Bodily involvement in readers’ online book reviews: applying Text World Theory to examine absorption in unprompted reader response

Abstract

Abstract David Miall was, for many scholars, the person welcoming them into the field of empirical literary studies. The research he conducted together with Don Kuiken on the effects of stylistic features on reading, with a central role for (self-modifying) feeling (cf. Miall, David S. & Don Kuiken. 1994. Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories. Poetics 22(5). 389–407) has been the inspirational foundation for much of the research conducted in this and other fields, such as cognitive poetics. By combining methods from traditional literary reading (such as close reading), with methods more commonly used in psychology (such as experimental designs and self-report questionnaires), he gave new depth to the concept of reader response research (Whiteley, Sara & Patricia Canning. 2017. Reader response research in stylistics. Language and Literature 26(2). 71–87), concerning himself with actual readers’ testimonials. In honour of David, this paper will present a close reading, not of a literary text, but of a particular reader testimonial, namely an online book review. By applying a close reading informed by Text World Theory, I attempt to show how the social context in which this review was written influenced the expression of narrative absorption the reader experienced during reading. Consequently, I argue for an expansion not just of the methodological toolbox we use to investigate absorption in online social reading, but for an expansion of the concept of story world absorption itself.