ERIC Number: ED271738
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1986-Mar
Pages: 48
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Story Structure and Reader Affect in American and Hungarian Short Stories. Technical Report No. 375.
Brewer, William F.; Ohtsuka, Keisuke
Forty-eight college students participated in a study that (1) explored the degree to which the reader response technique developed by W. F. Brewer and E. H. Lichtenstein to study artificial texts could be applied to natural texts, and (2) compared texts written over a wide time period and from two different literary traditions (six American and six Hungarian short stories written in two different time periods). The stories were divided into five roughly equal parts. After reading each part, subjects completed affective reader response scales that measured suspense, curiosity about the past, curiosity about the future, surprise, and irony. After reading the entire story, the subjects completed a questionnaire dealing with such issues as overall liking, degree of completeness, and degree of empathy. The overall pattern of results provided support for Brewer and Lichtenstein's structural-affect theory and showed that the reader response technique they developed for use with artifical texts could be used for natural texts. In addition, suspense and empathy were found to be particularly important variables in producing story liking for both American and Hungarian stories, and there were few differences in findings between the older stories and the more recent ones. (Appendixes contain a list of the stories and copies of the scales used in the study.) (FL)
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Inst. of Education (ED), Washington, DC.
Authoring Institution: Illinois Univ., Urbana. Center for the Study of Reading.; Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc., Cambridge, MA.
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A