Anta Abdellah
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Introduction
Where Chapter 8 is different is that it uses
cognitive theory to model the processes
involved in reading literature.
The branch of linguistics which deals with
such modelling is known as cognitive poetics
(see Stockwell, 2002; Gavins and Steen,
2003), and the cognitive theories that I draw
on here are relevance theory and schema
theory.
Cognitive theories
Schemata
Narrative
fiction
Corpus –
analysis
Relevance
Against
Grice
Grice introduced four basic maxims (quantity: give as much information
as is required and no more; quality: be truthful; relation: be relevant;
manner: be clear).
In contrast to Grice, Sperber and Wilson argue that only one maxim is
necessary — that of relevance. They contend that the human brain is
genetically geared to seek relevance in any form of communication
and through human evolution has become very efficient at doing so.
Therefore, for Sperber and Wilson, there is in fact no ‘cooperative
principle’ to follow.
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Within the perspective of Sperber and Wilson’s
relevance theory, a piece of language has an
in-built guarantee that it is relevant.
It comes with a presumption that it is the most
relevant way for the author or speaker to
communicate a set of assumptions.
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For Sperber and Wilson (1995), a text has
optimal relevance if for minimu, effort in
reading it, its processing leads to maximum
cognitive effects.
In this section, we will look at how relevance
theory might help to illuminate the nature of
literary reading and whether or not this is
different from non-literary reading.
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In Reading A, Relevance and literature’, Tony
Bex draws on relevance theory in an attempt
to show how literary texts are different to
non-literary texts, such as the AA advert,
because of how they are read.
Part of his case involves arguing that literary
texts have no necessary practical
consequences for the reader.
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On the principle of relevance, minimum effort is
invested for maximum cognitive effects.
Any additional processing effort in a reader’s
search for optimal relevance needs to be
balanced by a suitable set of effects.
So, for Bex, readers assume that the additional
processing involved in finding relevance in the
text world they create will lead to the following:
cognitive effects of enjoyment, stimulation,
mental enactment in being apt to use an
imaginary world to reflect on, judge or escape
from the actual world, etc.
The concept of schema was first used by the German
philosopher, Kant, in the eighteenth century but in the
twentieth century was initially associated with the
work of the psychologist, Bartlett (1932).
 Attempts to generate computer models of human
text processing led to the realisation that this involves
not only knowledge of language but also organised
knowledge of the world.
 Guy Cook, in Reading B, derives his schema
framework from Schank and Abselson (1977), who put
forward one of the most complete and influential
models in the artificial intelligence revival of schema
theory in the 1970s.
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Example: Consider this text:
“John put his foot down on the accelerator and was now
hurtling along the roads. He was way out of the city
and the country roads were empty. Such a beautiful
pastoral scene.. But in being so absorbed in the pastoral
scene, John soon became lost”.
 Comment
That John is lost is not made explicit above. So if you
understood readily what was happening here, it is
because you have a set of schemata for what happens
when people get lost while out driving.
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Script
Goal
Plan
Theme
One that you most probably activated is called a script. A
script refers to knowledge of a stereotypical situation or
activity.
 A second schema that was likely generated is known as a
goal and this relates to stereotypical purposes.
 To understand the goal, you would need to have activated
another schema. This other type of stereotypical schema
is known as a plan and is often activated in advance of a
goal schema, A plan is something that needs to happen so
that a goal can be achieved.
 There are schemata which are less tied to specific
situations but derive from our evaluations of our
experience. They are known as themes. Themes thus
carry much more of an element of subjectivity in contrast
to scripts, plans and goals, which are more stereotypical.
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The advert analysed by Cook has much
formal patterning and deviation.
The advert then results in schema
reinforcement. The poem, on the other
hand, is not as dense with linguistic
patterning and deviation, yet could still be
regarded as literary. This is. for Cook, because
the poem leads to schema refreshment, in
leading to cognitive change.
[.literariness.. as a dynamic interaction between
linguistic and text-structural form on the one hand, and
schematic representations of the world on the other,
whose overall result is to bring about a change in the
schemata of the reader. (Cook, 1994, p. 182)
 He uses the term ‘discourse deviation’ for the
phenomenon where linguistic or text-structural
deviation ‘interacts with the reader’s existing
schemata to cause schema refreshment’.
