Forgetting Fiction: An Oral History of Reading: (Centred on Interviews in South London, 2014–15)

Spontaneous transmedia co-location: Integration in memory

“…The respondents were first asked to select no less than three works of literature they remembered well, and then they were asked a set of questions designed to probe what exactly they remembered the most, and correspondingly, what they forgot most readily. In that respect, the study was designed to an extent as a reconfiguration of what constitutes literature, along similar lines to oral history investigations conducted previously (Lyons and Taksa 1992) and subsequently (Trower 2020) in other English-speaking countries. Although very few such studies have been made, the Trower study is comparable to the present one in its methodology and results, particularly when it comes to the type of responses elicited: 'To use psychological terminology, when readers are interviewed about their memories of fiction, the type of memory that seems most operational is usually 'episodic' (concerning autobiographical experiences that can be explicitly stated) rather than 'semantic' (encompassing the 'storage of words and meanings').…”

“…Although very few such studies have been made, the Trower study is comparable to the present one in its methodology and results, particularly when it comes to the type of responses elicited: ‘To use psychological terminology, when readers are interviewed about their memories of fiction, the type of memory that seems most operational is usually ‘episodic’ (concerning autobiographical experiences that can be explicitly stated) rather than ‘semantic’ (encompassing the ‘storage of words and meanings’). Readers tend more readily to remember experiences of reading novels, in other words, than the content of the novels themselves’ (Trower 2020, 271).…”