Position Of Reader Research Articles

You‐are‐here maps in emergencies –the danger of getting lost

This article evaluates criteria for the design of so‐called You‐Are‐Here (YAH) maps, i.e. maps that explicitly indicate the position of the map reader. Established design criteria are rendered more precise and applied in an exemplary assessment of three YAH maps as they can be found in public buildings as part of a general emergency scheme. The clarification of the YAH map terminology is necessary to allow for assessing the quality of existing YAH maps and consolidates the basis of rule‐based generation of location‐aware information services. Possibilities for further empirical evaluation of YAH maps are discussed and the role of location‐aware technology is considered for smart mobile systems and smart environments.

Three Approaches to Poetry

In this essay, I reflect on the empirical and subjective foundations of critical readings of poetry. I use my own experience, not because it is more valid than anyone else's but because I have direct access to it. The first section, “The Used-Book-Store Approach,” addresses the formation of poetic canons and the position of the reader as an agent and a consumer. The second section, “The Subway Approach,” gives an example of close reading in a setting where the world within the poem, the world within the reader, and the world outside the reader lose their borders. The third section, “The Rare-Book-Room Approach,” examines the impulse to seek the real thing that poetry can trigger and proposes that the first critical step for the reader consists in assessing the status of the poem as his or her object.

Readers Respond to Julian Edge's "Imperial Troopers and Servants of the Lord". The Author Replies. Of Displacive and Augmentative Discourse, New Enemies, and Old Doubts

0 When, on his deathbed, Voltaire was called upon to renounce the devil, he is reported to have replied, This is no time for making new enemies. As someone who has moved relatively peacefully so far through more than 30 years of a working life in TESOL, I feel much the same way. And yet, the informing ethos of the reader reacts/writer responds exchange-indeed, the unspoken assumption underlying academic discourse in general-is agonistic. Academics are trained in what might be called a displacive use of language, as though making a contribution is not sufficient; someone must first be shown to be wrong or lacking (Swales, 1990). The generic patterning of this displacive discourse in the TESOL Quarterly Forum takes the form of what Nicol (2004) calls intertextual critical exchange. It typically begins with a flourish that damns the original writer with faint praise and then goes on to state the reacting reader's position. The original writer then responds in kind. Purgason, for example, declares that Edge's text, prompted me . . . to do a great deal of reflection (this issue, p. 711). She emerges from this thoughtful state not only able to reconfirm the righteousness of her own previous thinking, but also to accuse me, the author, of simplistic argument, poor scholarship, unfitting choice of words, and alarmist rhetoric, all in the name of clarification' and an effort to keep the dialogue alive.., in a less polemical tone (this issue, p. 711). As a part of her clarification, and in apparently unconscious parody of rational argument, she suggests that the interest I declare (in my author statement) in using nonjudgmental discourse should somehow disqualify me from using evaluative expressions in my writing. Griffith takes a much less aggressive tack, albeit still in displacive mode. The core of his reaction is to dismiss the doubts and ambiguities that concern me with regard to the roles of TESOL in the contemporary world and to assure readers that people in the United States will only support a war if it has some idealistic rationale and that students of English gain access not merely to a linguistic code, but to outlook, a way of being, a culture rooted in human rights (this issue, pp. 715-716).

Interested Parties and Theorems to Prove: Narrative and Identity in Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy

