What American Readers Remember: A Case Study

IF 0.1 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY
Lovro Škopljanac
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This article describes an archive consisting of literary memories obtained via interviews from one hundred contemporary readers of literature, sourced from a college town in the United States. The memories were summarized and studied in order to establish what readers tend to remember as important and/or impressive in their everyday reading of literature. The summaries include both quantitative and qualitative data, which are presented in brief extracts (tables) referring to facts such as recall of textual elements, circumstances of reading, and most remembered texts and authors. Characteristics of non-professional readers and their readings are thus observed according to three distinct sources of information: (a) the type of text they preferred; (b) the context of their reading; (c) the textual elements they found most memorable. All of these are considered in turn, including more specific discussion on topics of attachments to texts; the role of “classics”; and the readers’ paracanon. The study concludes with three main findings: (1) the participating American readers are shown to have rich and diverse memories of literary works, (2) which usually consist of coherent mental representations of the texts accompanied by some sort of episodic memory attaching them to their lived experience, (3) and these representations mostly involve unusual and incongruous characters and plot occurrences set against the ground of narrative content, which might imply that literature is used as a form of simulation.
美国读者记得什么:一个案例研究
这篇文章描述了一个档案,其中包括通过采访100名当代文学读者获得的文学记忆,这些读者来自美国的一个大学城。对这些记忆进行了总结和研究,以确定读者在日常文学阅读中倾向于记住的重要和/或令人印象深刻的内容。摘要包括定量和定性数据,这些数据以简要摘录(表)的形式呈现,涉及事实,如对文本元素的回忆、阅读环境以及记忆最深的文本和作者。因此,非专业读者及其阅读材料的特征是根据三个不同的信息来源来观察的:(a)他们喜欢的文本类型;(b) 他们阅读的背景;(c) 他们发现最令人难忘的文本元素。所有这些都是依次审议的,包括关于文本附件主题的更具体的讨论;“经典”的作用;以及读者的副典。研究得出三个主要结论:(1)参与的美国读者对文学作品有着丰富多样的记忆,(2)这些记忆通常包括对文本的连贯心理表征,并伴随着某种将其与生活经历联系在一起的情节记忆,(3)这些表现大多涉及以叙事内容为背景的不寻常和不协调的人物和情节,这可能意味着文学被用作一种模拟形式。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
AMERICAN STUDIES IN SCANDINAVIA
AMERICAN STUDIES IN SCANDINAVIA HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
8
期刊介绍: American Studies in Scandinavia, the journal of the Nordic Association for American Studies, is published twice each year, and carries scholarly articles and reviews on a wide range of American Studies topics and disciplines, including history, literature, politics, geography, media, language, diplomacy, race, ethnicity, economics, law, culture and society. American Studies in Scandinavia is sponsored by the National Councils for Research in Science and the Humanities in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, the journal is published by Odense University Press with the financial support of the Nordic Publications Committee for Humanist Periodicals.
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