Research Bulletin: Are Some Types of Book Titles Better Liked and Better Remembered?

Humans spend vast amounts of time engaging with fictional stories. There are four main theories that help to explain this love for fiction. First, fiction contains social and psychological experiences of the characters, which helps us gain a better understanding of our own world (Mar & Oatley, 2008). Second, humans are drawn to gossip, which is essentially what fiction is. Fiction gives us a window into the social relationships of the characters. Third, humans are drawn to the moral content of fiction. People enjoy rooting for the good guys, but also enjoy stories about morally ambiguous characters (Janicke & Raney, 2015). Lastly, fiction is associated with hard-wired pleasures, such as an attraction to wealth, power, and beauty (Pinker, 1997).
 
Barnes and Black (2022) wanted to examine whether book titles containing words associated with these four theories would be more appealing and better remembered than titles without such words. The researchers generated five different words associated with each of the four theories. For example, the words “guilty, innocence, virtue, taboo, and evil” were used to create titles related to morality. Five titles that were not related to any of the four categories were selected from the USA Today Bestseller list, to act as the control titles. Undergraduates were then randomly assigned to view these titles, rate how appealing each
was, and then were tested on their memory for each title.
 
Participants rated the titles associated with the four main categories (i.e., mental states, gossip, morality, and pleasure) as more appealing than the control titles. For recall, the “mental states” category was the least well remembered out of all the categories. Next time you go to the bookstore, it would be fun to see whether the bestselling books have titles related to mental states, gossip, pleasure, or morality!
 
References
 
Barnes, J. L., & Black, J. E. (2022). What’s in a name? Book title salience and the
psychology of fiction. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 16(2), 290–301.
 
Janicke, S. H., & Raney, A. A. (2015). Exploring the role of identification and moral
disengagement in the enjoyment of an antihero television series. Communications, 40(4),
485-495.
 
Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of
social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173–192.
 
Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. Norton Company.
 
Post by Tia Kleiner
 
* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).
 
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels

Our Souls At Night

The idea of “schema” was central to Frederic Bartlett’s book of 1932, Remembering, where he described a series of experiments in which people were asked to read a story, or to look at a picture, and then reproduce it either immediately or later. Bartlett’s proposal was that remembering is an activity based not on anything like a photograph or recording, but on an understanding—schema—of how, in a way that is familiar to a person and within a society, one does certain kinds of actions like getting onto a train, or sitting down with others for a meal, plus an emotional attitude together with a rather small amount of detail. In Art and Illusion, Ernst Gombrich (1960) took this idea into an understanding of representational painting which, he said, is based on schema plus correction: for instance, a general idea of what a mountain, or a house, or a person might look like, together with a correction so that it becomes more specific or, in the case of some paintings, new and surprising. 

 

Kent Haruf’s novel of 2015, Our Souls at Night is also based on a schema: our idea of what it is for two people to have an affair. In the first chapter of the book, we are introduced to the novel’s protagonist, the elderly widow, Addie Moore, who lives in a small town in Colorado. She walks over to the house, one block away, of another elderly person: a widower, Louis Waters, whom she knows a little bit but not at all well.  Invited in, she tells him that she won’t stay long, then says that she is getting cold feet. She then says this.

 

I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me… I mean we’re both alone. We’ve been by ourselves for too long. For years. I’m lonely. I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk.

 

The usual schema we might have of going to bed with someone, or having an affair, receives a correction. Addie says to Louis that she means what she says. “I’m not talking about sex" she says but "lying warm in bed, companionably.”

 

At first, Louis makes his visits late in the evening, when he is unlikely to be seen. Addie and he try to keep their arrangement secret. As they talk with each other about their marriages, their concerns, they find themselves becoming closer. One event which Addie recounted had been especially hard. Her five-year old daughter, Connie, had been playing in the back yard with her elder brother, Gene, and had run out into the street, had been hit by a car and died. The event had been devastating for Addie’s marriage and devastating for Gene. Addie became the target of both her husband’s and her son’s resentments.

 

Other people in the town start to notice Addie’s and Louis’s relationship and to talk about it; no longer a secret. The turning point of the novel occurs when Gene asks Addie to look after his young son, Jamie, for a while, because his wife has left him. Jamie is a rather neglected child, but Louis takes to him, looks after him as a parent might, buys him a dog, of which the boy becomes fond. 

 

What are your schemas for growing older, for families, for parental relationships, for affairs? 

 

What happens next in this novel? Do Addie and Louis get round to sex? What might Jamie think of what is going on? Maybe I should tell you. Maybe we should gossip. What do you think?

 

Frederic Bartlett (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Ernst Gombrich (1960). Art and illusion. Phaidon.

Kent Haruf (2015). Our souls at night. Knopf.

