Reader Activity Research Articles

Le cas « Oblomov » : entre philosophie du non-agir, nihilisme existentiel et modèle de psychasthénie appliquée

AimIt is essential to distrust shortcuts, inferences, and generalizations, but it must be noted that literature can offer unique explanations about personality disorders or often even delve into a subtle, unexpected description of a more complex syndromic case or psychopathological model that we are familiar with. I. Goncharov, through the character of Oblomov, allows us to revisit the concept of psychasthenia that Pierre Janet described in 1903. As a disciple of T. Ribot, who he would follow as chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the College de France, and as a contemporary of Freud, with whom he disagreed on the way of “thinking about neurosis” (in terms of conflict for one, and in terms of deficit for the other), P. Janet would also develop the idea of the subconscious. His work, “Obsessions and Psychasthenia” was the first to describe obsessions and compulsions clearly and coherently, and to put forward the idea of an original psychological therapy, as well as an explanatory model. I hereby wish to pay tribute to him. Over and above the indisputable therapeutic virtues of literature, I seek to know how a novel can help the clinician to better understand a concept, an era, or even support a diagnostic hypothesis. MethodWe shall consider literary fiction as an opening onto a parallel world, the realm of the psychiatric, updated by a reader's activity, memories, references, and subjectivity. Through a comparative analysis, a sort of meta-theater between the life story of the main character (Oblomov) and the reactivation of more operational diagnostic criteria, I shall try to bring a founding concept of our discipline to light. ResultsAn extremely subtle psychiatric state (in this case psychasthenia) gradually becomes perceptible, one that will be authenticated using the conventional descriptions that we know. DiscussionThis raises the question of the place that the novel reserves for mental disorders. Through an empathetic and nuanced representation of mental illnesses, it makes all their complexity perceptible from the inside, in the light of standards that evolve over time, reflections of the given era and society. ConclusionLiterature allows us to reflect upon “madness” (as a social and cultural object), in the sense that the former reflects the latter, thereby allowing us to reconsider it.

Studying the Texts of the Yakut Epic Olonkho: A Phenomenological Approach

The theoretical and methodological bases of the present research are based on the theory of Wolfgang Iser, which distinguishes between the concepts "text" and "literary work." "Text" is produced by the author and exists in a single variant, representing a symbolic code that is waiting for its implementation, before which it has only virtual meaning. "Literary work" is what arises in the act of reception - as a result of the reader's activity in the realization of the semantic potential of the text - and exists in a multitude of receptive variants. In the process of the reader's communication with the text, “the horizon of expectations" of the text, which contains the requirements for the reader coded in the text, interacts with “the horizon of expectations" of the reader, which is based on the requirements imposed on the text by the reader. The merging of the "horizons" is the key to an adequate understanding. In the present paper, the interaction of “the horizons of expectations" of the text and the reader is represented in the form of "windows", "created" by the text and the reader in the experience of the perceiving consciousness. "The expectations of the text" are considered in the form of "windows" formed by phenomena and horizons. They are attached to three levels of the structural features of the olonkho texts: the active (eventive) level, the level of accenting rhythms and the semiotic level, which are the most illustrative for the conducted research. "The expectations of the reader" are provided by three fundamental limits of dynamic equilibria (identification limit, communication limit and the limit of the rhythms of world harmony), which are attached to the levels of text singled out above.

FEATURES OF VISUAL RETENTION IN ELDERLY PEOPLE WITH DIFFERENT READING PRODUCTIVITY

The article presents the results of a study of visual retention of the elderly people with different productivity reading. The importance of the reading process in the actualization of the psychic functions and their functional systems (for example, visual retention) has been described. It confirms the role of a reader's activities in the maintenance of cognitive reserve on the optimal level. The study included 89 people (aged 60-74 years old) born and permanently residing on the territory of the Arkhangelsk region. The technique of V.A. Borodina, S.M. Borodin was used to evaluate the productivity of reading skills. In order to study the features of the visual retention A. Benton test was used. The results of the study showed that in elderly age to safe the reading skills operations to retain clear visual images of letter marks, comparison of the optical performance with acoustic and speech motor components are relevant, otherwise it can lead to the degradation of a reader's activity. The results of correlation analysis revealed the relationship between deformations of the structural-spatial organization of the figures with the reading indicators: speed, digestion and reading productivity decrease with increase of such errors number as rotation, confabulation and distortion. Surveyed elderly patients with high reading productivity had safe function of cognitive control, reception, processing and storage of information.

