort of the reader. Third, the interpretive effort results in the modification
or transformation of readers' concepts or feelings, usually following an interval during which readers search (not
necessarily consciously) for an appropriate context for locating or generating such new understanding. Our empirical
studies tend to show that feeling is the primary vehicle for this search. We suggest that these components of
literariness are not merely conventional, the result of acculturation: rather, they reflect 4 aspects of our
psychobiological inheritance that involve linguistic capabilities, feeling expression, and self-perception. Drawing on
these capacities literary response has a critical function to play in alerting us to alternative perspectives on our self
and on our social and natural environment, perspectives that we suggest lead primarily to action rather than mere
cognitive change.
Several aspects of the view we have proposed challenge modern understanding of literary response. In the next part
of the paper we look critically at two representative examples of such modern frameworks, and confront them with
some empirical evidence for the distinctiveness of literature. Our first example is taken from the arguments of a
postmodern critic, Barbara Herrnstein Smith in Contingencies of Value (1988).
As with other recent critics, such as Fish (e.g., 1989) or Eagleton (1983), for Smith the most important questions
relate to the meaning of literary texts. How does literature come to have the value it does, leading us to give it the
careful interpretive attention we do? According to Smith, literary value is determined extrinsically: it is a product of
historical circumstances, so that what is deemed of value in one epoch may well be valued quite differently or not at
all in another (cf. Eagleton (1983), pp. 10-11). In this view, there are no components of an evaluative judgement that
are not derived from the social position of the evaluator; nothing is dependent on the qualities of the work of art itself:
"there are no functions performed by artworks that may be specified as generically unique" (p. 35). To the extent that
a reader identifies features or properties of a work for attention, these "are all the variable products of the subject's
engagement with his or her environment under a particular set of conditions" (pp. 31-2). Thus we are asked to
suppose that the reader we cited earlier singles out the metaphor in Coleridge's 5 line because she has been subjected
to certain educational practices that promote such activities.
Smith suggests that those in control of aesthetic judgement (usually in academia) expect texts to perform the
functions they find proper or desirable, finding any other functions irrelevant or improper. This controlling group is
also said to deem as necessary the conditions under which it engages with texts, other conditions being found
irregular or substandard (p. 41). This imputes much more power to the group than it possesses: our own studies of
student readers, such as the reader we have cited, show far more divergent reading practices and variant
understandings of literature than Smith's account would allow. But this only becomes apparent through empirical
study of actual readers. Both in terms of the interpretations they make and in their valuations, readers go their own
way, especially when unconstrained by classroom structures of authority. That such reading is not irresponsible or
whimsical (p. 11, a spectre also raised by Fish, 1989, p. 83), is shown by the persistant role of formal features of a
text as an influence on the reading process (Miall and Kuiken, 1994a).
The role of foregrounded features in transcending the cultural background of readers is suggested by a study
(currently in progress), based on Coleridge's long poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which contains 625
lines. Here, taking the extensive critical literature on the poem from 1900 to 1991, we counted the occurrence of
quotations from the poem in over 160 articles and book chapters. Then, during the study from which we have already
cited, 30 readers nominated and commented on five passages from the poem that they found striking. The frequency
with which lines were selected from the poem by the two groups (critics and student readers) was then compared: the
6 correlation was highly significant, r(623) = .441, p < .0001. It is noticeable that the most frequently selected lines of
the poem are either high in foregrounding, or capture moments of great narrative importance (usually ambivalent in
meaning, hence the tendency to select them for critical discussion). The poem thus appears to have the power to
attract attention in ways that transcend either time, literary experience, or critical perspective.
It is, at one level, quite true, as Smith says, that "literary value is not the property of an object or a subject but, rather,
the product of the dynamics of a system" (p. 15). But what is missing from this account, we suggest, is that value
follows from first having noticed features of a literary text and having found them striking. "As readers and critics of
literature, we are within that system," states Smith; thus, because we "have particular interests, we will, at any given
moment, be viewing it from some perspective" (p. 16).
But, we suggest, it is that perspective that the encounter with the literary text calls into question: if our interests were
invariably in control, as Smith supposes, the striking nature of the literary text would be inconceivable. But the
strikingness of literature is a phenomenon particularly attributable to the individual basis of our literary reading,
where it is the perspectives which we have, perhaps unconsciously, acquired from our culture that are especially
likely to be questioned. If this is correct, it points to the adaptive value
of literature in tuning our cognitive frames and providing us with greater flexibility, especially in impelling us to
reconsider our system of values.
A similar argument follows from the second main perspective in which literary response has been examined, that of
discourse processing. While proponents of discourse analysis (e.g., Van Dijk, 1979, Graesser, 1981) have argued for
the adoption of their framework as an appropriate one for understanding comprehension of all texts, the 7 methods of
analysis provided appear to overlook some key components of the response to literature (Miall, 1989; Miall and
Kuiken, 1994b). Zwaan and his colleagues (1995) have provided strong evidence of the reader's construction of what
is called a situation model during response to narrative: this consists of arguments (or propositions) and their

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relationships (connections between referents) and the need to register shifts in time, space, and narrative causation.