As readers of William Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, we find ourselves considering both life of Flem Snopes, and comparable attempts of readers within narratives to similarly interpret him, these interpretations having crucial effects on respective positions of both Flem and Faulkner's reader with regard to texts. Each of these books takes a different narrative approach. The Hamlet (1940) is delivered by an authorial voice, though it is one that is frequently inhabited by eager contributions of others, most notably V. K. Ratliff. As ever with Faulkner's use of such a voice, its own position can never be taken for granted--it would be a mistake, for instance, to assume omniscience in any Faulkner narrative, however external voice may seem. The Town (1957) apparently goes to other extreme, being entirely constructed of first-person accounts of Ratliff, Charles Mallison, and Gavin Stevens. These three also figure prominently in narration of The Mansion (1959), but are joined here by an authorial voice in certain sections of story--prominently those featuring two of Flem's most directly constructive (or, perhaps, destructive) observers, Mink and Linda Snopes, who themselves are never given narrative voices of their own. These general, novel-wide narrative set-ups each have very distinct effects on material that they deal with, even before we consider subtleties within them. It might almost be tempting, for instance, to liken narrative basis of The Hamlet to that of Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in that it is a story told by an authorial voice that is frequently invaded or even usurped by voices of other narrators or characters. But we are prevented from doing so by crucial point that, whereas Thomas Sutpen's interpreters in earlier book work in terms of a historical and interpretive network that works through time at business of constructing story of a man from past, Flem's readers are contemporaneous with him. They are not, like Quentin and Shreve, attempting to piece together a text from the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and (Absalom, Absalom! 303), but rather trying to understand and come to terms with a man they live and develop with, in whose story they can become involved at level of action as well as interpretation. Whereas Quentin and Shreve create through narrative circumstances in which Sutpen drama can unfold, Gavin Stevens, for instance, can try through money and warning to prevent murder of his long-time foe, Flem Snopes, thereby becoming an important part of events described as well as of their description. This, as we shall see, is vital to nature of understanding and construction of Flem, as a text, that develops across trilogy, and implies important questions about closeness of a text to its readership. In early stages of The Hamlet, Ratliff takes over narrative to tell tall tale of Ab Snopes and Pat Stamper. After many pages of story, we suddenly and briefly leave Ratliff's voice and swing out to see scene of its telling: Sho now, Stamper says. That horse will surprise you. And it did, Ratliff said. He laughed, for first time, quietly, invisible to his hearers though they knew exactly how he would look at moment as well as if they could see him, easy and relaxed in his chair, with his lean brown pleasant shrewd face, in his faded clean blue shirt, with that same air of perpetual bachelorhood which Jody Varner had, although there was no other resemblance between them and not much here, since in Varner it was a quality of shabby and fustian gallantry where in Ratliff it was that hearty celibacy as of a lay brother in a twelfth-century monastery--a gardener, a pruner of vines, say. That horse surprised us. (48-49) Ratliff is talking here to apparently ever-present group of poor white Frenchman's Bend men assembled on porch of Varner's store, a chorus with whom he is frequently seen and, more importantly, heard throughout novel. …

Trading Sex for Secrets in Haywood's Love in Excess

Trading Sex for Secrets in Haywood's Love in Excess Scott Black This article addresses the ways that recent historians of the novel have construed Eliza Haywood and her first work, Love in Excess (1719). It responds to Paula Backscheider's remark, "Suddenly Haywood is everywhere. Yet the study of her individual works is proceeding much too slowly. ... Less generalized comment on Haywood and closer study ofher texts is needed."' I will look closely at a particular moment in her first novel, a moment unexplained by the current critical paradigms applied to Haywood, and thus one that offers us a chance to be surprised by her. In turning from readings organized by sociological effects to ones organized by narrative effects, we can begin to recognize a Haywood who was not only a ???t?a? writer but a woman writer, one who grappled not only with questions ofidentity but also with issues ofform, and who belongs in our histories of the novel because her texts are self-conscious explorations of narrative. 1 Paula R. Backscheider, "The Shadow ofan Author: Eliza Haywood," Eitfileenlli-isiiluiy Iulion 11 (1998), 83. More recently Backscheider has explicitly drawn attention to Haywood's "experimentation with form," suggesting that narrative experiments are a continual feature of Haywood's works, beginning with Ijrne in Excess. "The Story of Eliza Haywood's Novels: Caveats and Questions," Tlu· I'nssioti/ite Fictions ofEliza Haywood, ed. Kristen T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000), pp. 20, 22-23. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 2,January 2003 208 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION The current critical debate about Love in Excess can be mapped in terms of the ways readers and reading are said to be depicted in the text. For Ros Ballaster, the female reader identifies with the victim of the seduction narrative; forJohn Richetti, this kind of identification is assimilated to a broader development of subjectivity; and for William Warner, the reader identifies with the seducer, who represents the active seeker ofserial pleasures in the print marketplace.2 I will consider each account in turn, noting that the way in which readers are said to read (their point of entry into the text and what they are imagined to do with it) governs the way in which the novel is imagined to participate in various histories of the novel. Ballaster puts Haywood at the head of a woman's tradition of romance, Richetti places her in a general history of the novel, and Warner has her participating in an even more general history of print media. Each ofthese histories ofthe early novel depends on a particular kind of access to the text, a particular reader's position that is figured by relationships in the text. In looking at a different kind ofrelationship in the text, I will suggest a differentway ofunderstanding the reader's relation to the text. This different exigency ofreading points, in turn, to another way to situate the novel in its social context—a context defined not by a choice betiueen aesthetics and the market, but by an aesthetics of'the market that was articulated in terms ofthe contemporary discourse of "novelty." Reading Haywood In the new critical economy of the early novel, sex sells, again. Categories ofgender and desire have helped us replot the story ofthe novel's rise to include the tastes ofEliza Haywood's first readers (who bought her novels in droves), notjust the predilections of the first historians of the novel (who kept her earlier salacious novels out of 2 Ros Ballaster, Sedmlive Forms: Women 'sAmatory Fictionfrom 1684 In 1 740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992);John Richetti, The English Novel in llislmy 1700-1780 (NewYork: Routledge, 1999); William Warner, LicensingEnleilairimrnt: TIuElevation ofNovelHeadingin Britain, 1684-1750 (Beikeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1998). TRADING SEX FOR SECRETS209 their accounts and collections).8 Resisting the accretion of later judgments (whether Reeve's in the late eighteenth century, Barbauld's and Scott's in the early nineteenth century, or Ian Watt's in the twentieth) that privileged other kinds ofwriting and made the early part ofthe story, and Haywood's place in it, so intractable,'1 our accounts now try to understand notjust the development ofa...

