Kate Chopin's The Awakening

The Awakening, published by Kate Chopin when she was 49 years old, has become a literary classic, and an influential feminist novella. 

Here’s a brief summary. Edna Pontillier is on vacation on Grand Isle with her husband Léonce. In the novella’s eighth paragraph she walks up from a beach with Robert LeBrun, after bathing in the warm Caribbean Sea. On the island she also meets Adèle Ratignolle, mother of three small children, the first person with whom she ever talks about her feelings. Although to start with, Edna cannot swim, she learns to do so and feels liberated. She starts to think of rejecting assigned roles. By the end of the vacation, Edna and Léonce have grown apart, while she and Robert have grown close. To avoid what might happen, Robert moves to Mexico. Back in New Orleans, where she lives, Edna relinquishes her role as housewife, and becomes serious about her painting. Léonce takes a long business trip to New York, his mother looks after the couple’s two young children, and Edna moves into a place she calls the pigeon house. She spends a night with a man who’s a substitute for Robert, whom she thinks is still in Mexico. But he returns and visits her. After some awkward meetings, she kisses him. Although she says that he “must have forgotten that she was Léonce Pontillier’s wife,” she and Robert both declare their love for each other. Then a servant brings a message to say that Adèle Ratignolle is sick, so Edna goes to see her. When Edna returns, she finds a note from Robert. It says: “I love you. Good by—because I love you.” She realizes that he has departed, so she will be solitary. She returns to Grand Isle, removes her clothes, and swims out to sea. 

 

As well as this novella, Kate Chopin is known for her short stories. Her principal literary influence was Guy de Maupassant (whom she first read when she was about 35). “I read his stories,” she said, “I marvelled at them.” He spoke to her directly and intimately. She admired his escape from tradition, his rejection of hypocrisy. Her first short story was published when she was 39.

 

Although there had been myths, fables, and fairy tales, the literary short story dates back perhaps to 1842: Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” The short story can be compared with the sonnet: eight lines, four lines, and two lines, with potential turning points between each set, after which we can see what had gone before in a new way. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1894) for instance, the protagonist first hears that her husband has died in a railway accident. She breaks down in tears, then goes to her room to be alone. There—turning point—she experiences “something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name”—a feeling of freedom. Then, towards the end of the story, she leaves her room and goes downstairs. There’s a turning of a key in the front door lock—final turning point—her husband returns; she dies of a heart attack.

 

In The Awakening, Kate Chopin uses techniques that are typical of poetry. Although she does this all the way through, an instance is in Chapter 10, when Edna finds she can swim, metaphors include: sea—liberation, learning to swim—accomplishment, actions previously not taken—actions that can now be taken, indoors is containment—outside are possibilities, lying in a hammock—comfort, coziness. There are also reiterated scenes of sleeping and waking. In addition, there are juxtapositions and contrasts. In Chapter 10, Edna’s walk down to the beach with Léonce contrasts with her return with Robert. In a more distant comparison, the novella’s first scene with Edna’s return from bathing connects with its last scene in which she swims out to sea. There are also scenes of emotion as inwardly experienced. For instance, as Edna finds herself able to swim “a feeling of exultation overtook her.” Early versions of such feelings tend to be vague. They then become more distinct; so exultation transforms into a feeling of freedom from the role into which Edna has been cast: wife and mother.

 

Kate Chopin. (1894). “The dream of an hour.” In P. Knights (Ed.), Kate Chopin The awakening and other stories(pp. 259-261). Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition, 2000).

 

Kate Chopin (1899). The awakening. In P. Knights (Ed.), Kate Chopin The awakening and other stories (pp. 3-128). Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition, 2000).

 

Nicolai Gogol (1842). “The overcoat” (C. Garnett, Trans.). In The overcoat and other stories (pp. 3-51). London: Chatto & Windus (current edition 1923).

 

Ross Day: The Book of Delights

I’ll postpone reviewing another television series until next week, in favour of a book of essays by Ross Day. Alright, these are not fiction, but they have many of its elements: character, emotional insight, inward thoughts, relationships. The author is someone who has published three books of poetry. One can think of poetry as the founding mode of fiction.

There are 102 essays in this book, most of them a couple of pages long. Essay number 10, called “Writing by Hand,” (pp. 31-33), starts with the poet Derek Walcott giving a class on the writing of poetry. He asked people in the class who wrote by hand and who wrote by computer. Some people raised their hands to indicate that they wrote by computer, and Walcott said in his voice which Ross Gay describes as “mellifluous and curt,” that they should leave the workshop. So they gathered their things and started off down the hall. But before they got too far, Wallcott called them back: “C’mon, c’mon, I’m just making a point.” Ross Gay then reflects on what this point might have been. He says he writes his poetry and most of his essays by hand, but he also writes prose by computer. He says that computer writing can make words disappearable by use of the delete button, which may be best for “a good deal of florid detritus,” that can occur.  But maybe these preliminaries shouldn’t just disappear because they have occurred on “the weird path towards what you have come to know, which is called thinking, which is what writing is” (pp. 31-33).

Another lovely essay is number 47, “The Sanctity of Trains” (pp. 134-135). Here Ross Gay reflects that when they are on trains, people often leave their bags and other stuff unattended for longish intervals, maybe to go to the washroom, or to the café several carriages away. On one train journey he noticed his neighbour, “across the aisle and one row up,” disappear “for a good twenty minutes, her bag wide open, a computer peeking out.” He calls the phenomenon “trust.”  He writes that all through our social lives we are “in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking: “letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped.” He finishes his essay like this. “This caretaking is our default mode and its always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.”

Shakespeare and Love

In Stratford on Avon, in 1582, William Shakespeare, at the age of 18, married Anne Hathaway, who was 26, probably because she was pregnant. They had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, then twins Judith and Hamnet, in 1585. Soon after this, William left Stratford. He moved to London, where he lived for more than 20 years, first joining a theatre company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in which he became an actor and their principal playwright. In 1609, William’s 154 sonnets were published. The first 17 of these seem to have been commissioned; they are addressed to someone known as “the young man.” They were written to try and persuade him to marry, so that he could pass on to children his beauty which otherwise, would be lost when “forty winters” would “besiege” his brow. The next 109 sonnets are about William’s relationship, probably an affair, with the young man, which seems to have started when William was maybe 28, and the young man perhaps 18. 

