Cognitive Science and the History of Reading

Elfenbein, Andrew

doi:10.1632/003081206x129675

Cited by 19 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Indeed, other literary tropes and cues might also have demonstrable effects on readers' moment-by-moment activities in the service of comprehension and on the products of those processes (Elfenbein, 2006). For example, modifying aphorisms to include rhymes can influence readers' beliefs about their validity, even when the rhymes do not contribute substantially to the semantic content of the messages (McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sweet Silent Thought

Lea

Rapp²,

Elfenbein

et al. 2008

Psychol Sci

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Poetic devices like alliteration can heighten readers' aesthetic experiences and enhance poets' recall of their epic pieces. The effects of such devices on memory for and appreciation of poetry are well known; however, the mechanisms underlying these effects are not yet understood. We used current theories of language comprehension as a framework for understanding how alliteration affects comprehension processes. Across three experiments, alliterative cues reactivated readers' memories for previous information when it was phonologically similar to the cue. These effects were obtained when participants read aloud and when they read silently, and with poetry and prose. The results support everyday intuitions about the effects of poetry and aesthetics, and explain the nature of such effects. These findings extend the scope of general memory models by indicating their capacity to explain the influence of nonsemantic discourse features.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sweet Silent Thought

Lea

Rapp²,

Elfenbein

et al. 2008

Psychol Sci

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“…In the Victorian context, Andrew Elfenbein has shown how current research into how readers process information during and after the act of reading can be useful for nuancing our perception of 19th‐century literary critical standards, beyond the widespread “Victorian dichotomy of the good, active reader versus the bad, passive reader” (496). In “Cognitive Science and the History of Reading” (2006), he examines Victorian reviews of Men and Women (critics commonly agreed that Browning was “the most difficult writer of the age”; 491) and finds that a modern scientific vocabulary, unlike the Victorian critics’ dichotomous one, highlights the complexity of the cognitive experience 19th‐century readers expected to have while reading a novel:…”

Section: Reading Consciousnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Psychology of Reading and the Victorian Novel

Gettelman

2012

Literature Compass

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This article examines a growing body of work on the psychology of novel reading in the Victorian period by focusing on how three related fields have recently, simultaneously, turned their attention to readers’ minds: the history of reading; studies of psychology and literature; and, more surprisingly, studies of Victorian sociability. Across these fields, critics have found that Victorian readers were not always expected to pay attention: 19th‐century psychologists and observers of literary culture thought that many layers and vagaries of the reader’s consciousness and unconscious mind were at work in the reading process. Newly accessible, first‐hand accounts of reading experiences have also underscored that Victorian readers used books in unpredictable ways, often as a prompt for their own associations or to turn inward and reflect on social practice. Partly in response to the Foucauldian emphasis on the coerciveness of novel reading that long monopolized literary studies, critics have been redrawing 19th‐century reading history to include not reading, or perhaps not only reading, but also the ways novel reading afforded unique forms of self‐knowledge amidst the pressures and worries of the modern Victorian world.

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“…Die zentralen theoretischen Ansätze zur Frage des literarischen Lesens stammen aus den 1970er und 1980er Jahren (Jauß, Iser und Eco), wie ein aktueller Überblick von Jahraus (2018) zeigt. Elfenbein formuliert pointiert: „Literary criticism has been better at developing a vocabulary for describing varieties of interpretation than for analyzing the microprocesses of reading” (Elfenbein, 2006, 484).…”

Section: Introductionunclassified