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Leonardo, Vol. 16, No.3, pp. 243-244, 1983 Printed in Great Britain 0024-094X/83$3.00+0.00 Pergamon Press Ltd. PROCESSING LITERARY WORKS UNDER RE::PEATED PRESENTATION L. Halasz* The complexity and repleteness of art-works and the extraordinarily rich meanings of the interaction of their elements are a great challenge to our information-processing system. Ingarden [1] has argued that the many levels of an artwork give too many simultaneous tasks to readers, who cope with these demands upon their information processing with distortion and simplification of the work. A literary text, for example, is always a struggle between the writer and readers. The writer intends to increase the variety and complexity of the text's code system but readers attempt to reduce it as they are interested in obtaining the necessary information by minimal effort [2]. This may help us to understand the popular success of commercial 'pseudo-literary' texts: while they offer the illusion of art, their one-sidedness minimizes difficulties in processingthat is, simplification for the reader is built into the structure in advance. To explore such ideas, subjects in this study were presented with repeated exposures of literary texts and 'non-literary' variations. From the point of view of the repleteness of the literary texts, it was hypothesized that subjects in re-readings would comprehend them in increasingly more complex ways, . when compared with non-literary variations. Information processing considerations, with an emphasis on simplification strategies, would not necessarily predict such changes. As examples of literary texts, two short stories were used, one a Hungarian classical text with a traditional structure, and the other a text by Kafka, with a more metaphorical structure. The non-literary variations were summaries containingjust the main points of the narrative of the two short stories. Forty-eight 17to 18-year-old secondary school pupils were assigned to four independent groups, which read only one of these four texts, four times at intervals of 2 months between readings. In the . initial instructions subjects were asked to read as attentively as possible and at each re-reading it was emphasized that further exposure would allow them to comprehend the text more fully. Among other tasks, subjects were asked to outline the meaning of the text, to put down their associations to it, and to indicate the most important part of it. A content analysis was carried out on these responses, together with an attempt to characterize the depth of subjects' approaches to the text. Categories in the content analysis included: personal or egoinvolving references, emotions, personality traits, and reference to abstract cultural institutions. Categories in depth-ofapproach analyses included: detailed exposition about the 'real nature of man', descriptions of character traits, brief moral judgments, and aphorisms about life. The results of most interest to us here may be briefly summarized. There were no systematic changes in either of these two analyses across trials for any group. Responses of subjects exposed to the two short stories were more complex and less superficial than those exposed to the two summaries. For example, they made more detailed references to the nature of *Institute of Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest VI, Szondy u. 83-85, Pf. 398 H-1394, Hungary. 243 man and made less personality trait attributions. The Kafka story elicited more abstract references and less personal and ego-involving ones and, interestingly, these differences were also apparent when their summaries were compared. How are we to account for this lack of change in responses in the different readings? Our approach draws upon concepts from psychological theories of information processing and person perception. In a paper titled 'Art objects as people' Moffet [3] has argued that works of art, whether they be paintings, sculpture or music, arouse in the spectator emotional reactions in much the same way as do human beings. In this view, when examining the impact of a work of art, the mobilization ofour knowledge of how we form impressions of people is relevant. This may be even more the case when reading a short story where one encounters 'characters'. There are of course differences between forming an impression of a character in a story and forming an...

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