 In other words, literature works in the way it does
because of the interaction between formal deviation in
the text and what the reader brings to the text.
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Another key idea in Cook (1994) in the discussion
of schema refreshment is that of novel linking of
schemata.
For Cook, literary texts typically evoke
conflicting and open-ended schemata and
establish complex and novel relationships
between them. In his reading of William Blake’s
poem, ‘The Tyger’, the following script schemata
are activated: TIGER, FORESTS, NIGHT,
BLACKSMITH, ARTISTS, GOD, SPEAR,
THROWER, TEARS.
The first critic I mention is Lesley Jeifries. While Cook
has a focus on the literary experience in the individual,
Jeifries argues that literary experience is likely to be
communal for readers if they do not have schemata
‘which are culturally dominant’ (Jeifries, 2001, p. 340).
 Another critic is Elena Semino (1997, p. 154), who,
drawing on Cook’s work, suggests that discourse
deviation and thus schema refreshment may only be a
property of prototypically literary texts. She argues
that, in practice, texts that are regarded as literary
range on a continuum from schema reinforcement at
one end to schema refreshment at the other.
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Relevance theory and schema theory are from different
scholarly traditions. Relevance theory is part of a branch
of linguistics known as ‘pragmatics’ which has its roots in
philosophy.
 Schema theory, on the other hand, derives from work in
psychology and artificial intelligence. Despite this, for
Semino (1997, p. 159) they are connected.
 Sperber and Wilson claim that in comprehension we
always aim to balance the effort involved in searching and
activating background knowledge with the resulting
cognitive effects.
 In schema-theory terms, this is equivalent to saying that
we activate a schema when its contribution to
interpretation counter-balances the effort expended in
activating it.
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The narrative is able to achieve sympathy
with the candidate and a degree of suspense
at the end by invoking relevant schemata as
well as through its careful shifts in narration,
tense and co-text.
This narrative technique of getting us to construct a
text world and then to refresh it is not just used in
novels. Other narrative genres such as films also use
such a device. This is not, though, to say that this is
how all narratives work.
 However, narratives through use of focaliser
techniques are able to position readers to
sympathise with or even identify with a character or
set of characters.
 That is, the genre of narrative fiction is well placed to
‘play with’ readers through refreshing text worlds.
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Corpus phraseology evidence corroborates the
intuition that it is common in language use to indicate
purpose around ‘waiting’, i.e. to make linguistically
explicit plan and goal schemata.
 But the corpus search also tells that usage of loitering
‫ تلكأ‬is more complicated.
 People can also loiter in the sense of just ‘hanging
about’ with no clear and specific intention to act.
 In analysing corpus evidence though we must be
careful to distinguish quantitative frequency evidence
from qualitative evidence about the salience of a
phenomenon in a culture.
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As we have seen in this chapter, Cook and
Semino are mostly concerned with the
outcome of our engagement with a literary
work — schema refreshment or schema
reinforcement.
It could be argued that the reason many
poems work for a large number of readers is
because they have the quality of ‘optimum
literary vagueness’ which draws readers in to
‘fill the vacuum’, to project schemata into
them in their generation of a text world.
- The corpus evidence helps substantiate vagueness and
ambiguity.
 An advantage of using corpus evidence with ‘Street Song’
is that it assists explanation of why the poem is likely to be
‘dynamic and disturbing’ for readers more generally. It
suggests that a reader might not always be sure whether
to project plan schemata into the poem or not.
 Finally, the tension about salience and frequency
mentioned earlier always needs to be borne in mind when
using corpus evidence.
 Nevertheless, use of corpora in the way shown offers a
method for developing constrained hypotheses, i.e. ones
worth empirically –testing.
Conclusion
This chapter has gone beyond the idea that
literariness only resides in the text, a perspective that
was dealt with particularly in Chapters 2, 3 and 6.
 It has done this by discussing the kinds of cognitive
processes involved in literary reading and whether
literariness can be defined in terms of cognitive
effects.
 Though this chapter has explored the relationship
between literariness and the reader’s cognitive
processes, the reader has been an idealised one.
 Next chapter is on readers and writers.

Antar Abdellah
In this chapter I will draw on a sociocultural approach to
readers and writers, which I am using to encompass two
things:
• To indicate that my interest is in real readers and
writers.