The codings of the segments of a short story for these components has been found to predict reading times, an
indication of the varying processing requirements that readers encounter in constructing the situation model with each
segment. A situation model, however, represents the array of cognitive processes necessary for understanding any
narrative, a perspective basic to all narrative comprehension. It is this perspective that literary narratives seem
particularly likely to challenge.
While deviations in certain narrative elements such as time may be captured in part by the situation model, other
important influences on literary response fall outside its scope. To examine this possibility, a reanalysis was made of
responses to one of the stories studied by Zwaan et al (1995), Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon Lover." The segments
of the story, as divided by Zwaan et al, were coded for foregrounding. These codes and those for the situation model
were then compared as predictors of reading times in a regression analysis (thanks to Rolf Zwaan, who kindly sent us
both the codings and the reading time data from this study). In addition to foregrounding, we also included a
"perspective" code representing the point of view of the main character. While the overall result, as expected, was
very significant, F(9, 139) = 183.24, p = 0, our analysis showed the influence of foregrounding on readers to be equal
in its effects to the New Arguments component and stronger than any of the other variables of the situation model. It
should also be noted that foregrounding and New Arguments are independent influences on reading times: partial
correlation (controlling for number of syllables), r(147) = .059. (...)
The situation model components represent the basic blocks or prototypes of comprehension that are probably
obligatory for all readers and also probably virtually identical for all readers. Foregrounding, in contrast, appears to
provide a significant point of departure for individual differences in response to a literary text, particularly since it
evokes feeling. Feeling appears to implicate the reader's self concept and to provide a route to specific issues relating
to the self, as well as to experiences or memories that may provide a new interpretive context following the moment
of defamiliarization. Thus, while all readers appear to be sensitive to foregrounding in literary texts, their construals
of its meaning often differ widely, as studies such as the "Mariner" set of protocols demonstrate.
The modification or transformation of readers' concepts or feelings, the third component we introduced earlier, is thus
also specific to the individual reader: it is in this respect, indeed, that literature seems to invoke what is individual in
the individual. A second example from the same participant in the "Mariner" study shows the unfolding of this
process in response to the fifth passage from the poem selected by this reader. It is a mode of response (shown in only
some of the protocols in this study) that we term enactment, since it seems to involve actively living through a
particular experience consequent on reading. The verse selected by the reader comes late in the poem:
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
(Mariner, 446 - 451)
I'm just going to share the emotion of being alone, in the dark, with this threat. Knowing that there's nothing you can
do about it, keeping on walking and pretending it's not happening, just because there's no other way to cope with it,
you can't run from it. . . . I also sense there's no point in fighting this because, like it's a guilt thing, he's the one that's
responsible for what's happened, he's the reason that this thing is following him, so there is no point in trying to get
away from it because, it's your fate. It's just a bit of a reminder that everybody dies. Whatever's following him is
going to get him. You don't know how long it's going to go and you don't know when it's going to get him, but you
know that eventually that it will.
After exploring the feeling of being alone, the reader turns to the situation of the protagonist: "it's a guilt thing, he's
the one that's responsible," then makes an important generalization that seems to include herself. In this way the
response unfolds in successive phases: a first awareness of a feeling with some personal relevance; the use of this
feeling 10 to locate a meaning for the poem, which is then applied to thinking about the position of the protagonist.
Finally, in what is perhaps the most interesting part of the commentary, we see a convergence of the protagonist's
situation with that of the reader: the "he" and "you" appear to become interchangeable. Although "this thing is
following him," "it's your fate." The story understanding that emerges at this point appears to be "everybody dies."
While this is certainly not a profound insight in itself, the way in which it is reached has made it personal to the
reader, and enabled her to pursue a particular theme that seems to have concerned her throughout her reading of the
poem (her first comment was "I seem to be picking on a bit of a theme of threatening").
In conclusion, the first two components of literariness, which include stylistic features or striking features due to
narrative, and the reader's defamiliarizing response to them, are necessary but insufficient to identify literariness. The
third component is constituted by the reader's attempts to articulate the phenomena within the text that are found
striking and evocative of feeling. In our final example we have illustrated this component with a form of articulation
that we refer to as enactment: in such protocols taken as a whole, we find readers progressively transforming an
affective theme across striking or evocative passages, becoming implicated in the existential concerns embodied in
those passages, and experiencing a blurring of boundaries between themselves and the narrator.
We suggest that the conception of literariness can appropriately be grounded in this three-leveled analysis. We also
believe that further empirical studies are likely to show that these interacting components of literary response are not
only distinctive, but also rest on a unique configuration of psychological and somatic responses that are, in the last
analysis, derived from the adaptive functionality of literature in human evolution.

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References
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