Openness, Reflective Engagement, and Self-Altering Literary Reading

Existential reflection and morality

“…Building on Mukarovsky (1964), Shklovsky and Berlina (2017), and others, we have proposed that (and how) literature can, for some, set in motion the distinctly aesthetic form of reading engagement that Expressive Enactment (ASQ-EE) captures and that brings Husserl's (2001) active ego and Gallagher (2012) higher-order sense of agency onto the scene (Kuiken and Sopcak, 2021;Sopcak and Kuiken, 2022). In fact, the actively expressive explication characteristic of Expressive Enactment (ASQ-EE) has this reflective sense of agency at its core and is related to the existential-phenomenological notion of freedom as the ability and responsibility to actively and expressively explicate and act upon "sense-constituting livedexperience" (Husserl, 2001: 13).…”

“…The overarching proposal is that defamiliarizing linguistic structures elicit perceptual, physiological, or behavioral effects. While support for some of these effects is available (e.g., Hakemulder, 2004Hakemulder, , 2020van Peer, 2007;Jacobs, 2015), we have distinguished these from a distinctly aesthetic engagement with literature, which is characterized by what the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl has termed "egoic acts" and "awakenings" (Husserl, 2001) and expressive explication of affective resonances (i.e., lifting out the felt sense of metaphoric resonances; Kuiken and Sopcak, 2021;Sopcak and Kuiken, 2022). Husserl, in turn, is part of a tradition in philosophy that dates back to Heraclitus and more recently Descartes within which emphasis is placed on the importance of reflection that goes beyond passive recognition of reified (sedimented) categorial objects, and instead toward expression of lived experience.…”

The year’s work in stylistics 2021

“…Chapters in this section are Kucirkova and Kümmerling-Meiabuer’s (2021) ‘Children’s reading for pleasure with digital books’, Black et al’s (2021) ‘Stories and their role in social cognition’ and Tukachinsky Forster’s (2021) ‘Character engagement and identification’. The next and longest section in the book, ‘Narrative Engagement and Experiential Depth’, focusses on how readers engage with texts and includes ‘Kuijper et al’s (2021) ‘Narrative absorption: an overview’, Kuiken and Sopčák’s (2021) ‘Openness, reflective engagement, and self-altering literary reading’, Oliver et al's (2021) ‘Meaningful Responses to narrative digital media: research from a media psychology perspective’ and Soon Khoo’s (2021) ‘Audience reception of tragic entertainment and the value of cathartic reflection’. The penultimate section of the collection, ‘Enhanced Social Well-being’, includes ‘Literary reading and mental wellbeing’ (Billington and Steenberg, 2021) which discusses the role that reading groups have on mental and physical health, and Hanauer’s (2021) ‘Poetic Writing research: the history, methods, and outcomes of poetic (auto) ethnography’, which reviews research on links between poetic writing and lived experience.…”

Paths to transformation across contemporary reading practices: The role of motivations and genre preferences.

“…The core assumption of this study is that why we read and what we read are related to how reading affects our lives. A growing body of research focuses on the transformative effects of reading fiction (Fialho, 2019;Tangerås, 2020), often articulating these effects in terms of self-modifying feelings or self-altering experiences (Kuiken & Sopčák, 2021). Several findings indicate that reading fiction can lead to shifts in self-understanding (Djikic & Oatley, 2014;Sikora et al, 2011;Tangerås, 2020) and enhanced social cognition (Eekhof et al, 2022;Kidd & Castano, 2013), i.e., it deepens the perception of both self and others.…”

“…Transformative effects of reading, in terms of shifts in self-understanding and enhanced social cognition, have been the topic of a variety of theoretical and empirical studies recently (cf. Fialho, 2019; Kuiken & Sopčák, 2021). However, most studies on this topic focus on print (and literary) fiction, thus ignoring the multifaceted, transmedial reading practices of the digital era.…”