• To acknowledge the importance of context for
understanding what real readers and writers do in, and
with, literary texts.
Key early writers who shifted their focus away from
the formal properties of texts to a focus on how
readers ‘received’ texts are Jauss (1982) and Iser
(1974).
 Jauss was interested in bringing the reader, rather to
the centre of literary studies and in historicising
judgments of aesthetic and literary quality.
 Iser (1974) introduced the influential notion of the
‘implied reader’.
 A range of terms have since been used to refer to the
‘reader’, some of these are listed and briefly explained
below.
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I continue with the empirical interest in the
following sections where I discuss different
ways in which researchers are setting out to
explore how real readers engage with literary
texts.
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Expert Reading 1: Feminism:
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar focus on the constraints
under which Catherine, the female protagonist in the
novel, has to live and act. They illustrate how the character
is forced to act in accordance with the expectations
surrounding what it means to be a woman in nineteenthcentury England
This kind of commentary illustrates some key strands of
feminist literary criticism:
(a) an interest in exploring the ways in which female
characters are portrayed;
(b) an interest in exploring binary constructions of
gender— male! female, masculine/feminine — and the
values attached to these:
(c) a focus on patriarchy and of power relations.
 Expert Reading 2: post colonialism:
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The kind of commentary that Said makes here is part of a
larger tradition, which Said himself helped to forge, often
referred to as post colonialist criticism, where the
relationship between Britain and the empire, as played out
in literary texts, is made the object of analysis and explored
critically
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Interestingly, neither Expert Reading I or 2 seeks to define
the literary value of the texts by making close reference to
their formal features. Rather they offer specific kinds of
readings drawing on particular theoretical and critical
frameworks.
 Expert Reading 3: literary Value:
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In contrast, Roger Simmonds focuses on a text whose literary value is
under some dispute. His focus, and indeed his aim, in discussing these
texts seems to be to claim a literariness for the texts and, in so doing,
argue that they have literary value.
There are several points I wish to draw from this focus on experts’
readings. Reading from a sociocultural perspective is understood not
(primarily) as an individual phenomenon but rather as a situated
activity, that is, as taking place and being shaped by the context of a
particular time and place, and as involving the following:
 1 Traditions of reading emerge from specific communities.
2 Readings are embedded in particular theoretical traditions.
3 Texts can be read and valued differently.
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Together, the three expert readings here
illustrate a particular way of engaging with
literary texts which are associated with a
particular community:
the ‘academic’ or ‘intellectual’ community.
They seem to reflect Fish’s notion of the
‘informed reader’, reading from the position of a
particular ‘interpretive community’ (Fish, 1980)
that engages with texts in rather specialised
ways.
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In order to make sense of literary texts, readers
draw (explicitly or implicitly) on theoretical
traditions of reading.
This is particularly evident in expert readings of
literature since the 1960s where theory itself
became explicitly valued as a tool for making
sense of literary texts.
The prominence of different theories in
academic fields at specific historical moments
influences experts’ interpretations of texts and
assumptions about their value.
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Whether familiar or not with the original texts
discussed above, you may have found some
of the experts’ comments unusual or
surprising.
We each - whether expert or non-expert bring our own specific history to the reading
of texts.
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1 Such readings bear no relation to what
other real or ‘ordinary’ readers do.
2 Such approaches exert too powerful an
influence over the discipline of literary studies
itself.
psycho-formalism.
This approach includes a wide range of interests such as:
the relationship between personality types and reading
and writing; ‘processing’ patterns, such as the effect of
the speed of reading on how people read; comprehension
strategies.
 A significant strand involves research into how ordinary
readers respond to literary texts, and, in particular, how
they recognise and respond to features typically viewed as
‘literary’, such as rhyme, alliteration, and different forms
of linguistic deviation.
 Psycho-formalism thus combines an inherency approach
to literariness with a cognitive approach to readers’
engagement with literary texts.
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The principal criticisms that Miall and Kuiken make against much
literary theory are as follows:
• Particular elite ways of talking about literature have developed which
are very different from the way ordinary readers talk about and
engage with real texts.
• Claims made in expert readings are not based on any empirical
(observable) evidence, but rather on theory and furthermore on
experts’ use of a particular theory.
