1. NWO Project, absorbed reading of narrative fiction
Varieties of Absorption in Narrative, and Aesthetic Experiences. A Comparative Study of Responses to Literature and Film.
Nell’s Lost in a Book (1988) put absorbed reading of narrative fiction on the map of scholarly interests. Besides characterizing it as a trance-like state, Nell did leave absorption largely untheorized. Researchers within various disciplines from both the Humanities and the Social Sciences have stepped in and tried to describe absorption. Their separate endeavors have resulted in a terminology that is bewilderingly diverse. As a phenomenon absorption...
2. What is absorption?
Just look at the face and posture of totally absorbed readers, or of people intensely focused on a movie, or of listeners concentrated on a piece of music, and you will see that they seem to have wandered off. It is as if they were simultaneously present and absent. They are certainly hard to reach for a moment. Some would even say they are temporarily in another world. The present contribution to this volume will attempt to clarify how we can describe that distinctive state they are in, and how...
3. How to get readers absorbed
There must be more to reading than just text comprehension — stories are to en- tertain, Brewer and Lichtenstein (1984) famously proclaimed. Hence, they said, research should focus more on how stories do that. What are the implications of this statement? Could that knowledge be of interest to people outside academia? For example, could it result in guidelines for writing bestsellers...
4. Uses of literature for personal growth
Uses of Literary Narrative Fiction in Social Contexts: Changes in Self and Social Perceptions Awareness of self and others has been shown to be key to happiness, social success, and productivity. As evidence suggests that reading literary narrative fiction alters readers’ sense of self and social perceptions, it may play an important role in enhancing such...
5. Empathy in literary response
After Kidd & Castano’s publication in Science (2013), showing an effect of reading literature on empathy, we have seen an upsurge of interest in the topic (Koopman & Hakemulder 2015).It seems that one essential aspect remains elusive: what it is that makes literature effective. What makes it so special? This talk will argue that there are qualities of literary reading...