 

 

 

 

  

Will and Testament

In 2016, when it was published in Norway, Vigdis Hjorth’s novel, Will and Testament, became a best-seller. Last year it came out in English, translated by Charlotte Barsland. 

The story’s protagonist is Bergljot. Other characters include her elder brother, Bård, and her two younger sisters Astrid and Åsa, along with their mother and father. At the beginning of the novel, Astrid phones Bergljot, to say that their mother is in hospital, but is “all right.” She had taken an overdose, not for the first time. Astrid goes on to say that Bård had discovered that their father had transferred ownership of the family’s two seaside cabins to the two younger sisters, so there’s a “row” (the fifth word in this novel). In his will the father had specified that, at his death, instead of a cabin, Bård and Bergljot would each get a financial equivalent—a compensation, except that it isn’t.

Bergljot is a theatre critic and magazine editor, who is also working on a thesis on modern German drama. Twenty-three years earlier she’d abandoned her family of origin, and had as little to do with them as possible; all except Astrid, with whom she has been in touch during the six months that precede the events with which the novel starts. Bergljot married a “nice, decent man,” with whom she had three children. 

This is a novel of inwardness, told by the first-person narrator, Bergljot. In its thoughts and language, this novel is as good as anything since Virginia Woolf, but in addition—and this makes it special—the inwardness is connected and interconnected with Bergljot’s relationships: what a person can talk about and what a person can not. And to whom, and when. Vigdis Hjorth invites us readers into Bergljot’s mind. We take on her concerns and mentally engage with members of her family of origin, with her children, with her lovers, with her friend Klara. 

At the centre is a family secret. Among the siblings, Bård is on Bergljot’s side. He, too, has abandoned the family some twenty years previously. 

So what is the secret? If you don’t like spoilers, you had better not read on; you could just read the book. (Some people are perfectly happy with spoilers; see OnFiction 3 April 2017, because they can help us to decide whether to read or watch, and if we do so, we can perhaps engage in the story more deeply.) 

So here’s the spoiler, the secret. Bergljot comes out with it. This happens two thirds of the way through the novel (p. 184). Bergljot, her siblings, and their mother, meet with an accountant, to discuss the business interests and the will of the father, who had died three weeks before this meeting. Bergljot has written out, very carefully, what she wants to say at the meeting, on two pieces of paper. She starts to read. 

Astrid knows what’s coming. “Now is not the time or the place,” she says (p. 187). But Bergljot continues.

I’ve been scared of Dad my whole life, I continued, I didn’t realize how much until 17 December last year when he died. I experienced a physical sense of relief. When I was between five and seven years old and repeatedly sexually assaulted by Dad, he told me that if I ever told anyone then he would go to prison or Mum would die.

You’re lying, Mum shouted.

I didn’t say anything, I said, I repressed it. I was silent but my life became increasingly self-destructive and chaotic as everything that I had repressed began to surface. I realised that I needed help and I got it, after several tests I eventually qualified for free psychoanalysis … I told Mum what had happened, she refused to believe me. As did my sisters … (p. 188).

In these days of the #MeToo movement, recognition of this issue has increased. But rather than a focus, which has now become common in news-stories, on who remembered what, along with accusations, excuses, and denials, this novel invites us to consider what kinds of implications might occur for a woman who has been abused as a child, for her relationships with her parents, her siblings, her friends, her lovers, her children. Vigdis Hjorth visits all these issues, enabling us to think about ramifications, and interconnections. 

The centrepiece of this novel is that it’s when she is an adult that Bergljot comes to remember that her father had sex with her when she was five or six years old. But this novel is not really about the plot. Instead it’s about the inner dynamics of Bergljot’s mind, about how events and relationships affect and permeate her inner thoughts and emotions. Vigdis Hjorth is brilliant at letting us see how things go in the opposite direction as well: how Bergljot’s inner thoughts and emotions, affect her relationships—with everyone. 

Bergljot feels that her life has been undermined. Her mother denies everything, and responds to Bergljot with hostility. Two other people believe her: Bergljot’s brother Bård, and her friend Klara. Her youngest sister, Åsa doesn’t believe her. Her closest sister, Astrid, the novel’s second main character, is a human rights lawyer. She doesn’t know whether to believe Bergljot and Bård, or their mother, father, and younger sister. She tries her very, very best to consider everyone, in the most utterly fair-minded, totally irritating, way. 

And the reader? As we go along, we take in Bergljot’s thoughts, receive her phone calls and text messages, enter the circumstances depicted, and make them our own. They take on the kind of urgency that is important when we read a novel. We think about them, reflect upon them …

Vigdis Hjorth, Will and Testament (2019) translated by Charlotte Barslund. London: Verso.