Discourses of poverty: social reform and the picaresque novel in early modern Spain

Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque in Early Modern Spain. By Anne J. Cruz. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. 297 pages. This study aims to provide a new understanding of picaresque fiction by reading it against the reports, controversies and (mostly ineffectual) legislative programs for the relief of poverty and control of vagrancy, and the debates on whether the poor should be enclosed along with the sick, or given outdoor relief. This richly documented material, and Professor Cruz's Foucauldian theorization, form the principal substance of the book. Beginning with Lazarillo de Tormes, Professor Cruz picks up the allusion (lazar-leper) in the protagonist's name and briefly traces the history of leprosy as a social phenomenon, noting that the marginalization of lepers shifted in the mid-- sixteenth centrury to vagrants, prostitutes, conversos and moriscos (16). Of all the fictions that carry the label `picaresque,' Guzman de Alfarache is the one that most directly and insistently presents the experience of poverty, both real and feigned, and also meditates upon begging and vagabondage as corrosive elements in society. father-shady Genoese financier of vaguely east Mediterranean origins, bisexual seducer of women, twice renegade,-transgressed all the norms of Spanish society. So Guzman's bastard status fails to define an essential or even specific ethnic, social or economic category. His is, instead, an status, one that encompasses all the dubious circumstances of the `other' (100). In a Spain beset with racial and religious, and other anxieties, the overdetermined discourse ... points to the picaro as the expiatory element in the narrative, as the scapegoat that must be sacrificed to safeguard the nationstate (106). This is interesting speculation; it presupposes knowledge of the subject position of readers, their response to the protagonist's strategies of survival, and their attitude to the real world of the poor and the vagrants. Aleman was close to Dr Perez de Herrera and other proponents of organized relief. After a century of debate, little had been achieved, and his frustration is evident in a letter to Herrera and in his novel. What did the readers of novels know about those high level discussions? How many saw poverty as a fact of Nature and shared the common prejudice that beggars were either lazy or criminal? Cruz's book focusses with great thoroughness on the activists; it does not acknowledge inertia in the shared world of readers. …

Narrative Inversion

The Bible acts as an epistemological anchor for the English Bildungsroman; however, the biblical narratives are themselves in flux, especially with regard to representations of spiritual development gendered feminine. The extent to which one can consider the traveling/travailling mother a spiritually coherent figure who exists independent of male spiritual authority seems only possible insofar as one adopts the position of the perverse reader, who envisions the envelopment of her stories as narrative inversion. To do so is to believe that accounts of female heroism need not narratively depend on those of male heroism. The term narrative inversion in turn allows the perverse reader to recognize a narrative desire that, because it does not conform to but indeed suggests an alternative narrative possibility for the homosocial plot, remains enfolded within the plot. Inhabiting precisely this paradox of narrative inversion are the lesbian heroines who follow in the Bible's wake.

Desire deferred: (Re‐)reading Eco's Labyrinths

Summary I will explore the operation of the labyrinth both within The Name of the Rose (1984) (as Eco's labyrinth) and as a condition of reading (as the labyrinth of discourse). The paper is about this potentially infinite space of conjecture outside of which one can never step. My project is thus similar to that of metaphor. Metaphor does not afford access to truth or meaning: it is both a provisional loss of meaning (because of its dissemination within syntax, its passing through a supplement of syntactic resistance), and a history with its sights set on the reappropriation of literal meaning.1 So too, the labyrinth as metaphor governs the production and retrieval of meaning, or rather elides the two. The labyrinth may be seen to confound positions of reader and writer: it belongs to none and floats as metaphor and of metaphor, unable to coordinate metaphor with the production of truth. As the dominant metaphor it will not return to the major transcendental signifieds, God or the Sun. Metaphor celebrate...