The group of 109 sonnets (18 to 126), as Helen Vendler explains in her brilliant book of 1997, draws on conversations and interactions between William and the young man. Then, beginning with Sonnet 127, come 27 sonnets about William’s affair with a woman called the Dark Lady, perhaps, Emilia Lanier, England’s first published woman poet, (see Michael Wood, 2003).

In his plays, William Shakespeare depicts memorable characters such as Hamlet, in the play of that name, and Rosalind in As You Like It. But these characters are out there, on the stage, whereas the Sonnets seem more interior, more personal. One may infer that when the young man had sex with others, William was devastated, so then he went and had sex with others as well, which seems to have increased his own anguish … 

So, here is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 27:

Weary with toil I haste me to my bed,

The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;

But then begins a journey in my head

To work my mind when body’s work’s expired;

For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,

Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,

And keep my drooping eyelids open wide

Looking on darkness which the blind do see:

Save that my soul’s imaginary sight

Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,

Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night

Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.

Lo, thus by day my limbs, by night my mind,

For thee, and for myself, no quietness find.

The sonnet is a verse form designed to express the emotion of love. Its general structure is eight lines, four lines, two lines (as shown above). Between each group are potential turning points. The first of these, in Sonnet 27, is between the first eight lines, about William’s inability to sleep, and the next four lines about his “imaginary sight” of the young man. The second occurs with the change from lines 9 to 12, to the final couplet in which, when William thinks of the young man, the experience is of anxiety.

In her discussion of this sonnet, Vendler points out parallels: day—limbs, night—mind, day of travel—night of pilgrimage, no quietness for the young man—no quietness for William. Then, she says, glimmering behind some of the words are others: behind “zealous” may be ”jealous.” And, as she explains, William’s night is arduous: “But then begins a journey,” “To work my mind,” “Intend a … pilgrimage,” “keep my … eyelids open,” “Looking on darkness,” “Save that my soul’s … sight,” “Presents thy shadow,” “Lo thus … no quiet.” As when any of us is unable to sleep, each insomniac phase is followed inexorably by another, without respite of “dear repose.”

William, here, seems to have been anxious because he had to leave London for work, and wondered what the young man may have been up to. Although, in the first eight lines he makes a mental pilgrimage to an image of the young man, with the first turning point what William meets, mentally, is a “shadow:” a word which at that time could mean “actor” on a stage, and also “outward behaviour” which Shakespeare tended to contrast with “substance,” meaning inward truth. So the night is “ghastly” because, with the second turning point, although though the poet is awake, alone in bed, perhaps the young man is also awake, in bed with someone else.

Helen Vendler (1997). The art of Shakespeare's sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Michael Wood (2003). Shakespeare. New York: Basic Books.

Image: Shakespeare from the First Folio of 1623

Writing Character

Imagine you are given this photograph, and asked to write a fictional character sketch of the man depicted here. This is the task that Marta Maslej, Raymond Mar, and I, gave to participants, in a study published last year. What would there be in your habits and traits that would influence what you write, and how you write it?

In our study we asked 207 participants each to write a fictional character sketch of the man in this photo. We asked them, too, about their habits of writing and reading, and gave them questions about traits of personality, empathy, and engagement in fantasy. Then, to a different group of people, 144 in number, we gave the character sketches that the first group of participants had produced and asked them to rate the sketches as to how likeable, interesting, and complex, each character was.

We found that habits of writing fiction, and of writing and reading poetry, were associated with producing character sketches that were rated as more interesting and complex. In terms of personality traits of Extraversion, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, Openness, and Conscientiousness, only Openness was associated with sketches of characters who were interesting and complex. Higher levels of empathetic concern, and of engagement in fantasy, had similar effects. No habits or traits were associated with writing sketches of characters who were more likeable.

We found it surprising that reading more poetry had an effect on people’s abilities to create characters who were interesting and complex, although habits of reading more prose fiction and non-fiction did not. Perhaps reading poetry involves an interest in language and emotion, which are also helpful in verbal depiction of characters. Perhaps the lack of effect from reading more prose is similar to how listening to a lot of music does not necessarily contribute much to becoming a musician.

Some people are drawn to writing fiction. It seems that they are more likely to be among those who seek out challenges of intellectual and aesthetic kinds (the trait of Openness), as well as being higher in empathy for others, and more likely to engage in fantasy. We can imagine that it’s people with these habits and character traits who go on to become authors of novels and short stories that are published.

Maslej, M. M., Oatley, K., & Mar, R. A. (2017). Creating fictional characters: The role of experience, personality, and social processes. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11, 487-499. 

Writing and Inspiration

Do writers who feel themselves to be inspired enable their readers to feel the same way? This is the question that Todd Thrash and his colleagues asked in a recent paper (Thrash et al., 2016). The authors quote Maurice Bowra (1951) who wrote “inspired words create life in us because they are themselves alive” (p. 36).

Thrash and his colleagues gave 195 students half an hour to write a poem on “the human condition,” and then to rate how inspired they felt when writing their poem. All the poems were scored on a series of measures by independent raters. The most important independent rating was of Insightfulness: “The degree to which the poem transcends the obvious or superficial and discerns the hidden nature of things.” All the poems were also read by 220 student readers, who rated how inspired they felt on reading each poem.

The main results of the study were that poems by writers who felt more inspired when writing elicited more inspiration from their average readers, and that the effect was moderated by the independent ratings of the poems’ Insightfulness.

What is inspiration? For the researchers the answer is indicated by the scale of nine items, which they gave their student writers. The items included, “I felt inspired while expressing my ideas,” and ‘I was inspired to revise this poem.” It may be, therefore, that what the researchers call “inspiration” is of writers having the sense that they have had a good idea to write about, with the additional sense that its wording catches something that is worthwhile, and is of a kind that can be offered to readers. It may be interesting to wonder what other ways there may be of thinking about this kind of mental state when one is writing.

Bowra, M. (1951). Inspiration and poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Thrash, M. T., Maruskin, L., Moldovan, E. G., Olevnick, V., & Belzac, W. C. (2016). Writer-reader contagion of inspiration and related states: Conditional process analyses within a cross-classified writer x reader framework. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, advance online publication.