Stories of the Earth: Prince reminds us how much care it takes to live with each other

The week of Earth Day was intense in Minneapolis this year. Earth Day eve, already a time of pensive introspection given the reminder of climate change this year has been (the pile of street snow that usually would not be melted at the end of my driveway for another month has been gone for over two months already!) and ongoing struggles with dire racial inequalities, also brought the news of Prince's death. As my hometown's most notable hero, Prince has inspired not only the overnight purplization of the city (everyone I encountered on Earth Day was wearing purple, and murals like the one pictured went up immediately), but also an Earth Day sung in and out with all night mourning dance parties. 

I will remain brief and encourage readers to go back to watching amazing Prince music videos and sharing their stories with friends, but will also share a quick reflection of my own. Listening to and watching the outpouring of remembrance and appreciation amongst all my friends (most of whom grew up here, in the inspiring and liberating purple shadow -- and who are giving bookish tributes, #princerevelry, and more), a significant part of what I am hearing echoed is the caring work that makes it possible to live with each other. Van Jones emotional remembrance perhaps has made this most visible for people, opening up the view to Prince's humanitarianism, if they hadn't been paying attention to visible work such as Planet Earth or his more subtle involvement building and funding Green for All and #YesWeCode. Watching those music videos (such as this one with Beyonce) in this light reveals ways of listening and responding that seem important to learn from (this moment, this move!) -- they make Prince so sexy and so loved partly because they show graceful and creative ways of acting on paying attention and caring. 

Caring enough to continue living here seems like one important way to practice our celebration of Earth and its communities, and trying to pay attention, then figuring out what to DO about what we've noticed, like Prince, seems a good tribute.

Re-appreciating Place

Last week, I had the opportunity to take part in a long-term learning project that has been named after various geographic regions where it takes place – in the case I participated in in northern Georgia, it is the Piedmont Project. In northern Arizona, it’s the Ponderosa Project, and I hear that there are many additional regional variants.  

These projects exist to engage faculty in the places in which they teach, and through that engagement, to support them in taking on sustainability themes in their courses—whether that be through explicit learning for sustainability and “education for sustainable development” (something the U.N. has just completed a decade of promoting), or rather more lightly through taking on a sustainability-themed example in a language class, for example, translating an explanation of campus recycling or energy conservation efforts. We returned repeatedly to the power of places for reminding people both of the most common tropes of sustainability work—the material processes of our everyday lives and their effects—and also, and perhaps more importantly, for engaging people in the wonder that inspires sustainability work, that makes people reflect on what should be sustained for all people to thrive in the long term.

I was prompted to share my experience because as a geographer, I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about and exploring place. But like any canon one learns, there can be a tendency with things once learned to seem like something everyone has learned. So no matter how much impact it had when I was first encountering the power of really noticing place, and paying attention to its qualities, and what being in place FELT like, it has still been remarkably easy to set it aside and not focus on what it offers in terms of entry points to experiential learning. 

Noticing place has its weirdnesses, too: in this amazing, clearly very place-inspired meeting spot, all of the bathrooms were graced with air freshener whose location in Georgia seemed to invite considerable analysis: I challenge anyone to describe the smell of TimeMist Clean Cotton—and to tell us where that places them.

The Mind and the Text

What is our relationship to the texts of poems, novels, short stories? Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon say that for too long the assumption has been, in literary studies, that a text is a physical object, out there in the world, and that we as readers have unconstrained access to it. In a 2015 paper, they argue that this is completely wrong. Our relationship with a text depends on the kind of engagement we have with it, and by what we remember of it.

Bortolussi and Dixon report two experiments. Separate groups of participants were asked to read either an interesting story: the first 7432 words of Ann Rice’s Interview with a vampire, or a less interesting story: the first 7753 words of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The story of Pendennis. Texts were read one sentence at a time on a computer screen. After they read each sentence, participants pressed a keyboard space-bar to see the next sentence. At ten unpredictable locations, instead of the next sentence participants were given a mental state probe in the form of a question about whether they were fully comprehending the story or thinking about something else. They then rated their mental state on a line with points that ranged from “Definitely thinking of something else” to “Definitely comprehending.” A second experiment was the same except that the question in the probe was, “Do you feel like you’re experiencing the story as if you were there or are you just reading superficially?” For this question the rating line was labelled, “Definitely reading superficially” to “Definitely experiencing the story.” After reading the story, subjects were tested for their memory of material in the sentences that preceded each mental state probe.

Bortolussi and Dixon found in both experiments that the piece from Interview was remembered better than the piece from Pendennis. In the first experiment, of participants who read Interview, those who were more on-task were more accurate in their memories for the sentences that preceded the mental state probes. The effect was also found for Pendennis but it was smaller. In the second experiment, although Interview was remembered better than Pendennis, for each story there was no relationship between level of engagement and accuracy of memories for the sentences that preceded the mental state probes.