Features of Assessment Activity at the Lessons of Literature

The rational way (a mark, a test) of assessment of a school student’s perception of art contradicts the principles of personality oriented learning and reduces the interest of a child in fiction. In the article the problem of assessment of learners’ achievement in the lessons of aesthetics, namely in literature lessons, is solved. The author identifies the reasons for the lack of result in the research into the problem: the figurative nature of the literary text which accounts for the plurality of its interpretations, impossibility to define the criterion for assessment of free communication of learners discussing the work of art. The emotional nature of esthetic perception interferes with objective assessment of the reader's activity, and the children with a more developed sphere of feelings find themselves in a less advantageous position, than the children with developed analytical thinking, however not inclined to empathy. The author sees the solution to the problem by means of rating scales of assessment widespread in psychological diagnostics. Such scales should be developed by each class staff on the basis of their own experience of class work with a literary text, they will have a different number of criteria, but that will allow to do justice to every learner.

Redution effects in interest for reading and library (FGR’s example)

Devoted to the problem of reducing the reader's activity which is considered at the level of global (digitalization, the global financial crisis) and regional (local cultural transformation) factors of development. The experience of librarianship Germany in overcoming the typical and regional problems is analyzed. The article deals with the German readers activity’s dependence on the language reform of 1998. It raises the problem of influence of orthographic mode on the on the preservation of written cultural heritage and on the development of book culture.

Between Code and Motion: Generative and Kinetic Poetry in French, Portuguese, and Spanish

Between Code and Motion:Generative and Kinetic Poetry in French, Portuguese, and Spanish Manuel Portela1 1. Textual engines: 'the work is a system whose reading is one of its internal functions'2 One of the most important European groups of electronic literature, L.A.I.R.E. (Lecture, Art, Innovation, Recherche, Écriture), was formed in France in 1989. Philippe Bootz, a founding member of L.A.I.R.E., is one of the leading practitioners and theorists of programmed literature in Europe. His theoretical writings address the pragmatics of writing and reading programmed works, a topic that is also a thematic and structural element in several of his works. He has attempted to model digital textuality by describing the relations between author's field, work's field, and reader's field in programmed works. For Bootz, the grammatical productivity of computer code and the perceptual display of transient signifiers should be studied in their interrelations. Electronic literature requires the consideration of both programmability and the material instantiation of code in a given form: [End Page 305] La programmation est un nouveau matériau sculpté et modelé par les artistes. Dans la visée de Transitoire Observable, ce modelage passe par un travail sur la forme. Il s'agit d'une approche formaliste de cette dualité algorithmes/processus qui constitue la pro-grammation.c Ce qui est visé dans cette approche n'est ni le programme en tant qu'ensemble de lignes de textes ou de code bien formé, ni l'événement produit à l'exécution en tant que réalité audiovisuelle, mais le rapport qu'entretien cet événement avec, d'une part, la réalité algorithmique du code, et d'autre part la pragmatique de la lecture. (Bootz 2004)3 Bootz describes the materiality of the display, i.e., the multimedia screen features of works, as 'le transitoire observable', and he uses the concept of 'formes méta-stylistiques' to refer to the programming codes. Transient observable forms are seen as material instances produced by meta-stylistic implicit forms ['le non-dit du programme'], i.e., by the code that is not immediately accessible to readers. Authors of programmed works move between these two levels: on the one hand, the physical process of executing the program ['le processus d'exécution physique du programme'], and, on the other, the pragmatic reality of the reader's activity ['la réalité pragmatique de l'activité du lecteur']. According to Philippe Bootz, reading becomes an internal function of the meta-textual device that instantiates the text – a conception that can be related both to Aspen Aarseth's notion of cybertext (1997) and to N. Katherine Hayles's notion of technotext (2002; 2008). Reading acts co-generate the 'transitoire observable', which means that, as acts of reading, they become scripted in the work's virtual field at the meta-textual level. Bootz has favored a poetics of programming that explicitly works at the level of code, rather than with the 'video metaphors' graphically embodied in software tools. His aesthetic position – as that of other 'code workers' – highlights one important aspect of electronic literature: there is a software layer that defines its rhetorical tropes and its multimedia materiality, and this layer should be part of a poetics of digital media that 'relocates programming at the core of electronic art' (2005). If electronic materiality consists of a series of cascading abstractions with several layers nested on each other (Kirschenbaum 2008), it is clear that certain properties at the level of formal materiality will depend [End Page 306] upon specific codes and hardware capabilities. According to Bootz, the author's field includes the programming code, since this is what is particular about digital media. Writers of programmed works should move beyond the pre-defined expressive features embedded in a given program and they should, instead, consider programming itself as their material. It is through this conscious intervention at the programming level that the specificity of the 'transitoire observable' ['transient observable state'] may be grasped and fully explored. For him, the pragmatics of authoring electronic literature engages with its algorithmic nature, and not merely with transient screen effects.4 Bootz's work is concerned with...