 

Project Bookmark Canada

A lovely idea of Miranda Hill was to start and continue to administer Project Bookmark Canada. (We had a Quick Hit on the Project in April last year, click here.) Each bookmark is a plaque on a sturdy metal post set into the sidewalk at a particular place. The first Bookmark was to Michael Ondaatje. It’s on the Bloor-Danforth Viaduct in Toronto. Ondaatje wrote about the viaduct in his novel, In the skin of a lion, which is about about workers involved in the building of the city. There are bookmarks across Canada, from Vancouver in British Columbia to Woody Point in Newfoundland.

When I am out walking and I see a plaque, I stop and read it. In London, England, I like the many blue plaques on the sides of houses. They began to be set up by the Society of Arts. Then the scheme was taken over by the London County Council, and more recently by English Heritage. 

If I move to a new place, even for a short time, I feel at first without bearings. To combat this disorientation I read writings of people who lived there, and plaques are wonderfully helpful. When I lived near South End Green in Hampstead, London, for three months, I saw a plaque to George Orwell on a building at the corner of Pond Street and South End Road. The place is now a café, Le Pain Quotidien. It used to be the second-hand bookshop, Booklovers’ Corner, in which Orwell worked during the afternoons for 15 months. The job allowed him time to write in the mornings. A short walk away, at 77 Parliament Hill, on the edge of the Heath, is a house in which he had rented a furnished room. It has a plaque put up by the Hampstead Plaque Fund. The book Orwell was writing when he worked at the bookshop was Keep the aspidistra flying. I hadn't read it, so then I did. I went to look at 31 Willow Road, not far away, which I imagined to be 31 Willowbed Road, the house in which Orwell has this novel’s protagonist, Gordon Comstock, rent a room. Comstock works in a bookshop in the afternoons, so that, like Orwell, he can write in the mornings. The novel helped give me a sense of that place.

To track down what Orwell had been writing when he worked at South End Green, I had to do a bit of research. I didn't mind doing that, but a very good idea for the Canadian plaques, which can give a start to one's research, is not just to give the name and dates of an author, but to have some 500 words of a piece of poetry or fiction that relate to the spot where the plaque is set up. I feel very pleased to have been present at the unveiling of the Bookmark at the corner of College Street and Manning Street, in Toronto, which bears a passage from Anne Michaels’s book Fugitive Pieces. Here is part of the passage that the plaque bears.

Up Grace, along Henderson, up Manning to Harbord I whimpered; my spirit shape finally in familiar clothes and, with abandon, flinging its arms the stars. 

But the street wasn’t empty as I thought. Startled, I saw that the blackness was perforated with dozens of faces. A forest of eyes, of Italian and Portuguese and Greek ears; whole families sitting silently on lawnchairs and front steps On dark verandahs, a huge invisible audience, cooling down from their small hot houses, the lights off to keep away the bugs.

Image: Anne Michaels on the left and Miranda Hill on the right, at the unveiling of the Bookmark at College Street and Manning Street in Toronto.

The Art of the Book

Those of us who love to read books almost inevitably have a visceral reaction to the physical presence of books. We not only love to read books, we love to hold books, to smell books, and to admire the visual appeal of books. In celebration of the physical form of books, the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild is currently exhibiting the results of a juried competition across Canada. These 'Art of the Book' exhibits began in 1988 and have occurred every 5 years, presenting some highly creative and thought-provoking demonstrations of bookbinding alongside re-imaginings of what makes a book. Presented at the top of this post is a piece by Karen Hanmer (US), for In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje. Below are some other fine examples along with the rest of the touring schedule for the exhibition. It is currently at the Craft Ontario Gallery 

(990 Queen St. W., Toronto) until September 13th. The online exhibition catalogue is here. I highly recommend catching this if you can.

Poetry on the brain

How are we affected by poetry, by evocative prose, and by more ordinary prose? Adam Zeman and his colleagues (Zeman et al., 2013) of the University of Exeter have sought to answer this question using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).

Zeman et al. studied fMRI scans of 13 right-handed volunteers from Exeter University’s School of English: 10 faculty members, a post-doc, and two advanced graduate students. The researchers selected 16 brief prose passages (some evocative, for instance from fiction, and some functional), 16 sonnets (some accessible and some difficult), and 8 poems that were self-selected (by the participants). Participants each took part in eight blocks of 5 trials in the fMRI scanner. In each trial they read one of the 40 passages of poetry or prose that had been chosen. The passages were presented in random order, and between them a distractor task was introduced to prevent participants thinking about what they had just read. Outside the scanner participants made ratings of what they had read.

The results were that, as well as activating brain areas concerned with reading, texts that the researchers describe as more emotionally charged also activated areas that are usually associated with music. Literary texts were better at activating left-sided regions of the brain. Poetry chosen by the experimenters tended to activate areas associated with introspection, whereas self-selected poetry tended to activate areas concerned with memory.

As compared with expository writing, Mar, Oatley and Eng (2003) found that narrative is better at prompting personal memories but, according to Zeman et al’s study, poetry that is familiar seems to be better still. The study adds a modern touch to Keats’s idea that poetry should be “almost a remembrance” (Keats, 1816-1820).

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Gustave Flaubert proposed that the genre of the novel was only just being developed and that it:

. . . would be as rhythmical as verse, as precise as the language of science, and with the undulations, the humming of a cello, the plumes of fire, a style that would enter your mind like a rapier thrust, and on which finally your thoughts would slide as if over asmooth surface . . . (Williams, 2004, p. 167).

One conclusion from Zeman’s et al’s study, depicted in the graph above, is that even when it is selected to be evocative, by no means all prose achieves these characteristics.

Keats, J. (1816-20). Selected poems and letters of Keats (Ed. D  Bush). New York: Houghton Mifflin (current edition 1959).

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., & Eng, A. (2003). Abstraction and the vividness of details in fiction. Paper presented at the Symposium on Models and Mechanisms of Narrative Persuasion, American Psychological Association Annual Convention, Toronto.

