PSIHONARATOLOŠKI PRISTUP ISPITIVANJU KNJIŽEVNOSTI
PSYCHONARRATOLOGY: AN APPROACH TO THE EMPIRICAL STUDY OF LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: Empirical studies of literature have been developed for the past three decades, mostly based on the reader-oriented literary theories and in cooperation with various disciplines such as psychology, sociology, neuroscience and others. Although groups of researchers in this field have had quite distinct goals and research methods, they all conduct the empirical study of literary reading with real readers. Here we present one of such approaches to the empirical study of literature, psychonarratology, which is an attempt at forming a theoretical framework specific to the empirical study of literature. Psychonarratology derives its basic principles and hypotheses from narratology and cognitive psychology – a field of study concentrated on questions related to choosing, coding, storaging, decoding and using information in our cognitive system. Also, it uses knowledge from other disciplines, such as linguistics, discourse analysis and statistics. In this paper a short description of main research problems of psychonarratology is also presented l, which include the narrator, events and plot, characters and characterization, perception and focalization and represented speech and thought. Although psychonarratology is arguably the most developed theoretical and methodological concept in the field of empirical and experimental study of literature and certainly a step in the right direction, it still has issues including both forms of literature in its research designs and all the aspects of literary reading, such as subjective experience. In addition, it can be argued whether the textual experiment suggested by psychonarratology diminishes the artistic value of used textual stimuli, since it necessarily includes making changes to the original text.

• Details
• Contents