Texture and identification

Abstract

It is clear that there is an increasing divergence between the concerns and discourse of professional readers of literature and the experience engaged in by natural readers. In particular, natural readers foreground emotional and motivational aspects of literary works, areas which are neglected or poorly handled in the academy. This paper explores the emotionally affecting dimension of how readers identify with literary works. Drawing on cognitive poetic developments within stylistics including text-world theory, a method is proposed that equates empathetic identification with spatial conceptualisation and distance. A short analysis of a very popular poem illustrates how the method can gauge differences between artificial and natural reading.