Williams, T. (2004). The writing process: scenarios, sketches and rough drafts. In T. Unwin (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Flaubert (pp. 165-179). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Zeman, A., Milton, F., Smith, A., & Rylance, R. (2013). By heart: An fMRI study of brain activation by poetry and prose. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20, 132-158.

Image: Figure 1 from Zeman et al.’s paper, of participants’ ratings of the emotionality, familiarity, and literariness, of the texts they read in the fMRI machine. 

Silence

First I waited for the sounds
that cleave the silence.
Then I waited for the silence
that cleaves me.
But the chatter spread, and grew, and multiplied.
It deceived me.
Now I wait, once again, for the silence
to cleave me.

Travelogue: Limerick

On a visit for a conference at the University of Limerick, in Ireland, I was charmed by the Aer Lingus cabin crew on the flight from Heathrow to Shannon Airport. Even their announcements about what to do in an emergency seemed to be made with a kind of concern for us passengers that was different from the recitations one generally hears on aeroplanes.

Ireland was strongly affected by the visit of the Celtic Tiger, an economic boom that began around 1995 and ended abruptly with the world economic recession of 2008. Speaking with feeling about the Tiger's departure, a taxi-driver who took me from Limerick to the University pointed out, as we passed it, a curious archeological site of concrete walls and half-erected buildings that had been intended, he said, to be the largest shopping mall in Ireland. Whereas Limerick had become well-off, now there is a sense of sadness and anxiety. The city advertises with large electronic signs the spaces in its many new car parks. A lot of car-parking space was available; this is a place without enough cars.

The University of Limerick is very large, and it's beautiful, in a park on both sides of the River Shannon. People who worked there were fond of it, which I could understand. But with the economic recession a question hovers: how to move forward? I didn't mention it to anyone but my thoughts about the place issued in this limerick on Limerick.

An itinerant chap from Toronto
Wondered wherever he'd gone to;
Some was old, some was new,
Didn't once have to queue,
What next should the folks here get on to?

As a group talked together on the conference's last evening, several of us admitted that we had vowed not to mention limericks. At that moment, evidently no longer able to contain the inner emotional pressure to express oneself in verse, which Chinese poets of the Tang period called huai (click here), a fellow conference attender let slip:

A young law professor from Nashville
Said, "Now I'm not going to be bashful;
It's just blurting out,
I might even shout …"

This limerickateur said she would think of the last line the next day, but see how much more interesting this fragment is than my feeble effort. Her ancestors came from this part of the world, so it's clear she was drawing on some inherited ability. I didn't see her next day, so we may never know what she would have found to rhyme with "Nashville" and "bashful."

The limerick is a populist, sometimes improvised, form and of course poetry-written-by-poets isn't improvised. Ireland's greatest poet, W.B. Yeats, said it would take him many days to write even the shortest poem. On the first day no rhymes would come at all, then, he said: “when at last the rhymes begin to come, the first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes a whole day" (Parkinson, 1964, p. 76).

Parkinson, T. (1964). W.B. Yeats: The later poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Image: A modern bronze statue of this one-time port city's dockworkers, on the quayside in Limerick

Principles of Poetry

Maja and I have a project: to try and glimpse the inner core of poetry. So this is a follow-up to my recent post on Chinese poetry (click here) and Maja's recent post on short lines (click here). What are the psychological principles of poetry?

A first principle seems to depend on what Andy Clark pointed out, that the mind has a deliberative verbal processor and an associative intuitive processor which have utterly different properties. So the mind is a hybrid; we have to negotiate between the different modes. The verbal processor can enable thoughts themselves to be objects of thought. The associative processor is perhaps responsible for concepts and intuitions. A verbal utterance, received by the verbal processor can be purely semantic and syntactic. I can write: "There's a leafless tree outside my window." In these words I can communicate both to myself and you. Perhaps you can think of a tree of this kind. This isn't poetic: you know the sort of thing I mean by drawing on your experience of winter-time deciduous trees. A poetic utterance does this but adds something beyond the semantic and syntactic. It makes connections between and among the words themselves by means such as metres, metaphors, metonyms, multiple interpretations. The psychological effect of an evocative poem is to invite a certain density of reflective thought, which brings a thought feelingfully to mental presence, by its several links with the associative processor. (On this idea of reflectiveness, see Sikora, Miall & Kuiken click here.) If I read, in William Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 the line: "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," the words seem to become poetic by inviting links from the verbal to the intuitive processor that go beyond the semantic and syntactic because they are multiple and simultaneous. Rather than intuitions one-at-a-time, they invite concurrent intuitions. In this line, I enjoy the iambic pentameter because it's like a heartbeat; I think somewhat poignantly of my own aging as of ruined churches I have visited along the English-Scottish border, picturesque but sad, no longer of much use except as memories of a sort; I connect the singing of birds and the singing of choirs; I wonder what birds were doing, flying about in the churches before they were ruined. All in ten syllables: the span of a single conscious verbal thought. If I had merely written such thoughts (as I have just done), you'd read them one at a time, they'd not be linked, and they'd not be of much interest.

A second principle, as John Keats said in a letter of 27 February 1818, is that: "Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity." (In North American usage: it should be unusual but not weird.) The principle was later proposed by Victor Shklovsky: defamiliarization. It was one of the first aspects of literature to be studied empirically, by Willie van Peer. Rachel Giora has shown that brain activation spreads beyond the language hemisphere not in response to metaphoricity, but to unusualness.

A third principle derives from Indic poetics, in which Abhinavagupta said that dhvani, suggestiveness, is the heart of poetry. Suggestiveness implies an intimate partnership: the poet suggests and the hearer or reader creates a shared meaning.

And, as Coleridge said, real "poetry brings the whole soul … into activity." How it does so is what we're trying to understand: trying, but not there yet.