Some good texts are always better: text revision to foster inferences of readers with high and low prior background knowledge

This paper presents two experiments testing whether an approach to revise a text that fosters the reader's active processing benefits both high and low-knowledge readers. A history text and two alternative revised versions, one fostering the reader's inferential activity and the other reducing it, were employed. Junior high school students with low and high background knowledge about information related to the text topic participated in experiment 1, whereas undergraduate students with low and high knowledge on both the text topic and related information participated in experiment 2. One-third of the students for each condition in both experiments read either the original passage or one of the two revised versions. The revised version, aimed at fostering the reader's inferential activity, benefited low and high-knowledge readers on memory recall and inferences in both experiments, whereas the version aimed at reducing inferential activity had positive effects on recall but not on inferences. Active processing during reading seems to be the crucial factor to explain learning from texts. Consequences for the development of instructional texts are discussed.

Lyric Reading: Woman and Juan Ramón Jiménez

J uan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958) frequently identifies woman, mujer, with his work, As object of erotic or spiritual desire, image of beauty, symbol of love, and form of the Ideal, is as central to his poetic discourse as Obra, his life-aspoetry, and muerte, his preoccupation with death. Suelo confundir la mujer desnuda con la muerte, the poet writes in 1923 (Pdginas 91). La poesia first practiced in Diario de un poeta recien casado (1916) and Eternidades (1917), is grounded metaphorically in the nude female figure: Poesia / desnuda, mia para siempre! (SAP 411). Woman figured in his life as well, for the poet's love affairs were reflected in his poetry,1 and he especially valued the opinions of one woman in particular, Zenobia Camprubi Aymar, who became his wife and lifelong companion (Palau de Nemes, Vida 524-29; Sanchez-Romeralo, Introduccion xix-xx). Thus women do not merely provide objects for representation, but their opinions as readers-their voiceswere also taken seriously by the poet. It is in this context of woman as reader that I explore woman as object in Jimenez's poetry in an attempt to hear her voice along with the poet's. Zenobia's reading of her husband's poetry will provide the intertext, a separate text related to and informing the first, against which we can read the response of a female reader to the Obra. We can identify at least three aspects of a lyric reader: the image of the reader in the text (the textual clues which describe the author's imagined audience);2 the reader's activity in the reading process itself; and finally the encounter of an actual reader or group of readers with the text. Reader-response theorists describe the reader moving through the Nor would I be a PoetIt's finer own the EarEnamored-impotent-contentThe License to revere, A privilege so awful What would the Dower be, Had I the Art to stun myself With Bolts of Melody!

Artificial intelligence and the study of literary narrative

This paper tries to show that some cross-fertilization between the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and literary studies could be beneficial to both fields. Consideration of what is required to understand literary narrative can provide both a new set of challenging AI problems and greater insight into the mechanisms that contribute to the meaning of narrative texts in general. Literary studies can also benefit by re-casting their assumptions and theories in terms formal enough to lead to experiments on computers. We show that current AI models of story understanding require some fundamental changes in order to handle literary narrative, in areas such as the representation of sentence meaning, the understanding of a text's purpose and themes, the derivation of meaning from non-narrative textual features, and the need for more explicit and flexible models of the reader's activity, goals, and abilities. We propose a general model of understanding that requires an interpreter capable of simulating different readers and operating at a level outside and surrounding those of current AI models.

Writer-Audience Relationships: Analysis or Invention?

As my freshman composition classes begin each fall, I find that I am faced with two major problems: the first is the deeply embedded freshman concept that successful writing is the same as successful proofreading; the second is that the written word-especially the printed word-is seen as a fixed and passive artifact. In practice these two beliefs combine to produce a mindset that turns the writing process into a search, usually unsuccessful, for the sentence, paragraph, or essay. These students have heard English teachers pay lip service to the possibility of alternatives in writing, to the writer's control of his material, to the latitude open to a writer, but they know full well this is lip service only: if you choose the subject and say the things about it you get an A; otherwise (i.e. usually) you don't guess right and you get a C, or worse, as well as a collection of red grunts such as Awk, Coh, or Agr. This, of course, tends to prove the proofreading thesis. Like all composition teachers, I struggle to counter these beliefs, but I struggle selectively. That is, I do feel that proofreading is important, but that it must post-date, not antedate other skills, and I can usually convince my students of the validity of my position. On the second point, however, I usually have more difficulty. I do not feel that writing is passive, either as process or product; I feel strongly that the reader plays an active role, and that the writer, when writing, must be consciously aware of the reader's activity. Quite obviously, I am not alone in this conviction, for most texts designed for use in beginning composition classes do pay some attention to the writer's awareness of his reader. However, as I have tried in my classes to use the advice provided in such works, I have become increasingly disturbed not only about the superficiality of the advice itself, but about the philosophy which seems to lie beneath it. It seems to me that there are several wrong notes being sounded, but that there are some potential correctives available. Acknowledged or not, most composition texts rely heavily upon classical rhetorical concepts. While this reliance has had several results-most obvi-