• Literary theorists do not focus on real readers but rather only make
claims about what real readers do, or in some instances, even dismiss
the value of considering what real readers do.
• In many expert readings, the text and its textual features have
become largely irrelevant as part of a wider backlash against
‘Formalism’.
• Literariness’ as a textual phenomenon is ignored.
• Undue importance is often given to the social context of readings
and the ways in which socially shaped reading conventions determine
individual readers’ engagement with texts.
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Hall provides an overview of ethnographic research which seeks to
document in different ways (survey, archive, observation or interview)
how ordinary readers engage with literary texts in their everyday lives.
The key elements of ethnography are:
• It is concerned with analysis of empirical data that is systematically
selected for the purpose.
• Those data come from ‘real-world’ contexts, rather than being
produced under experimental conditions created by the researcher.
• Data is gathered from a range of sources including observation,
interviews and documentation.
• The focus is a single setting or group, of relatively small scale, or a small
number of these.
• Much ethnography seeks to explore participants’ perspectives.
• The analysis of the data involves interpretation of the meanings and
functions of human actions and mainly takes the form of verbal
descriptions and explanations, with quantification and statistical analysis
playing a subordinate role at most.
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The focus is on three dimensions:
1 The social contexts in which creative writers
develop their relationships with language;
2 The ways in which writers draw on specific
linguistic and other semiotic resources in
different linguistic and cultural contexts;
3 The significance of different kinds of readers
for writers at different moments in time.
McEwan describes his journey as a developing
creative writer from the close community of his
childhood towards the rather more abstract and
diffuse community of writers of literature.
 In this journey, his first community — mother home,
English working and lower middle class — powerfully
shapes the particular kind of relationship he has with
the resources of the creative writer- language.
 McEwan’s comments suggest that the creative writer
has to develop a sensitivity whereby language as a
whole is made strange’, that is, it becomes visible as
an object to be consciously forged by the writer
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Unlike McEwan who describes the extreme caution with
which he approaches language and crafts his sentences,
Roy says that she doesn’t think about language at all and
gives an impression of writing freely and without effort, ‘I
don’t rewrite’.
 However she also indicates a more deliberate and
conscious approach to the construction of her texts
overall. In general, she emphasises pleasure as a central
dimension to her creative writing, which contrasts with
the struggle emphasised by McEwan.
 Roy’s comments in the interview alongside her own
writings reflect the nature of English as a global semiotic
resource and three specific ways in which such a resource
is being used by creative writers.
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Firstly, English involves multiple varieties because of its use
across many different geographical and linguistic contexts.
Secondly, a common feature of texts written out of multilingual
contexts is the juxtaposition of English with other languages
Thirdly, Ter, writers — whether monolingual or multilingual
users of English - do not simply use words from existing varieties
of languages, but also invent their own usages.
As indicated by McEwan’s comments and in Joyce’s inventions
above, in many ways the key issue faced by all creative writers
(whatever their social, cultural and linguistic context) is the
same: how to take control over the ‘stuff of writing — the
range of linguistic and other semiotic resources — and to create
these anew adopting a range of stylistic strategies.
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Different readers react differently to the
writer’s text.
Sometimes, readers even (mis)read the text.
One explanation is that the crystallization of
themes is not suitable for a time or a region.
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A writer’s writing is always informed by
readings, and in part re-writings of others words.
‘Writing back’ and ‘talking back’, as mentioned
in Reading B, are phrases which explicitly signal
this in the context of feminist and postcolonial
writing, and are used to describe a particular
kind of response — challenging, responding,
resisting — to traditionally conceived notions,
products and practices of ‘English literature’.
Addressivity is another term belonging to Bakhtin’s
Sociolinguistic theory.
 An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its
quality of being directed to someone, its addressivity.
 Both the composition and, particularly, the style of the
utterance depend on those to whom the utterance is
addressed, how the speaker (or writer) senses and
imagines his addressees, and the force of their effect on
the utterance.
 Bakhtin’s emphasis on the powerfully interactive
relationship between writers, readers and texts has
increasingly been taken up in recent times in approaches
to literature and literary activity.
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Readers &
Writers
Readers
Expert
feminism
Post
colonialism
Writers
Ordinary
Literary
Value
Social
Background
Psycho
formalism
Eng Global
resource
Ethnography
Writing Back / Addressivity