The researchers concluded that we process stories not so much in terms of a text as an immutable object, but in terms of how we interact with it. They say (p. 46) that, “aesthetic reaction is not to the text, but rather to readers’ mental representation” of it.

Bortolussi, M., & Dixon, P. (2015). Memory and mental states in the appreciation of literature. In P. F. Bundgaard & F. Stjernfelt (Eds.), Investigations into the phenomenology and the ontology of the work of art: What are artworks and how do we experience them? (pp. 31-49). Heidelberg: Springer.
 

Phenological Anxiety and Abeyance

Last year at this time, I watched the leaves flame out with peculiar detachment: for the first time, I was leaving my temperate deciduous autumn during the brief interval between leaf fall and snow fall, dissociating the exhilarating experience of gorgeous foliage transformation from the anxious anticipation of winter. This year, I am attempting to channel that dissociation to mitigate the seemingly unavoidable resignation that comes with the end of warm season foliage.

Psychologically, part of what was interesting about trading in my usual excruciatingly cold winter for a cool southern hemisphere summer in Dunedin was that it did not feel quite like summer—it was much more like coasting in a pleasant autumn/spring holding pattern, the kind of seasonal dawn/dusk people in places like Florida and California must experience, complete with a full panoply of broadleaf evergreens whose home range just doesn’t extend quite this far. This in-between season is quite a contrast with the ominous gloaming of both the second half of autumn and the first half of spring in Minnesota, both of which twinkle with the starry brightness of long clear nights and the occasional crystalline sunny days of a winter too cold to snow but also stretch out with snow cover that one knows will last almost half of the year before the leaves flesh out again. Even if it might be t-shirt and swimming weather (like it is today!) while the leaves are crunchy on the beach in Minneapolis, one knows that the lake could freeze within the week, and this leads to a certain pinchedness that contrasts the relaxed abandon elicited by extended warmth in summer.

In a Dunedin kind of summer, any warm morning is almost certain to be followed by a stiff breeze off the cold ocean separating you from Antarctica, sucked in by the lifting warming of interior Otago. The short half-life of warmth prompts somewhat more structured adventure: one is motivated to get out into the promise of warmth but without the illusion of extended heat or the punishment of overheating. This is consistent with spring/fall activities of my prior experience, times when I have found it easiest to plan around the possibility of being outside, getting some sunshine and warmth in whatever time of day best allows it, and then retreating inside to get work done with the rest of the time—a rhythm that feels well balanced and measured, overextended into neither lassitude nor action.

The summer/winter rhythm, in contrast, often feels like one of allowing catch-up relaxation time contrasted with the holing up of cold months recognized to not be much good for fun. Everyday winter sports like biking or snowshoeing or skiing (even as a commute) are process-intensive enough with their bundling and equipment to feel laborious. And the cold is punishing enough to elicit a constant low-level vigilance. Even on days nice enough to lounge around outside if dressed warmly enough, for example, I’ve had police stop to make sure I wasn’t dead when trying to soak up some sun sitting against a tree in the park. Constant reminders of how not to be killed by the weather require a fair amount of the “hygge” coziness that has become a trendy aspiration of cold winter sojourns.

So as I watch orange, red, and yellow leaves stream off the trees today in the uncertain mid-autumn sunny warmth, I am compelled by ways to build up my measure of phenological equanimity in the face of oncoming winter. Phenology is the study of the signs of seasonal progression, and it was an unusual gift last year to be able to watch these signs without bracing for the onrush of seasonal symptoms one expects next (ice! snow! dryness crinkly with static, dark mornings, afternoons, and long nights and slippery roads). This year, I find myself poking at the edges of this anticipation in a more exploratory way, wondering how to build mitigation by other means than escape.

I remind myself that I already organize my daily commute around sun gathering, and that I own a reasonable trunkful of warm winter clothes. The walking and bike commute may soon be more difficult, but I have just discovered a bus route that stops within two blocks of my home and office. I am looking for some better sources of humidity, and spaces to be active and at ease without a lot of extra clothing this winter. If I could build into my schedule regular sessions working in community greenhouses, pleasant spaces, and sunny places to write, can those feel as ordinary, well-balanced, and un-emergency as staying out of the high sun in summer or keeping the garden weeded?

Two Sharp Shakes

On Indigenous Peoples Day, being back on laundry feels mundane—but I am going to celebrate efforts to decolonize places by understanding the stories we use to shape those places, in the hopes that such efforts can help us shape them more equitably. 

Partly because of health problems, and arguably also because of class positioning and the effects that has on people's tolerance for disgust and their enthusiasm for demonstrating cleanliness, my mother taught me how to do laundry when I was quite young. And after twenty years living with my mate, one of the things I still often find myself trying to demonstrate persuasively is two sharp shakes of each laundered item as it goes from the basket onto the line or into the dryer. 