Clark, A. (2006). Material symbols. Philosophical Psychology, 19, 291-307.
Coleridge, S. T. (1817). Biographia literaria, Ed J. Shawcross. Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition 1907).
Giora, R. (2007). Is metaphor special? Brain and Language, 100, 111-114.
Ingalls, D. H. H., Masson, J. M., & Patwardhan, M. V. (1990). The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Keats, J. (1816-20). Selected poems and letters of Keats (Ed. D.  Bush). New York: Houghton Mifflin (current edition 1959).
Shklovsky, V. (1919). On the connection between devices of Syuzhet construction and general stylistic devices. In S. Bann & J. E. Bowlt (Eds.), Russian formalism: A collection of articles and texts in translation (pp. 48-71). Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press (this edition 1973).
Sikora, S., Kuiken, D., & Miall, D. S. (2011). Expressive reading: A phenomenological study of readers’ experience of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Journal of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 5, 258-268.
Van Peer, W. (1986). Sylistics and psychology: Investigations of foregrounding. London: Croom Helm.
Vendler, H. (1997). The art of Shakespeare's sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Image: The ruined Jedburgh Abbey

Short Lines

Here is Helen Vendler, an English Professor from Harvard, discussing an anthology of American poetry in the NYRB:

“Printing something in short lines doesn’t make the writer a poet; it only makes him a person with a book of short lines.”*

First I chuckled. Then I blushed. After all I have been writing my own short lines for a few years now, calling them the ‘p’ word. It was like playing violin without any instruction in the instrument, trying to paint without knowing the color circle. Yet it felt right, seductive, as if I were actually writing poetry. After all, the motive wasn’t to express an idea, or even a feeling (I can always cry), but to reach across the transparent barrier to the other side, where Keats’s beauty keeps company with truth. I was reaching for it in short lines with little knowledge, and even less discipline.

I wonder whether I resemble the first pre-historic painters, who tried to reach across such a barrier – ignorant of technique, but trying nonetheless. They felt perhaps a similar impulse move them, and tried scratching an awkward-shaped animal on a cold cave wall. How many centuries did it take from one such impulse to what we now know as ‘cave art’? No one will ever know. I, on the other hand, have it easy. If I want to move from short lines to poetry I should crack-open a book, perhaps even one of Vendler’s own. I hope that’s all it takes - muses make no guarantees.

*Vendler, H. (2011). Are these the poems to remember? The New York Review of Books, Vol.LVIII, 18, 19-22.

Patterns in the World and in the Mind

I am trying to understand some more about Chinese poetry of the Tang period. I haven't got very far, but what I have picked up is so interesting that I thought I would pass it on to readers of OnFiction. My source is Stephen Owen (1985) in his book on Chinese poetics. Here—with apologies for misunderstandings which I hope knowledgeable readers will correct—is some of what I have gathered so far.

In the West we tend to think of poetry as an act of the imagination and even, as the Romantics urged, an act of extraordinary imagination, inspired by the gods. Tang poetry isn't imagination, but an interpretive perception by a particular person at a particular historical moment in a particular place. It occurs because of an inner emotional pressure (huai) to make conscious with concern and strong feeling what is on his or her mind, to make a communication to another human being. What is written in a poem is a particular kind of pattern in which aesthetic significance and meaning are conjoined. Such a pattern is called wen, which is also the word for writing, and also for literature. It is the "civilizing force of culture" (p. 18). Rather than being based on metre and rhyme (as in the West) poetic patterns of this kind are usually written in couplets, in each of which the second line parallels the first so that the relationship between them draws on, and clarifies, an inner principle.

Owen's first example (p. 12) is a four-couplet poem by Tu Fu (who lived between 712 and 770). Its title is something like: "The poet writes of what he feels, traveling by night." Here is Owen's translation of the first couplet.

Slender grasses, breeze faint on the shore,
Here, the looming mast, the lone night boat.

In the original, each line is written as five Chinese characters, so that the couplet literally is:

fine/thin                   grass/plants      faint                wind      shore
high/precarious       mast                  alone/lone      night     boat     

Each word is written as a single Chinese character, and there is a parallelism not just between the lines but between the two characters in the first pair, the two in the second pair, and so on, for instance between fine/thin and high/precarious. (The carefully calligraphed Chinese characters, their etymologies, and their specific associations also have relationships with each other.) Not only that, says Owen, but the first and second half of each line need each other: "they act on each other according to the laws of the empirical universe" (p. 17). So in the first line there is a hidden image of the fine grasses swaying in the faint breeze. At the same time, the boat's mast is precarious, seemingly threatening to fall with the rocking of the boat, so that the poet feels anxiety, alone at night, while on the shore people are safe in their houses. I take it that what Owen calls parallelism is what Jakobson (1956) called metonymy: juxtaposition that can be based on similarity, on contrast, on a part suggesting the whole, or on any other kind of mental association.

Just as principles of the world can be perceived in such patterns (wen), so, says Owen, the conscious human mind can manifest itself in these same patterns, and poetry is one such manifestation. There is nothing here of poetry being mimetic, nothing of the Platonic idea of truths existing only in some ideal, other-worldly, realm. Instead, a particular piece of literature emerges naturally from the conjunction of some aspect of the world with an aspect of human consciousness, so that the writing (wen) is the manifestation of that conjunction. A reader of such poems then, works backwards from the words of the poem to the specific mental state of the poet as he/she is writing the poem, and can then engage, like the poet, in a comparable piece of reflective consciousness.

Four-couplet poems such as "The poet writes of what he feels" have turning points, midway through them, of a kind that in the West would later be embodied in the sonnet form. At the turning point in this poem, the poet moves from his perceptions of the outer world to inside himself, to reflect on how he is getting sick and old, and has to give up his post, so that even with his writing he will be unknown, like a single gull on the sands.

This is just a beginning: I am brooding on Owen's book. Apart from marvelling at the beautiful compression of thought in the structures of these Chinese poems, I have already started to look at the world in ways that are new to me, ways that I find engaging. I have read the book only once. I shall read it again, along with some more Tang poetry.

Note. Ezra Pound became interested in Chinese poetry and made translations of it in ways that were influential in the imagist movement. Owen makes it clear that it's not with such translations that he is concerned. Although the early twentieth century movement of imagism drew on some aspects of Chinese poetry, it is also not with imagism or its ideas that Owen is concerned. Instead he invites us to take a leap of imagination into what it might be like to inhabit the minds of these ancient poets. The closest Western parallel I know is in Proust's depictions of things and people in themselves and at the same time in their inner meanings, meant to be passed on to readers.

Roman Jakobson (1956). Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbance. In R. Jakobson & M. Halle (Eds.), Fundamentals of language (pp. 53-83). 'S-Gravenhage: Mouton.

