Empirical Approaches to Studying Literary Readers: The State of the Discipline

What is literary reading, and is it possible to distinguish it from other kinds of reading? I have two reasons for beginning with this question. First, it evokes some central controversies over reading that have occurred in the last two or three decades that remain unresolved; and, second, such controversies suggest the need for experimental methods studying acts of reading by real readers. Given the rejection of literariness by recent literary theorists, these two questions are critical for the future of literary studies. Terry Eagleton in 1983 expressed a now common view: there can be "no 'essence' of literature whatsoever.… Any writing may be read 'poetically.'" Thus given the right frame we would read a railway timetable as literature. It follows, writes Eagleton, that

anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature—Shakespeare, for example—can cease to be literature. Any belief that the study of literature is the study of a stable, well-definable entity, as entomology is the study of insects, can be abandoned as a chimera.¹

While the empirical study of literature does not allow us to refute this claim definitively, it does, as I will show, enable us to call it into question and show when and in what ways literariness as a distinctive experience seems to be occurring for readers. Thus experimental work does not enable us to put such controversies behind us: on the contrary, they are an important component of what motivates such work.

The paradigms within which literature is typically studied and taught, however, have ruled against the experimental approach. Thus in 1981 Jonathan Culler argued:

There is little need to concern oneself with the design of experiments, for several reasons. First, there already exist more than enough interpretations with which to begin. By consulting the interpretations which literary history records for any major work, one discovers a spectrum of interpretive possibilities of greater interest and diversity than a survey of undergraduates could provide.²

No doubt the study of published interpretations has its own merit, but it is a poor answer to the question of how texts are actually read. Filtered out of printed interpretations are details of how a reader arrived at her understanding of the text; printed accounts are also likely to be subject to distortions and repressions of various kinds that misrepresent the act of reading. Above all, what is usually given in print is an interpretation, but this is not necessarily what a reader reading "nonprofessionally" is aiming to produce; thus a reliance on printed interpretations for a study of literary reading has little ecological validity.

Experimental study of nonprofessional literary reading has been occurring for some thirty years.³ Embracing a range of cultural, social, and psychological questions, it raises many of the questions that historians of reading have been studying, albeit from a different perspective. In particular, it has centered on tracing the effects on readers of specific aspects of the reading process, such as the influence of features of literary style, the effects of empathy in reading narrative, or the impact of significant reading experiences on a reader's memory and self-concept. Often, experimental methods involve laboratory conditions in which acts of reading can be controlled and monitored; two or more conditions for reading may be compared (a literary text might be manipulated, for instance, so that the effects of versions containing either free indirect discourse or third-person discourse might be examined). Typically, the readers studied will be drawn from the student population, but some studies draw on readers from the general population, or compare inexperienced with more experienced readers (beginning students with faculty, for example). To carry out such studies demands some familiarity with experimental design and statistical analysis, but—as I aim to show below—the issues raised and the basic features of the methods being used can readily be understood by any scholar interested in...