I have never liked ironing. (See also: learning to do laundry before being very good at controlling steaming metal appliances, or small ladder required to reach into washing machine, requiring climbing up and then down to the dryer for each piece of clothes...) Given my rather strong aversion, I've always thought of the two sharp shakes mainly as a way to prevent wrinkles. As I've tried to justify it in my demonstrations—and as I've learned more about the dynamics of laundering—I've realized it's not just about wrinkles (although the pre-emptive smoothing of the collar and placket and pockets does save me a lot of ironing). It also shakes off lint from the wash, pollen from the yard, and the various bits of leaf and insects that may be resting on the clothes. 

The pollen pieces (along with molds) aren't something I'd ever thought of before quite recently—and hence the justification felt quite ad hoc, even if it was legitimate. It made me notice, however, that I was adopting reasons that contributed to my feeling of doing laundry right. Noticing the distance between my ability to explain why and this definitive sense that two sharp shakes seemed to both serve some functions and also set the appropriate pacing for laundry hanging made me also notice than when I was too rushed to take the time for each garments' shakes (it turns out I shake them both before hanging and after), the need to shake them out lingers with the clothing, and I'll find myself wondering if it's legit to shake them in the bedroom, or if I need to shake any potential loitering spiders out on the porch, or out the window.

This is clearly a trivial case. However, it strikes me as a good example of the functions that lurk in practices, waiting to be explored. Exploration may provide insights into what makes these practices meaningful—not necessarily why they are persuasive or optimal, but perhaps why they have been made to feel right, perhaps through only dimly remembered instructions or modeled behaviors (it would not have been till years after my formative laundry learning that I regularly hung laundry outside with my mother and grandmother). And it reminds us that the way that we shape spaces to provide these instructions, often outside of explicit language, seems worth regularly exploring and reinvesting in.

Finding Base, with love for Paul

On the occasion of celebrating Paul (a cousin of mine who was a well-loved wrestling coach in New York and who passed this week), I want to share a small story in three parts about finding base, a kind of metaphysical version of a wrestling parable I realize I learned from him.

The soundtrack for the story is the recent arrangement of Meghan Trainor’s ‘All about the Bass’ by the Postmodern Jukebox: I know it’s about bass and treble, not base and instability, but it makes a nice complement to Paul’s lifelong intense insistence on the enjoyment of the tenor.

The part of the story you should feel in your body is something I’m finally picking up from studying yoga with people learning to inhabit their bodies more fully even through disability: it’s all about the base. Bipedalism isn’t great to us in terms of a base of stability, and as we sway and twist under the various vicissitudes of life, we grip and slacken and may not often be reminded how to settle back into all the points of contact with balance we have – spreading the load out as easily as we can lift it, securing those points of contact with the floor, moving fluidly from there like Paul’s wrestlers.

Paul has been a solid part of all of the lives of my whole generation of our family. Rocked back on his heels, arms folded or in his pocket or gesturing along to his whistle, Paul made us feel where we were standing, and made us appreciate it by the intensity and effort he put into being there.

Growing up as a child of our extended family so palpably (my grandfather’s brother, his father, was dead before his childhood) – stretched between his visits and so visibly sharing his need, his toughly vulnerable quest to navigate a degree of lostness – he gave us so much coaching in the material and spiritual practice of how to relax into things, even when they were sad. And I really appreciate that coaching right now, as I tend to shift up toward my toes in the best of situations.

In celebration of resting space

When I packed up my home kitchen five months ago, it was with a sense of wonder at the number of relationships embodied in the jars stached around the space. A rich map of food chain explorations were laid out there, and although it was a little messy and overwhelming, it provided a concrete illustration of how vividly my days are packed with building and maintaining relationships with people who do interesting things with food and society. Food is something that’s constantly demanding, though – people always need to eat, and food and society organizations always are doing interesting things, and being engaged in such a broad topic definitely puts one at risk of succumbing to the syndrome of being too busy. My busy refrigerator, despite being planted squarely in my kitchen, was a portrait of being pulled across a lot of relational space.

Today, as I take a break to let the kitchen floor in Dunedin dry after mopping it and look through the emptied out, wiped down cabinets, the emotion that bellies out behind my sternum and keeps me feeling as if this is something beyond just a normal day is a feeling more specific to this space. It’s a feeling not unlike what I felt clearing out my office last autumn, as well, although books confer another layer of feeling, perhaps something more outward directed in the way the food collection in my home kitchen felt. Here, the foods that taste like this place—the pohutukawa honey, the apricots—are coming with me, and it is just the space I am leaving behind.   