Stephen Owen (1985). Traditional Chinese poetry and poetics. Madison: WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Why Do We Read Literature?

The question of why people read literature continues to perplex. The usual assumption is that people read for pleasure and, of course, reading is pleasurable. But does this mean it's like eating chocolate? That doesn't seem quite the right idea.

Don Kuiken (2008) has proposed that the deeper kind of reading is expressive. He means that reading literary texts enables us to understand in ways that are not afforded by non-literary texts. In expressive reading we can focus on our emotions, as we express them mentally: reflect on them, clarify them, understand them more deeply, and reconfigure them within an altered understanding of our own and others' lives. As Kuiken puts it, reading of this kind: "requires articulation of how feeling expression unfolds over time, has the character of disclosure, and simultaneously brings feelings and their intentional objects to presence" (p. 49).

In a recently published article, Shelley Sikora, Don Kuiken and David Miall (2011) have studied, very fruitfully, how people read Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The rime of the ancient mariner," to see whether and how people might read expressively.

Thirty women and eleven men were asked to read "The ancient mariner" at home, then read it a second time and mark five passages they found particularly striking or evocative, then describe, using an audio recorder, their experience of each one of these passages in turn, in as much detail as possible. The researchers looked for distinct expressions of personal meaning and identified what kind of meaning these were. Here's an example: "It reminds me of times when I felt despair and end up with nothing good in my life." Each such meaning was called a constituent, in this instance labelled: "Reminded of a generic autobiographical event." All 196 commentaries were analyzed in terms of whether or not they contained each of 48 such constituents.

Using the statistical procedure of cluster analysis, Sikora, Kuiken and Miall found six clusters of response. The one in which they were particularly interested, which they identified as indicating expressive reading, involved (a) metaphoric and quasi-metaphoric engagement with sensory imagery from the poem, or (b) progressive transformation of an emergent affective theme, or (c) metaphoric blurring of boundaries between the reader’s and narrator’s perspectives. Constituents in this cluster were found to occur in reading Coleridge's poem, and they contrasted with constituents in the other five clusters found in propels responses, which were: allegorical connection for instance a thought about how the killing the albatross referred to the biblical idea of "the fall," aesthetic feeling in which a reader noted sensory imagery in the poem, autobiographical assimilation in which the reader connected an event in the poem to an event in his or her own life, autobiographical diversion in which a reader took off on a piece of autobiography that had nothing much to do with the poem, and non-engagement which was the absence of any of the other modes but was about something rather different from the poem. Participants who were English majors offered examples of expressive reading more often than did people who were not English majors.

Here are lines 446 to 451 of the poem:

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread ...

And here is part of commentary to these lines (marked by a reader as evocative):

Knowing that there’s nothing you can do about it, keeping on walking and pretending it’s not happening, just because there’s no other way to cope with it, you can’t run from it. All you can do is hope that somehow or other it magically just disappears and leaves you alone (p. 264).

As Sikora et al. point out, in this example of expressive reading, the poem's narrator and the reader seem almost to have merged, as if Coleridge had been able to articulate in words a feeling that the reader has had, and struggled with and was then, as a result of reading, able to depict in this response.

Sikora et al.'s paper is an important one. It puts into words what many of us feel about literary reading, that in a deep way it can be about an articulation of what we feel which, without the literary text, we may not previously have been able consciously to recognize. Making-of-meaning is something we do all the time in life, but literary reading can augment it, and enable us make sense of aspects of our experience that were previously insubstantial or insensate.

In the participant's commentary on "The ancient mariner" passage (above) about walking in fear and dread, the reader constructs and offers his or her own words. It's in this way that the expressive, enacted, reading takes place. I used to think, as a novelist, that my job as author was to contribute 50% of a piece of fiction and the reader would contribute the other 50%. I now think that the writer contributes 30% and the reader 70%.

Kuiken, D. (2008). A theory of expressive reading. In S. Zyngier, M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova & J. Auracher (Eds.), Directions in empirical literary studies: In honor of Willie van Peer (pp. 49-68). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Sikora, S., Kuiken, D., & Miall, D. S. (2011). Expressive reading. A phenomenological study of readers' experience of Coleridge's The rime of he ancient mariner. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5, 258-268.

Image: Statue of the Ancient Mariner, Watchet, Somerset; Wikipedia. (It was in and around the little harbour town of Watchet that Coleridge wrote "The rime of the ancient mariner." I visited there last year, and found this statue to be surprisingly moving.)

Dream, Wakefulness, and a Tale of Two Poets

Creative writers care very much about dreams. Perhaps because of what dreams might impart to them about human consciousness, themselves, about the past or about the future, or perhaps about what to write, or even how to write it. In 1379, Chaucer began a poem entitled “The House of Fame” which, according to John M. Fyler, is his “fullest exploration of the poet’s position and responsibilities, the sources of his knowledge, and the limits of his vision” (Fyler, 1987, p. 348). The poet wishes to tell us of the wonderful dream that he had on the tenth day of December, but first presents 65 lines on his confusion and amused annoyance concerning the splintered category of dream with its many near-synonyms, and on the dreamer’s frustration at the uncertainty of knowing what a dream means. He also wants to know why the prophecy of one dream occurs and that of another doesn’t. He muses over the possible causes of dreams: the balance of bodily humours, cognitive deficiencies, illness, imprisonment, distress, disruption of routine, hitting the books too hard, melancholy, or being “ful of drede” (Benson, p. 348).

An important source for Chaucer’s poem was Macrobius, a medieval thinker who based his classification on an earlier Greek work in which five kinds of dream were presented. The “nightmare” and the “apparition” are, according to Macrobius, not worth one’s while to interpret, as they have no predictive value (Macrobius, p. 49). The nightmare seems to be a product of mental or physical stress, while the apparition is a type of dream that occurs only in a hypnagogic state. The “oracular” dream is refreshingly straightforward: a pious person visits the dreamer and tells him or her of a future event and recommends how to deal with it. The oracular becomes a “prophetic” dream if the visitor turns out to be right. The “enigmatic” dream “conceals with strange shapes and veils with ambiguity” its own meaning (Miller, p. 50). In spite of his confusion, frustration, and sense of inadequacy before the concept “dream”, Chaucer’s narrator ploughs ahead, excitedly describing his dream in 2,048 more lines of verse that read like a story. The narrator’s poem (unfortunately, unfinished) is the dream. The implication here is that in dream theory of the time the dream-state consciousness was taken to exist across an ontological chasm from the consciousness of wakefulness. The dream seems to be somewhat pathological, but nevertheless, if it’s the right sort of dream, capable of conveying useful information, and also capable of occasioning an enjoyable read.

