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In 1986 Sperber and Wilson's Relevance theory emerged in pragmatic analyses as an ambitious attempt to provide a thorough explanation of how addressees pick up one single interpretation (based on nondemonstrative inference) that is consistent with the addresser's intention. In the application of this theory to media discourse, some problems arise associated with the correct attribution of the addresser's...
The literary status of writers is strongly dependent on the critical attention given to their books in the daily and weekly press. Previous research has shown that this attention depends to a great extent on attributes that are external to the work in question, but are related to its institutional setting, notably the stature of the publisher and the critical reception of previous works by the same...
Professional art experts were required to evaluate sets of ten to twenty slides of artworks created by young artists. The design of the experiment enabled comparisons between aesthetic quality judgements based on averaged scores of four to six experts and consensual judgements reached after discussions of the works within groups composed of the same four to six judges. It was demonstrated that the...
This article builds on theoretical, methodological and empirical research on the Climate of Literature having since the early 1960's on and off been pursued at the University of Lund. Literature is regarded as one of several large societal systems. It is hypothesized that during the last few decades basic characteristics of the literary system - just as those of other large societal systems...
This study examined emotional responses to excerpts from short stories by James Joyce. Forty-eight introductory psychology students, including 24 males and 24 females, read four short story excerpts from James Joyce's Dubliners each divided into four segments of equal length. Two of the short story excerpts had unifying Emotional themes, while two others were Descriptively dense. Readers were instructed...
Two experiments examined how people updated their knowledge gained from reading newspaper stories. Participants in a related condition read an initial news story on one day, and then read two consecutive updates on two subsequent days. Participants in control conditions read the same stories as those in the related condition, but without having read the prior related news stories. Participants...
The assumption that formal features in literary texts typically shape response, which has been a theme of literary theory almost since its beginnings, has been rejected by poststructuralist critics. If formal features are considered, they argue, this is because social or institutional conventions direct readers' attention to them. We argue that this claim is unsupported by empirical study. Studies...
The assumption that formal features in literary texts typically shape response, which has been a theme of literary theory almost since its beginnings, has been rejected by poststructuralist critics. If formal features are considered, they argue, this is because social or institutional conventions direct readers' attention to them. We argue that this claim is unsupported by empirical study. Studies...
This study examined emotional responses to excerpts from short stories by James Joyce. Forty-eight introductory psychology students, including 24 males and 24 females, read four short story excerpts from James Joyce's Dubliners each divided into four segments of equal length. Two of the short story excerpts had unifying Emotional themes, while two others were Descriptively dense. Readers were instructed...
In this article, the term 'after Bourdieu' has a threefold significance. In the first place, the main points of Bourdieu's sociology of cultural production will be reviewed briefly together with the way Bourdieu has applied this sociological analysis to book publishing. In the second place, several publications of his followers also dealing with book publishing are discussed, leading to the view that...
Two experiments examined how people updated their knowledge gained from reading newspaper stories. Participants in a related condition read an initial news story on one day, and then read two consecutive updates on two subsequent days. Participants in control conditions read the same stories as those in the related condition, but without having read the prior related news stories. Participants in...
In this article, the term 'after Bourdieu' has a threefold significance. In the first place, the main points of Bourdieu's sociology of cultural production will be reviewed briefly together with the way Bourdieu has applied this sociological analysis to book publishing. In the second place, several publications of his followers also dealing with book publishing are discussed, leading to the view...
This article confronts the problem of defining the population for large-scale empirical studies of contemporary artists. The focus is on one special category, here identified as 'status-of-the-artist' (SA) studies. This term refers to surveys of professional artists' social and economic conditions, usually commissioned by public arts administration bodies or artists' associations. Empirically the...
Recent international research describes a diminishing interest in leisure reading for almost all western countries. In this article, we have investigated trends in leisure reading of the Dutch population between 1955 and 1995, using data from seven national representative time budget surveys. First, our results show that the time spent on reading has diminished by about half. The strongest decline,...
Pierre Bourdieu's influential theory of cultural capital has increasingly been subject to criticism. This paper addresses Bourdieu's ideas about the role of the arts in class cohesion among elites, a group to whom the theory should be most applicable. It finds that the arts are valued by elites and do contribute to class cohesion, but not entirely in the way his theory describes. In contrast to...
In the following paper we will argue that even within an empirical study of literature, the concept of literariness continues to carry certain prescriptive implications. We demonstrate this by spelling out such prescriptive implications for the concept of polyvalence. We then argue, referring back to the discussion of the postulate of value neutrality in the social sciences, in favour of accepting...
The conditions of suspenseful re-reading have always been a controversial topic of discussion. In two very recent essays, suspenseful re-reading has been described as a paradox. The object of this paper is to revise current definitions of suspense and describe the various levels of emotional response it can elicit: emotions or feelings caused by uncertainty, by the readers' construction of resolution...
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