But a space isn’t an empty hull. One day traveling along University Avenue in St. Paul a few years back, I was struck sharply by a sign that said “Cocoon House,” advertising clothing for women. For a tantalizing moment, in the part of attention that notices and spins things out into fanciful detail before the appraising eye pays more rational attention and trims back the imagination, I saw that place as a silky luxuriant nest, filled with lounging women resting on the cocooning environment of the space they had built. As I scrub its corners and shoo out the myriad moths and grasshoppers who have wandered in over a summer of open doors and windows, this space has these layers, of the months of meals cooked and cooked for me, the exercises done, the pages written, the movies watched, games of cards played, even conversations home over the long internet cable under the Pacific Ocean anchored all from this room.

In both the academic and artistic communities in which I have been trained, there is a strong emphasis on the sabbatical space: the moving away from the ordinary, and finding a regular time away. The distance from the everyday task has been emphasized, and I have been curious about what one now finds in an away space, given the ubiquity of these internet cables that tie us to our working communications. There is the “I am not checking my mail this sabbatical” method, and someday I would like to try that. But there is also something far more prosaic in the way that a retreat to a simplified version of the same kind of day allows one to rest and reflect on the construction of that day.

Toward the beginning of this time, I wrote about my appreciation for the supportive material tasks that it can be hard to properly incorporate when one’s schedule has gotten too full: being able to enjoy hanging out the laundry, luxuriate in making breakfast, write an exploratory page while the mopped floor dries. I am taking the time to document this layer of experience because I see that most of my colleagues are as bad as I am at practicing sabbatical time. With the urgency of the social organizing work we do, reflective time is hard to take, even when we know how useful it is. But perhaps for those of us for whom the traditional “day off” or “vacation weeks” tend not to be a move away from work, per se, we can still take some of the blessing of sabbatical practices by incorporating them into the rhythm of what we do.

Make the space sacred, revel in its richness – and do everything in your power to make sure everyone else can do the same.

Step out of franticness, if only to watch it from a more restful space and try to pick it up again more purposefully. Pay your employees for time spent reflecting on what they have done (/don’t pile more work on them than they can do in the time – if necessary, see what you might glean from some of their reflection time to organize their tasks to meet what satisfies them, but do not only incorporate the enjoyment of rest for its productive purposes). Not all people will enjoy the space the way I do. But pay attention to see whether you might, because a space that reinforces your refresh button makes everything more enjoyable.

Reflexive Dialogics

In recent posts, I have been thinking through some questions of internal dialogue. Noticing the process of narrating new places as I explore them has heightened my awareness of a relatively constant layer of internal dialogue, and I have become interested in the functions of this dialogic layer of thought.

One of my projects in my temporary home has been to make itako boards for planing in the surf here, as the shape of the waves is different from the water where I have swum before, and I have been exploring how to move in unfamiliar water. This has provided two domains for continuing my observation of internal dialogue.

First, surfing language is so amusingly already incorporated into everyday vernacular that there is a hiccoughing cadence to the process of realizing what words like “wipeout,” “bail,” and “rip” mean in embodied, rather than metaphorical, experience. I often find myself using the surfing terms I have picked up from pop culture in the imperative, directed at myself: “duck dive!”

I then often have an agonizing (and very motivated) moment with a wave looming up over me as I summon all of the embodied associations I have with this word to launch myself into (under) the wave (usually a second too late, after such a thought process, and often with the accompanying doubt, “or should that have been a turtle roll?). As the physical experience becomes more familiar and automatic, the verbal exploratory layer gets less noticeable. It is when I am flailing in the fizz that I thrash the potential accumulated glossary for insight; when I am shooting along in a wave, it seems less likely to be narrated. (It will be interesting to see if this is a parabolic association: perhaps once there is more bandwidth to spare, exploratory language will be more noticeable? Are there proportions of expertise to novelty that maximize or minimize internal narration?)

Second, the laborious process of making boards that were seaworthy provided a chance to observe the kind of dialogue that appears when doing repetitive things like sanding or painting. Almost every time I dug into the process of sanding to reach the state of even attention over the surface that contributes to a proper finish, I would find that quality of attention accompanied by the playing out of elaborate dialogues of fictional characters in my head. It reminded me of summers painting houses with my father—a very distinctive kind of imaginative dialogue, where I often came to notice that I was spinning out a story right in the middle of a complex plot.  

Together with my recent attention to the constant labeling efforts of internal narration, this familiar process made me think about how the dialogue that plays through our heads as we make sense of the things we are doing (or as we reach a certain daydreaming quality of attention) seems useful to understand. It tells about the complex networks of meaning and bias we bring to new situations, and reveals some of the ways that we bring our already existing interpretive schemes even when we think we are experiencing something novel and fresh.

It also may suggest interesting things about the way we model dialogue.