Five hundred and forty-five years later, André Breton, writer of poetry and prose, and everything in between, was rather obsessed with states of consciousness, regularly engaging in automatic writing with his colleagues. Automatic writing, of course, is not produced from the sleeping consciousness state, but much of Breton’s poetry reads like dream. Nevertheless, unlike Chaucer’s dream poem which is in verse, but reads like a story, a sample of one of Breton’s automatic writings from 1921-22, but published in the 1924 Poisson Soluble, might convince us that there is indeed an absolute difference in kind between dreamlike states and wakeful consciousness:

In the piece of school chalk there’s a sewing machine; the little children shake their curls of silvery paper. The sky is a blackboard erased minute by minute by the wind. “You know what happened to the lilies who didn’t want to fall asleep,” begins the teacher, and the birds begin to make their voices heard a little before the last train’s passing. The class is on the highest branches of the return, between the greenfinches and the burnt spots. (Breton, 1988/1924, p. 368-369).

Much of the stuff of dream is here: lack of calibration of size among elements, unexpected parts amalgamated into wholes, personification of objects, unexpected juxtapositions of people, objects, and places, and introduction of strange elements into familiar routines, a presentation strong on image and weak on logical concatenation. The assumption is no longer that the dream may convey useful predictive information, or indeed any information per se, but that there is value in the writer’s accommodating, as best he can, the mind’s production of images that seem not to be sculpted or concatenated through the mind’s logical processing, and perhaps that reading the product of a dreamlike state, that does indeed read like a dream, will prove a positive and aesthetically worthwhile experience.

Eighty-six years later, a very engaging review of research examining the relationship between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of dreaming, by Yuval Nir and Giulio Tononi, appeared in the February, 2010 issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences. The authors review contemporary dream research, noting for example, that, participants in experiments report dreams (defined as “vivid, sensorimotor hallucinatory experiences that follow a narrative structure” [p. 88]) in both REM (rapid eye-movement) and non-REM sleep, contrary to earlier experimental work; that those aspects of wakefulness and dreaming that are similar in one’s personal experience are in fact similarly represented in the neural substrate; that there are developmental constraints on dreaming; that there is consistency between one’s cognitive capacities in dream and wakefulness; and that visuo-spatial capacity correlates better with dream quality than linguistic capacities. Further, there is reduced “voluntary control of action and thought” (p. 89); reflective thought (with some exceptions) is impaired: such oddities as we experienced earlier in the Breton passage are accepted without challenge; there is reduced awareness of self, which may contribute to the finding that the emotions of anxiety, anger, fear, joy and surprise are experienced in dreaming, but rarely are guilt, sadness, or depressive feelings; and memory is impaired within the dream. The authors also present a clear and detailed table in which the psychodynamic, activation-input-modulation, and neurocognitive models of dreaming are delineated.

Finally, Nir and Tononi ask, “Are dreams more like perception or imagination?” The response is cast in terms of the differential processing of “low-level sensory” and “higher-order” areas of the brain. If the first were triggering the dream-state, input from the brainstem to the visual cortex would then be meaningfully integrated by the higher-order areas. If the second were the trigger, motives would recruit the necessary mental imagery. The authors note that the critical tests determining patterns of signal flow have not yet been done, but the preponderance of empirical evidence points to initiation by higher-order areas. “If this view is correct,” they conclude, “waking consciousness is more like watching the news in real time, whereas dreaming is more like watching a movie created by an imaginative director” (p. 97). Thus, the research may not yet show that correctly interpreting a dream can tell us the future, but a picture of the neurophysiology of dreaming tells us much about the phenomenology of dreams, and perhaps something about creativity itself.

Benson, L. D. (1987). The Riverside Chaucer. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Breton, A. (1988/1924). Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard. (my translation).

Fyler, J. M. (1987). The House of Fame. In Benson, L. D. (Ed.) The Riverside Chaucer. (pp. 347-348). New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Macrobius. (1977). On Dreams. In Miller, R. P. (Ed.) Chaucer: Sources and backgrounds. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nir, Y., & Tononi, G. (2010). Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 88-100.

Image: Chaucer from the Ellesmere Manuscript

Two Eyes

Two eyes decapitate me.
Headless, full of joy, I wonder,
Are they my own?
I can no longer tell.

Long strong bones they break,
While keeping the snake of my spine,
Delicately intact;
Each vertebra timed just right,
Not too close, not too far.

Two eyes bleed me,
Until I am light.
Is it ruin they beget?
I cannot tell.

I hope the destroying never ends.

Conference: IGEL in Utrecht

In November last year we did a post on IGEL, an acronym for the German translation of the International Society for Empirical Research on Literature (click here). This society has goals that are close to those of OnFiction, and Raymond Mar and I are both due to attend its 2010 conference in Utrecht, from 7 to 11 July. Perhaps some of you are signed up to attend, too. I hope so; it will be good to see you there. To join IGEL go their website (click here) where you will also find a link to the conference program.

This year's conference is organized by Frank Hakemulder (who has contributed to OnFiction, click here). Its keynote speakers give an excellent sense of some of the interesting research in our area, which I thought I might take the opportunity of mentioning in this post.

The first keynote speaker in Utrecht will be Gerry Cupchik, who has worked for many years in psychological aesthetics, studying visual and literary art. In an interesting recent paper with Michelle Hilsher (Hilsher & Cupchik, 2005) the researchers compared responses to poetry presented in three different ways. They found that people preferred to read poetry themselves rather than to listen to it, to hear it, or to see it performed, because in reading they were better able to explore and interpret literary devices in an independent and creative manner.