Levinson and the resisting reader: Feminist strategies of interpretation

Abstract Contemporary approaches to authorial intention and its role in determining textual meaning have tended to present the issue as though there are just two options: either meaning is determined by authorial intention or authorial intention is irrelevant. This is far too simple. Jerrold Levinson is someone who thinks that the first option is right. The resisting reader approach is one which adopts the second alternative. I think that both are incomplete. Moreover, both could benefit by being supplemented by the other. Levinson thinks that meaning is attributed through a hypothesis of a complex communication intention. This cannot be all there is to textual meaning because from the resisting reader position unintended aspects of meaning are revealed. However, resisting readers rely upon a hypothesis of intended meaning in order to demonstrate the unintended.

近世初期における作者・書肆・読者の位相 : 作者浅井了意・書肆河野道清を軸に( 作者というメディア)

近世初期における作者・書肆・読者の位相 : 作者浅井了意・書肆河野道清を軸に( 作者というメディア)

THE DREAM TEAM, COMMUNICATIVE DIRT, AND THE MARKETING OF SYNERGY: USA BASKETBALL AND CROSS-MERCHANDISING IN TELEVISION COMMERCIALS

This study uses a reader-oriented approach to understand the use of sports-related communicative “dirt” in the positioning of television commercial readers into an idealized interpretive community during broadcasts of games of the USA basketball “Dream Team” during the 1992 Summer Olympics. The study identifies commercials and their workings based on three types of sports dirt: nationalistic, focusing on sport as a tool for nationalism and the metaphor of team as soldiers; youth sports dream, focusing on the idealized notion in the sports world that if one works hard enough, one's sports dreams can be realized; and sports hero, focusing on the ideal of the sports hero as a role model and the power of the “reflected glory” of identifying with the hero. The discussion focuses on how the apparent polysemic nature of open texts is an important strategy that works to contain readers to variant but nonetheless dominant readings. Particular attention is given to how apparently open constructions of multiculturalism, race, and gender work to limit roles of African Americans and women in sport as well as limit the social role of sport itself.

A Text-Semantic Study of the Hebrew Bible, Illustrated with Noah and Job

The study of literature in the twentieth century shows a development that is indirectly reflected in exegesis of the Bible. The idea that meaning in a biblical text is determined by the writer (tradition and redaction criticism) was first replaced by the conviction that the text itself was the main source (close reading, stylistics, structuralism). Subsequently there was a tendency to grant the reader some importance too (rhetorical analysis, reader-response criticism, studies considering the position of narrator or reader). Now it is held that the reader is to a large extent responsible for determining meaning (deconstruction, poststructuralism, ideological criticism). Whereas interest was at first focused on the object (the text), it later moved more and more in the direction of the subject of signification (the reader). At this moment, the subject in his/her ideological definition, in his/her own specific social context (reading as a woman, as a black male, a Chinese female) is regarded by many as the central factor determining the meaning of a text.1 Developments in linguistics have been equally revolutionary. Two major shifts have taken place within three fields of linguistics syntax, semantics, and pragmatics-which are reflected in linguistic Bible studies.2 Traditionally, the longest unit to be studied in linguistics was the sentence. In the past decades, however, certain branches of linguistics have begun to study the hierarchical relationships between sentences in a text. Thus, besides sentence syntax we now have text syntax; besides word semantics we now have text semantics; and besides the pragmatics of a sentence we now have the pragmatics of the text as a whole? The second shift that has taken place in linguistics

Talk about texts: reading as a social event

ABSTRACTDrawing on anthropological evidence that interactions with texts are often mediated through oral language practices and Vygotsky's ideas about the primacy of social dialogue for individual intellectual development, the authors argue that children's informal talk about both electronic and printed texts throws new light on the reading process as a whole. They analyse children's talk about a school library book, a piece of graffiti, a television programme and a film to show how readings are shaped by the social organization and personal relationships of the readers, whether in curriculum activities, friendship groups or at home in the family. Readings are constructed, contested and negotiated through talk at the point where texts are first calculated and reshaped again when they are jointly recalled. Talk also helps to construct the text's legitimate audience and the reader's position within it.

Review of Images in mind: The evolution of a theory.

