A Three-Dimensions Model of Literary Reading: First- and Second-Generation Approaches, and Shared Conceptualisations

Abstract In this article, we propose a new model of literary reading that integrates concepts from three paradigms of cognitive studies: the ›first-generation‹ approach to human cognition, which has informed the study of text understanding under the label ›discourse processing‹ and generated models of narrative comprehension based on notions of information storage and retrieval; the ›second generation‹ of cognitive approaches centring around the concept of embodiment; and a third approach, which focuses on the connections between individual cognition and its cultural contexts under such labels as ›situated conceptualisation‹, ›grounded cognition‹, ›cultural models‹, or ›patterned practices‹, which we summarise under the label ›shared conceptualisations‹. The latter approach is partly implied in second-generation theories but deserves to be integrated into the broader picture of readers’ complex mental operations when reading literature. We argue that shared conceptualisations integrate mental representations of abstract information and bodily experience in culturally shared schematic mental structures, but that in literary reading, the other two dimensions can also be evoked separately. The third strand thus takes a middle position between a strongly conceptual and abstract (first-generation) understanding of the reading process on the one hand, and a strongly embodied, or enactive (second-generation) one, on the other. Importantly, our model acknowledges the fact that the dimensions mutually influence each other. Each dimension is a description of a prominent tendency in a particular mode of cognition in the reading process, not an ontological distinction that separates one set of cognitive operations from another. The model itself must be understood as a heuristic for a closer inspection of the different ways in which readers bring their backgrounds of knowledge and experience to their engagement with literature. Using a novel (Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day ) as an example, we demonstrate how different aspects of a literary text may invite different dimensions of cognitive-emotional engagement in readers.