The second keynote speaker is Joan Peskin (who has contributed to OnFiction, click here). She has been influential in showing how the methodology of expertise can be applied to reading literature. In a 1998 article, for instance, she showed that expert readers (graduate students in English) of pieces of metaphysical poetry that were unknown to them were able to employ concepts that were more useful and more far reaching in understanding a poem than novices (undergraduates), who tended to spend their time worrying over words and phrases.

The third keynote speaker is Susanne Janssen who studies the way in which literary culture and media are taken up in society. With Giselinde Kuipers and Marc Verboord (2008) she conducted a large study of arts coverage in newspapers in USA and several European counties. The researchers found that international coverage increased in European countries between1955 and 2005 in a manner the researchers called "globalization from within," but this had not occurred in USA. In all the countries studied, non-Western arts remained under-represented.

The next keynote is by Peter Vorderer and Bradford Owen. I first met Peter about fifteen years ago, when he told me about a study he had headed (published as Vorderer, Knobloch, & Schramm, 2001), in which he and his colleagues had used two versions of a German commercial TV movie. In an experiment the film was stopped at one point, and some of the watchers were asked to say whether they would like to see (a) the female character hand some money to the male protagonist, or (b) to see her kiss him, or (c) to see the version that the director preferred. If they chose (c) they saw either the (a) version or the (b) version. After the scene in which the money hand-over or the kiss occurred, the movie was the same for everybody. The researchers found that for those who had not graduated from high school the traditional, more passive, experience produced the most empathy and suspense, while those who had graduated from high-school were able to enhance their experience by making a choice. (Bradford Owen has recently completed his PhD, which was also on effects of cognitive capacity on enjoyment of film.)

The fifth keynote speaker is Sheldon Solomon, whose work I did not previously know. His title is "The worm at the core: The role of death in life and literature." Solomon has concentrated his research on why we suffer terror. A much cited article is of Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, et al.'s (1990) study in which they showed that when people were reminded of their own mortality they became more likely to favour their in-group and to discriminate against an out-group.

The rest of the conference program looks pretty good too!

Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon et al., (1990). Evidence for terror management theory II: The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who threaten or bolster the cultural worldview. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 308-318.

Susanne Janssen, Giselinde Kuipers & Marc Verboord (2008). Cultural globalization and arts journalism: The international orientation of arts and culture coverage in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. newspapers, 1955 to 2005. American Sociological Review, 73, 719-740.

Michelle Hilsher & Gerald Cupchik (2005). Reading, hearing, and seeing poetry performed. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 23, 47-64.

Joan Peskin (1998). Constructing meaning when reading poetry: An expert-novice study. Cognition and Instruction, 16, 235-263.

Peter Vorderer, Silvia Knobloch & Holger Schramm (2001). Does entertainment suffer from interactivity? The impact of watching an interactive TV Movie on viewers' experience. Media Psychology, 3, 342-363.

The Slow Slog of Literary Education, by Joan Peskin

Research that I carried out revealed that young adults, that is, students of 17 to 18 years, respond to a text very differently when it is in the physical shape of a poem, compared to when the identical words are presented in the form of expository prose (Peskin, 2007). However, a follow-up study suggests that, for younger adolescents, the identification of a poem as a poem does not prompt a more literary reading (Peskin, in press). It seems that there are systematic changes in what students attend to and process when reading a poem, and these changes appear to require a lengthy process of formal literary training.

Our participants were from middle- to upper-middle class backgrounds and attended two private schools. Both of these schools had an explicit, detailed poetry curriculum and extremely low student attrition rates so that almost all students had experienced the prescribed curriculum. We asked students in Grades 4, 8 and 12 at these schools to “think aloud” as they read poem-shaped and prose-shaped texts.

The 12th Graders spent significantly longer processing the texts in poetic form than prose, thinking aloud about their expectations, and observing textual devices associated with the genre of poetry. For instance, they talked about the poems as expressing a significant attitude to some issue related to the human condition, and as involving multiple meanings and metaphoric content. These older students paid attention not only to what the poem was saying, but how the author was saying it; how the subject matter is amplified by the sounds, the contrasts, and other textual devices.

The responses of both the Grade 8 and the Grade 4 students, however, were most surprising: The 8th Graders had experienced more than four years of a poetry curriculum, yet, even after these years of literary training, they read the poem-shaped texts no differently from the prose versions. They spent no longer processing the literary texts, and these texts did not appear to trigger any expectations about the reading of literature or provoke any feelings or thoughts about the role of textual devices.

The responses of children at the beginning of Grade 4 were even more surprising. Although these children had not yet begun formal poetry instruction, they had had many informal experiences with poetic texts both at home and at school. However, they did not even appear to categorize a poem as a poem. Some of them even referred to the poems as prose extracts, such as a “paragraph.” For instance, when reading the poem, “Like they say,” by Robert Creeley, a poem of 29 words graphically portrayed in 8 lines divided into four separate stanzas, one young student thought aloud, “it’s a nice kind of little paragraph, and you can tell a lot about this thing, this story.” These students did not seem to have a conscious representation of a text in poetic form, as a “poem.”

The students were also asked to rate each text in terms of enjoyment, emotion engendered, imagery, and challenge, and a similar developmental pattern emerged. Grade 12 students rated their enjoyment of the poems higher than the prose versions and also rated the poetic texts higher on emotion and imagery. Their positive personal responses to the poetic texts may have been a result of their greater understanding of the culturally attuned conventions and their aesthetic appreciation of the textual devices. On the other hand the Grade 8 students rated the texts in poetic format no higher on any of the measures, and the children in Grade 4 not only did not rate the poems any higher than the prose versions, but, in terms of emotion engendered, actually rated the prose versions higher than the poetic counterparts.

As James Gee (2001) noted, the development of literary competence appears to be tied up with the acquisition of societal practices through enculturation. Developing the structure of knowledge needed for poetic literacy seems to require a long process of formal literary education.

Gee, J. P. (2001). Literacy, discourse, and linguistics: Introduction and what is literacy? In E. Cushman, E. R. Kintgen, B. M. Kroll & M. Rose (Eds.), Literacy: A critical sourcebook (pp. 525-544). Boston: Bedford.

Peskin, J (in press). The development of poetic literacy through the school years. Discourse Processes.

Peskin, J. (2007). The genre of poetry: Secondary school students’ conventional expectations and interpretive operations. English in Education, 41, 20-36.