Powerful Prose: How Textual Features Impact Readers

Open Access Published by transcript Verlag 2021

Powerful Prose

How Textual Features Impact Readers

Edited by: R. L. Victoria Pöhls and Mariane Utudji
Funded by: Max-Planck-Institut für empirische Ästhetik

In the series Lettre

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839458808

Overview
Contents

About this book

What makes a reading experience »powerful«? This volume brings together literary scholars, linguists, and empirical researchers to elucidate the effects and reader responses to investigate just that. The thirteen contributions theorize this widely-used, but to date insufficiently studied notion, and provide insights into the therefore still mysterious-seeming power of literary fiction. The collection investigates a variety of stylistic as well as readerly and psychological features responsible for short- and long-term effects - topics of great interest to those interested or specialized in literary studies and narratology, (cognitive) stylistics, empirical literary studies and reader response theory.

Author / Editor information

R. L. Victoria Pöhls works as a researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt). Her interest in studying literature with both hermeneutical and empirical methods evolved during graduate studies in cognitive science (University College Dublin) and literature, linguistics, and philosophy (Universität Hamburg). To foster interdisciplinary work at the frontiers of these disciplines, she cofounded the Powerful Literary Fiction Texts-Network in 2019. Her research focuses on comparative, empirical, and cognitive approaches to literature and is especially concerned with the portrayal of minorities.
Mariane Utudji has completed a PhD thesis in English studies and translatology in which she investigated Salman Rushdie's highly valued prose style and showed how the its reading experience can be retained or recreated in French. Her approach to literary texts thus combines stylistics, applied linguistics, and translation studies, with a growing interest in cognitive linguistics.

Topics

Frontmatter Open Access Download PDF	1
Contents Open Access Download PDF	5
Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	9
Experiencing Powerful Prose R. L. Victoria Pöhls and Mariane Utudji Open Access Download PDF	11
Part I Emotional Experiences: Textual Features Eliciting Positive, Negative or Mixed Emotions
A Psycho-Biological Approach to Suspense and Horror: Triggers of Emotion in a Passage from Lewis’s The Monk Peter Wenzel Open Access Download PDF	25
Repeated Pleasure: Reading the Threesome Ménage Romance as Digital Literature Elina Valovirta Open Access Download PDF	45
Negating the Human, Narrating a World Without Us Mahlu Mertens Open Access Download PDF	63
Refiguring Reader-Response: Experience and Interpretation in J.G. Ballard’s Crash Ciarán Kavanagh Open Access Download PDF	77
Part II Coming to the Fore: The Subtle Influence of Rhythm, Sounds, and Sensory Representations
Lives and Deaths of Gatsby: A Semantic Reading of a Key Passage in a Powerful Text Christine Chollier Open Access Download PDF	99
Introducing Jane: The Power of the Opening Kimberley Pager-McClymont Open Access Download PDF	111
Performing Rhythm Through Enunciation: Prose Versus Poetry About Lighthouses Maryvonne Boisseau Open Access Download PDF	129
The Pictorial Paradigm of La Vallée: A Text-Image Reading of the Incipit of The Mysteries of Udolpho Alice Labourg Open Access Download PDF	145
Part III Readers, Characters, Authors: Relations Formed by Textual Features
The Nature of the Agonistic in a Pragmatics of Fiction Tahir Wood Open Access Download PDF	167
The Relevance of Turning a Page: Monotony and Complexity in §25 of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King Sixta Quassdorf Open Access Download PDF	189
The Language of Engagement and the Projection of Storyworld Possible Selves in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives Maria-Angeles Martinez Open Access Download PDF	207
“Smuggling in Accidental Poetry”: Cognitive and Stylistic Strategies of a Stammering Teen in David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green Constance Robert-Murail Open Access Download PDF	231
Contributors Open Access Download PDF	249
Editors Open Access Download PDF	253
Index Open Access Download PDF	254

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 264
Keywords: Language; Culture; Literary Studies; Linguistics; Theory of Literature; Psychology

eBook

Published: October 27, 2021
ISBN: 9783839458808