Style And Reader Response

Style and Reader Response: Minds, media, methods profiles the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches in reception-oriented research in stylistics. Collectively, the chapters investigate how real readers, players, audiences, and viewers respond to, experience, and interpret texts. Contributions to the book investigate discourse types such as contemporary literature, poetry, political speeches, digital fiction, art exhibitions, and online news discourse. The volume also exemplifies the variety of empirical approaches in reception research, with contributors drawing on a range of methods including discussion groups, interviews, questionnaires, and think-aloud protocols with data analysed from both online and offline sources. Style and Reader Response makes an important contribution to an emerging paradigm within stylistics in which verifiable insights from readers are used to generate new models and new understandings of texts across media, with each essay demonstrating the centrality of empirical research for theoretical, methodological, and/or analytical advancements within and beyond stylistics.

"Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism" collects the most important theoretical statements on readers and the reading process. Its essays trace the development of reader-response criticism from its beginnings in New Criticism through its appearance in structuralism, stylistics, phenomenology, psychoanalytic criticism, and post-structuralist theory. The editor shows how each of these essays treats the problem of determinate meaning and compares their unspoken moral assumptions. In a concluding essay, she redefines the reader-response movement by placing it in historical perspective, providing the first short history of the concept of literary response. This anthology remains an indispensable guide to reader-response criticism. -- From publisher's description.

This text, based on Louise M. Rosenblatt's transactional model of literature, focuses on the application of transactional reader-response theory in the classroom. It grows from frequent requests from secondary school and college teachers for teaching suggestions on how to put theory into practice. This is not a "What should I do on Monday?" cookbook, but an expression of the practice of theory in college and secondary school classrooms. The chapters portray a spectrum of strategies--including biopoems, expressive and imaginative writing, journal writing, readers' theater, role playing, and unsent letters--using as examples individual works from several genres. Recognizing that teachers who may have been trained in other theories and methodologies may be hesitant about their quite different role and expectations in the reader-centered classroom, the authors provide stepping stones to develop readiness and confidence, suggestions, and insights to ease the transition to the transactional model of teaching and learning. Pedagogical features: * An explanatory introduction to each section defines its orientation and describes the content and direction of the chapters it contains. * Invitations elicit engagement of readers with concepts, attitudes, or strategies presented in the chapters; they invite readers, as individuals or members of a small group, to consider ideas or to practice a strategy, among other activities, in order to enhance understandings. * A glossary defines key concepts and strategies discussed in the text. * A bibliography provides an extensive list of resources--books and journal articles--both theoretical and applied. New in the second edition: * Six new chapters--three deal with the roles of film-as-literature in the English classroom, and three with enhancing multicultural understandings. * Updates and revisions to several chapters that appeared in the first edition. * Invitations, new in this edition, have been added to focus and expand readers' thinking.

In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"-from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.

Does growing up have to mean growing apart? Identical twins Maya and Nikki have always agreed on the important things-their friends, the right boys, their plans for college and the future. But before senior year begins, too many things are changing. Their neighborhood is starting to get nice-and not really in a way Maya enjoys. With houses turning into trendy coffee shops and restaurants, and neighbors, including their best friend, Essence, being pushed out, Maya's neighborhood is becoming unrecognizable. And when a new-white-family buys the house Essence's mom rented, Nikki suddenly has a new best friend and Maya has a new admirer, someone she's not sure she should like. And then there's their principal, intent on prioritizing the comfort of white students at the expense of the school's largely Black identity. What's worse, no one seems to be as alarmed by these changes as Maya is-not even Nikki. As Maya struggles to hold on, she begins to wonder where-and with whom-she belongs. From Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Award-winning author Renée Watson comes a poignant novel about love for home and for ourselves, embracing change, and what it means to grow up.

Looks at the different ways in which emotions influence beliefs.

This book endorses Coleridge's statement: "nothing can permanently please which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so". It conceives 'Kubla Khan' as of a hypnotic poem, in which the "obtrusive rhythms" produce a hypnotic, emotionally heightened response, giving false security to the "Platonic Censor", so that our imagination is left free to explore higher levels of uncertainty. Critics intolerant of uncertainty tend to account for the poem's effect by extraneous background information. The book consists of three parts employing different research methods. Part One is speculative, and discusses three aspects of a complex aesthetic event: the verbal structure of 'Kubla Khan', validity in interpretation, and the influence of the critic's decision style on his critical decisions. The other two parts are empirical. Part Two explores reader response to gestalt qualities of rhyme patterns and hypnotic poems in perspective of decision style and professional training. Part Three submits four recordings of the poem by leading British actors to instrumental investigation.

Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.