In this review I hope to capture some of the flavour of Images in Mind, in which Allan Paivio traces some of the signal events in the evolution of dual coding theory. I encourage each reader of the review to become a reader of the book. The main reward is a glimpse of the workings of a great mind, but there are practical benefits as well. I am reminded of an interview with Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones. When asked how he came up with so many songs, he replied that he just played through his Buddy Holly Song Book, and something always came up. Reading papers by Paivio has the same effect on me; I can't read his work without many experiments coming up.I agreed to review Images in Mind only after some real soul searching. How can I pretend to be objective? Al Paivio was my graduate supervisor. He taught me to do science. I believe that he is one of the clearest thinkers who has ever played psychology, but that he has successfully included the artistic and creative side of his nature into the tough - minded scientist that he is. And, in a fundamental sense, that is the real root of dual coding theory. We have two different ways of thinking, and any theoretical approach that excludes either of them gives too narrow a view of human cognition.How is the book organized? There are 20 chapters in the book, of which the middle 18 are reprinted from many sources spanning the years from 1963 to 1989, published by Paivio and several collaborators. Chapters 1 and 20 are original to the book. Chapter 1 is an orientation and overview; Chapter 20 is a description of loose ends, unsolved puzzles, and the author's hopes for future progress. An obvious question with older articles is Does the language travel, or do yesterday's insights become today's ho hums? Although I have previously read almost all of the articles that are reprinted in the book, I put myself in the position of a new reader and read all of them. In some ways each chapter is a microcosm of the book, beginning with an overview, presenting new evidence, and nothing any discrepancies that call for theoretical evolution. There is some unevenness in the articles, but most of them are clear and easy to read, and they travel well through time, from as long ago as 1963. It is work to read the book, but it is work worth doing.Summary of dual coding theory. The focus of the book is with dual coding theory, according to which the cognitive system consists of two symbolic systems. One is the verbal system; its units are representations that are activated by linguistic symbols, and that are organized in sequential strings. The other is the nonverbal system; its units are representations that are activated by nonlinguistic objects and events, and that are characteristically organized in synchronous bundles. It is assumed that the systems are functionally independent, which means that one system can be active without parallel activity in the other. However, the systems are connected by reference; pictures can be named and words can be imaged. Whereas the verbal system is abstract, with symbols that are arbitrarily related to their verbal activators, the nonverbal system contains information that is analogous to the events that activate it. With this brief summary as a guide, let us now consider the contents in more detail.Detailed ContentsChapter 1. Ever the empiricist, Paivio tells his story with concrete examples to serve as conceptual pegs. The young Al Paivio learned about imagery mnemonics in 1950, in a course in public speaking. During his graduate education at McGill, he was surprised to find that there was very little experimental evidence relevant to the obvious value of imagery in service of memory. Judging by the success of the memory pegs, it should be easy to show that imagery is especially effective when cues retrieve memories. It was easy to show, but because of the covert nature of images, there were many detractors among the behaviouristic verbal learners of the day. …

Authenticity and the writing cure: Reading some migrant women's writing

In the wake of postmodernist theories of the decentred subject, how might feminist criticism argue for gendered difference in relation to cultural difference without returning the authenticity of the humanist subject? What safe passage exists between the Scylla of biological essentialism which haunts explorations of écriture féminine and the Charybdis of textual analyses which depoliticize the reading/writing process? The insertion of non-Anglo-Celtic women writers into the context of Australian Literature raises intriguing possibilities for reassessing the positioning of writers and readers and for rethinking the processes whereby cultural values are created.

A Handbook of English in Engineering Usage

It is seldom that a book appears which can be regarded as unique in the subject matter with which it deals; but this may be truly predicated of Prof. Howell's engrossing work. It is a shining example of the principles enunciated, and it is pleasant to peruse the flowing periods and incisive remarks permeating the pages. The advice that a writer should project himself into the reader's position is well urged. A fault to which attention may be directed, however, is that the text is unduly protracted, and there is a tendency to reiteration. In places, too, are encountered erroneous examples on phrasing—such as “The message will be delivered to whoever is authorized”, “The kind of pens is the best”, “one must write his paragraph”, may be cited. For a book on engineering phraseology there are too many examples of non-engineering sentences given as illustrations. The author's remarks on reviewing, editorials, and cognate matters are inspiring. In a work like the present, the use of “the same letter”, when “a similar letter”, is intended, would not be expected. In conclusion may be commended the maxim on p. 93, “There is a vast difference between having to say something and having something to say”. A Handbook of English in Engineering Usage. Prof. A. C. Howell By. Pp. vii + 308. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.; London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1930.) 12s. 6d. net.