What is literariness? Empirical traces of reading

It is now widely maintained that the concept of "literariness" has been critically examined and found deficient. Prominent literary theorists have argued that there are no special characteristics that distinguish literature from other texts. Similarly, cognitive science has often subsumed literary understanding within a general theory of discourse processing. However, a review of empirical studies of literary readers reveals traces of literariness that appear irreducible to either of these explanatory frameworks. Our analysis of readers' responses to several literary texts (short stories and poems) indicates processes beyond the explanatory power of current inferential or situation models. Such findings suggest a three-component model of literariness involving foregrounded text features, readers' defamiliarizing responses to them, and the modification of personal meaning as a consequence. We argue that feeling, not cognition, is the primary vehicle for the processes of literary understanding. What is literariness? Empirical traces of reading What sort of activity is the reading of literature? There are several different answers to this question, depending on the theoretical commitment of the respondent. It may, for example, be explained as a type of discourse processing amenable to cognitive