Moderating readers and reading online

Cognitive stylistics is primarily concerned with the cognitive processes -mental simulationsexperienced by readers. Most cognitive stylisticians agree that experiences of reading texts are dynamic and flexible. Changes in the context of reading, our attentional focus on a given day, our extra background knowledge about the text, and so on, are all factors that contribute to our experience of a fictional world. A second reading of a text is a different experience to a first reading.As researchers begin to systematically distinguish between the 'solitary' and 'social' readings that constitute reading as a phenomenon (Peplow et al., 2016), the relationship between multiple readings and the nature of their processing become increasingly pertinent. In order to explore this relationship, firstly we examine the different ways in which re-reading has previously been discussed in stylistics, grounding our claims in an empirical analysis of articles published in key stylistics journals over the past two decades. Next, we draw on reader response data from an online questionnaire in order to assess the role of re-reading and the motivations that underpin it. Finally, we describe an exercise for the teaching of cognitive stylistics, specifically applying schema theory in literary linguistic analysis (Cook, 1994), which illustrates the need to distinguish between readings as part of an analysis.Through these three sections we argue that our experiences of texts should be considered diachronically, and propose that the different readings that make up an analysis of a text should be given greater attention in stylistic research and teaching.

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“…For the even more dedicated, group reads of the letters also take place. (Thomas and Round, 2016: 245)…”

Section: 2 ‘Re-reading’ In Published Stylistic Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Re-reading in stylistics

Harrison

Nuttall

2018

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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“… 4. See Thomas and Round (2016) for more on digital public reading of Austen. …”

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confidence: 99%

Commonplacing the public domain: Reading the classics socially on the Kindle

Rowberry

2016

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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Amazon leads the market in ebooks with the Kindle brand, which encompasses a range of dedicated e-reader devices and a large ebook store. Kindle users are able to share the experience of reading ebooks purchased from Amazon by selecting passages of text for upload to the Kindle Popular Highlights website. In this article, I propose that the Kindle Popular Highlights database contains evidence that readers are re-appropriating commonplacing -the act of selecting important passages from a text and recording them in a separate location for later re-use -while reading public domain titles on theKindle. An analysis of keyness in a corpus of 34,044 shared highlights from public domain titles suggests that readers focus on words relating to philosophy and values to draw an understanding of contemporary society from these classic works. This form of highlighting takes precedent over understanding and sharing key narrative moments.An examination of the top ten most popular authors in the corpus, and case studies of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and William Shakespeare's Hamlet, demonstrates variation in highlighting practice as readers are choosing to shorten famous commonplaces in order to change their context for an audience that extends beyond the original reader. Through this analysis, I propose that Kindle users' highlighting patterns are shaped by the behaviour of other readers and reflect a shared understanding of an audience beyond the initial highlighter.

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“…We need to be careful in generalizing about readers' behaviours, since the texts and the readers on Wattpad are only a subgroup of all kind of literary texts and readers. The young age of Wattpad users and their still relative small cultural capital may affect the way they talk about books, as it also happens in other kinds of digital platforms [8,123,124]. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that we did not focus on the response of individual readers, we rather created a statistical model of a collective response to stories.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wattpad as a resource for literary studies. Quantitative and qualitative examples of the importance of digital social reading and readers’ comments in the margins

2020

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The end of deep reading is a commonplace in public debates, whenever societies talk about youth, books, and the digital age. In contrast to this, we show for the first time and in detail, how intensively young readers write and comment literary texts at an unprecedented scale. We present several analyses of how fiction is transmitted through the social reading platform Wattpad, one of the largest platforms for user-generated stories, including novels, fanfiction, humour, classics, and poetry. By mixed quantitative and qualitative methods and scalable reading we scrutinise texts and comments on Wattpad, what themes are preferred in 13 languages, what role does genre play for readers behaviour, and what kind of emotional engagement is prevalent when young readers share stories. Our results point out the rise of a global reading culture in youth reading besides national preferences for certain topics and genres, patterns of reading engagement, aesthetic values and social interaction. When reading Teen Fiction social-bonding (affective interaction) is prevalent, when reading Classics social-cognitive interaction (collective intelligence) is prevalent. An educational outcome suggests that readers who engage in Teen Fiction learn to read Classics and to judge books not only in direct emotional response to character's behaviour, but focusing more on contextualised interpretation of the text.

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Moderating readers and reading online

Cited by 17 publications

References 19 publications

Re-reading in stylistics

Re-reading in stylistics

Commonplacing the public domain: Reading the classics socially on the Kindle

Wattpad as a resource for literary studies. Quantitative and qualitative examples of the importance of digital social reading and readers’ comments in the margins

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