Literary Expertise and Analogical Reasoning: Building Global Themes

Abstract

This paper investigates the analogical reasoning of literary academics and writers in order to understand what role analogy plays in literary interpretation. Readers' verbal protocol data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively to examine reasoning operations ( claims, hypotheses, analogies, expectations, questions, evaluations, and meta-statements), the relational links between operations ( condition, elaboration, and reiteration), and the levels of the text at which those operations occur ( fact, local, and global). The results of the quantitative analysis reveal that expert readers generated relatively few analogies. The qualitative analyses suggest that, in spite of the low frequencies, analogies serve an important function in expert readers' literary text descriptions. Analogies may be signaled explicitly by the text or may be generated from the domain-specific expertise of the readers. Analogical comparisons may be constructed at any of the multiple levels of the text descriptions and are also generated in relation to the communicative context. These intertextual references appear to facilitate the elaboration of knowledge schemas and global themes, and permit readers to work with multiple interpretive possibilities. In this way, analogies served as a form of data generation and management for expert readers.