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours passingly portrays Virginia Woolf’s relationship with this almost subterranean creative process. In the film version, Woolf is seen in a series of scenes in a very specific state of distracted attention, in which she discovers, in quite fully formed shape, large sections of dialogue and plot. Looking back over our archives to see how dialogic thought has been treated, I found it productive along this line of thought to revisit Thomas Scheff’s 2009 essay on “Virginia Woolf’s Multi-personal Dialogues”:

If women are usually better than men at spontaneous, non-instrumental, rapid role-taking, with looseness of association, this difference might explain women’s greater intuition then men. It may be that rapid, loose and/or non-conventional associations are a feature of parallel, rather than serial processing in mental activity. Parallel mental processing means that one is thinking in several different trains of thought at once. These parallel trains of thought are all, or all but one, going on outside awareness. When these several trains are all attempts to solve the same problem, they can give rise to extremely rapid and imaginative solutions to difficult problems.

 

Research Bulletin: Gender and Reading

The issue of gender and reading continues to be of interest for OnFiction so that, for instance, a few weeks ago (click here) we commented on the study in which Marisa Bortolussi and colleagues (2010) found that both women and men preferred male protagonists. Is this result due to congruence with the stereotype in Western industrial society that men are the ones who do things out there in the world? Maybe it’s different in Russia where I have heard it said that the women do everything, and the men do everything else.

The gender differences of one of the first studies in our group in Toronto surprised us. The study was a central part of Angela Biason’s PhD thesis (1993), and it was reported in Oatley (1996). We asked 59 high-school students to read one of two short stories about adolescent identity. One was “Red Dress” by Alice Munro. It had a female protagonist. The other was “Sucker” by Carson McCullers. It had a male protagonist. We adapted the method of Larson and Seilman (1988) and asked the participants, as they read, to mark an M in the margin if they experienced a memory coming to mind, and to mark an E in the margin if they experienced an emotion. We counted up the Ms and Es for each story. The 12 girls who read “Red Dress” experienced a mean of 6.67 emotions as they were reading, and the 13 girls who read “Sucker” experienced 6.77 emotions (overall mean 6.72). By contrast, the 17 boys who read “Red Dress” experienced a mean of 2.88 emotions, and the 17 who read “Sucker” experienced 4.88 emotions (overall mean 3.88). (The overall means were significantly different as a function of gender at p < 0.02.)
We interpreted our results as meaning that high-school girls were much more involved than boys in these stories as they read them, and that the girls were equally able to experience emotions in themselves with both female and male protagonists. The high-school girls were willing to make a leap into another mind, they were equally able to identify with a female or male protagonist. By contrast, the boys were, overall, not only less willing to identify with the protagonist about whom they were reading, but they were particularly unwilling to make a leap into the mind of the female protagonist of “Red Dress.” We also asked both the girls and the boys to write a summary of the story, and we had these marked by their English teachers. There was no significant gender difference between the sets of marks, nor was there any significant difference between the expected marks of the girls and boys in English literature. The curriculum for the classes whose members we studied was typical for high school English literature: being able to give details of stories, and understand their themes. It puzzled us that these abilities were independent of girls' and boys' willingness to involve themselves in the stories they read.

What does this mean? One conclusion is that although high-school girls and boys were equally able to do as they were asked by their teachers of literature, the girls were more able to become involved with, and hence to take an interest in, stories in which the content was interpersonal, and had to do with understanding the self and others. As we reported in December 2013 (click here) the US National Endowment for the Arts found in their 2009 survey, based on 18,000 telephone interviews, that 58 % of women but only 42% of men had, in the previous year, read a novel a short story, a piece of poetry, or a play.

Biason, A. (1993). Emotional responses of high-school students to short stories. PhD, University of Toronto.  

Bortolussi, M., Dixon, P., & Sopčák, P. (2010). Gender and reading. Poetics, 38, 299-318.

Larsen, S. F., & Seilman, U. (1988). Personal remindings while reading literature. Text, 8, 411-429.

National Endowment for the Arts. (2009). Reading on the rise: A new chapter in American literacy (No. 46). Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts.

Oatley, K. (1996). Inference in narrative and science. In D. R. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), Modes of thought (pp. 123-140). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Image: Book cover of Alice Munro’s first collection of short stories, which includes “Red Dress.” 

The Pleasures of Rereading and Where They Come From

Why do people reread novels? Why do they listen over and over to pieces of music they’ve already heard? A worn and dog-eared copy of a repair manual, or a recipe book, or a dictionary, or a dense philosophical text makes sense, but somehow that of a novel less so. Young children will listen to the same favorite story read to them many times in a row, and request the same story at the next opportunity, while a stack of other books stands unread nearby. Why would humans waste their time rereading an account of fictional lives in fictional worlds? Why would they bother listening to music that they know so well they can whistle it?

Two of my favorite thinkers have discussed these phenomena, and I was surprised to find on closer inspection that their arguments are interestingly similar. C. S. Lewis, early twentieth century author of the Chronicles of Narnia series and Christian apologist, said that it is very difficult to know whether a story is affecting another reader’s “deeper imagination or only exciting his emotions”. One way to test which the other reader experiences is to learn whether she “often rereads the same story”. Rereading is a sign of interest and attention to something other than the plot and its sequences of suspense, climax, suspense, climax: “Knowing that the ‘surprise’ is coming we can now fully relish the fact that this path through the shrubbery doesn’t look as if it were suddenly going to bring us out on the edge of the cliff….It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia” (Lewis, p. 16).

But why should attending to the “surprisingness” (p. 16) be any more valuable than attending to each surprise-event as it occurs in the story? Lewis enlarges the perimeter of the concept, though, and says that it’s not just surprisingness that we value – it’s theme. Themes likes “giantness,” “otherness,” “the desolation of space,” “home-coming,” “reunion with a beloved”, among others, attract us deeply. “All that happens [in a story] may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted?” (p. 18) Rereading is an iterative attempt to find ourselves enveloped within the theme, almost in spite of the plot. Lewis then proposes that that tension between these two story elements is precisely that which makes story and real life so much alike: “We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never embodied” (p. 18). We want to experience something larger and more comprehensive, more coherent than the ostensibly stochastic plot events as they are unfolding.  So we go back again and again to the events to attend the birth and development of theme and to feel ourselves a part of it.

In a chapter entitled “Musical Parsing and Musical Affect,” the generative and cognitive linguist Ray Jackendoff (1992) argues against the idea that affect in music is largely determined by the music’s novelty for the listener. He notes, “musical affect is produced not just by hearing (and predicting) the musical surface of a piece, but by the activity of deriving in real time all the details of abstract musical structure. The musical structure has intrinsic points of instability or tension, which require resolution and therefore result in affect” (p. 153).  Jackendoff posits a “musical parser” that is “informationally encapsulated from musical memory” and that continues to parse independent of the listener’s conscious knowledge of, in Jackendoff’s example, a “deceptive cadence” that is about to be heard. Despite the fact that the listener is likely not unduly surprised by the cadence, having heard it before, nevertheless the listener can still experience genuine emotions elicited by the piece because of this encapsulation. Jackendoff argues that if we think in terms of the listener’s “conscious expectations” or if we take the view that there is a free exchange between the cognitive faculty that “constructs abstract structures that analyze the musical surface” (p. 155) and musical memory, then neither fresh affect nor heightened affect can occur. In his view, affect originates in part through in the structure of the musical phrase itself and in the parser’s ongoing identification of the “most salient structure” (p. 154) to be pursued in light of the instability inherent in every “analysis of the musical surface”. And this, independent of conscious memory.

Now, one must be careful not to approach the two views reductively. These thinkers occupy different temporal cohorts, different fields of inquiry, and different areas of creative media. Nevertheless, both are analysts of an artistic pursuit that they understand deeply. Lewis wrote dozens of novels and stories, and Jackendoff has worked closely with the composer and music theorist Fred Lerdahl in developing their theory of musical reception and production, based on the Chomskyan paradigm of generative linguistics. I am struck by the similarities in Lewis’ and Jackendoff’s views of how affect, and not uncommonly extraordinary affect, can arise in spite of great familiarity with a piece, whether of fiction or music. Lewis’ plot events would seem to align with Jackendoff’s musical phrases, as they both have accepted ways of building and resolving, and accepted deviances thereon. Both elements are numerous and temporally intertwined. Both have accepted discrete boundaries at which points the soul or parser detects and discards implausible assessments of the elements.

More interesting, though, is both thinkers’ strong insistence on the lack of communication or articulation between the theme/memory entities and the plot experiencer/musical parser. If Lewis had been a cognitive psychologist, he might have said that the plot components are processed in a massively parallel fashion and the theme is fashioned in a heavily constructivist sort of way from the results of that processing. Jackendoff, as an author of children’s fantasy fiction, might have asked can a series of musical phrase analyses “quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted” (Lewis, p. 18). Indeed, this informational encapsulation would seem to be a crucial part of the pleasure-in-rereading conundrum. What we want in reading a cherished, dog-eared book with which we are in some sense in love, is to get back to the way we felt when we were entertaining that book’s big ideas at the most abstract levels of analysis that the soul/ parser can experience. We don’t need to remember what exactly we were thinking or feeling during each analysis. We need, at most, the desire to set the parser to work again, “trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive” (Lewis, p. 18).

Jackendoff, R. (1992). Languages of the mind: Essays on mental representation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Lewis, C. S., (1966). Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. Edited with preface by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

By Dr. Rebecca Wells-Jopling.