Literature and Transformation: A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Reading Experiences

By Thor Magnus Tangerås

This book develops a method called intimate reading to investigate how ordinary readers are deeply moved by what they read, and the transformative impact such experiences have on their sense of self. The book presents unique narratives of such experiences and suggests a theory of transformative affective patterns that may form the basis of an affective literary theory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Feb 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785272967

Book preview

Literature and Transformation

Literature and Transformation

A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Reading Experiences

Thor Magnus Tangerås

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Thor Magnus Tangerås 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955671

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-294-3 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-294-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter One Introduction

Transformative Reading Experiences

Presuppositions: Change, Crisis, Being Moved

Chapter Two Intimate Reading: A Narrative Method

The Anteroductive Logic of Inquiry

Reliability and Validity

Research Design Overview

Sampling in Interview-Based Qualitative Research

Recruitment Strategy

Interview Method

Presentation of Narratives

Philology and the Manuscript Matrix

Critical Selection of Narratives for Interpretation

The Construct of Life-changing Fiction Reading Experience

Analysis of Narrative Structure

Idiographic Interpretations of the Narratives

Chapter Three Veronica’s Bruise

Listening to the Heart

Chapter Four Nina’s Life-Long Friend Flicka

The Nostos of MySpace

Chapter Five Esther’s Episode

From Discord to Concord

Chapter Six Jane’s Visionary Reading

The Big Bang and the View from Above

Chapter Seven Sue’s Buried Life

Re-membering the Body’s Song

Chapter Eight Reading by Heart: Lexithymia and Transformative Affective Patterns

Mode of Engagement

Realisation through the Experience of Being Moved

Alloiosis: Qualitative Change from Crisis to Resolution

Complex Affective Configurations

Art for Heart’s Sake

Bibliography

Index

Preface

A few years ago I came across an article by the science fiction author Nicola Griffith, in which she wrote about the responses she had had from her readers. Her books, it turned out, had changed people’s lives, helping them to accept their own identity and situation:

A woman in Australia, married with two children, read Ammonite and wrote me a letter to tell me that my novel had shown her what the empty space inside her meant: she was a lesbian. At a bookstore reading in the South, a man told me Slow River had made his job bearable during a truly awful period in his life. A woman in the Midwest approached me at a convention: No, she didn’t want to chat, but she thought I ought to know that Ammonite had literally saved her life: she had been planning to kill herself but instead, for six months, read the book cover to cover, over and over, endlessly, immersing herself in a world of women until she knew it was okay to be a woman, to stay alive and become herself.¹

Shortly thereafter, an author I know told me of a reader who had contacted him to say that his novel had given him the courage to go on with his life when everything was black. About this time I also discovered David Shield’s intriguingly titled memoir, How Literature Saved My Life. The serendipitous confluence of these events impressed themselves upon me. I myself had previously experienced the transformative power of the written word: in my late teens I felt ‘like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken’ as I discovered the hitherto hidden continent of poetry. Later on, as a literary scholar I would come to feel that there was something missing from, or taken for granted in, literary studies: the question of literature’s importance and meaning in our troubled lives. It was as if the wonder and deep engagements with literary works was deemed self-explanatory or, even, an affective fallacy, something to be set aside in order to move onto the ‘important’ stuff: explication, judgement, criticism.

However, many avid readers find sustenance and meaning in literature, which is why we are drawn to it in the first place. As William Nicholson once said, ‘we read to know we are not alone.’ And so I decided to find out more about the role of literature in readers’ lives. In a time in which there is purportedly a ‘crisis in the humanities’,² a time in which the importance of the classics is dwindling and people read fewer books, I believe it is incumbent upon literary scholars to address this exigency; to illuminate the vital link between imaginative literature and the soul’s needs, not by offering yet another apologia, but by empirically investigating the meaning of literature in readers’ lives.

The experience of the work of art, argues the influential literary scholar Rita Felski, ‘is not just a matter of conveying information, but also of experiencing transformation’.³ ‘If you are listening to what people are saying’, proposes Felski, ‘they will explain at length how and why they are deeply attached, moved, affected by the works of art which make them feel things’. And then she asks: ‘What would it mean to do justice to these responses rather than treating them as naïve, rudimentary or defective?’⁴ The purpose of this work is precisely to replace Felski’s if by when, in order to turn her conditional would into a definite does: in other words, to do justice to people’s responses by listening to them relating at length how they are moved, affected and changed by works of literature. I wish to find out how reading imaginative literature may be experienced as life-changing, and what such experiences can tell us about the value of literature and reading. Such a method of inquiry requires careful elaboration. In the chapters that follow, I will first look into what previous research can tell us about transformative reading experiences, as well as psychological studies of narratives of life-change. Thereafter, I will explicate the procedures and justifications of a method that I call Intimate Reading. The method attempts to present a clear rationale for how to approach interviews, how to transcribe and edit narratives, how to critically select narratives for interpretation and how to interpret them. In recent years, narrative methods of qualitative inquiry have flourished.⁵ The concept of narrative, however, is elusive, indeterminate and contested. It is ‘variously used as an epistemology, a methodological perspective, an antidote to positivist research, a communication mode, a supra-genre, a text-type’.⁶ As such, it is necessary to clarify methodological and procedural problems related to such inquiry.

The main body of this book is the presentation in detail of five dialogic narratives of life-changing experiences, and my subsequent interpretations of these. The first narrative presents Veronica’s experience of reading D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. My interpretation addresses four main issues: the nature of Veronica’s crisis prior to and during the reading experience, her account of her process of transaction with the novel, her interpretation of the kind of change she has undergone and what role she ascribes to Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the configuration of her story. I will argue that Veronica’s problem, that of finding the strength to escape from the entrapment of a confining relationship, only masks a deeper crisis: an emotional bruise that can no longer be held at bay by avoiding contact with her underlying emotions. An essential element of her mode of engagement with the novel is the visceral and a bodily form of knowing. What appears to be a rather straightforward case of deciding to take action, may only be a surface manifestation of a deeper change having taken place: Veronica learns to ‘listen to the heart’. The meaning of her story must be understood in relation to her serendipitous discovery of the book, and how the reading experience opens up for another transformative experience many years later, when reading The Winter’s Tale. The latter enables her to heal her bruise, by metaphorically ‘bringing her mother back to life’.

The second narrative is the only one to thematise an accumulative experience of re-reading. Nina has returned to Mary O’Hara’s novel My Friend Flicka time and again in the course of her life. It has been a companion for 40 years, ‘making unbearable times bearable’. Central to Nina’s life is the ‘great struggle’ to find her ‘own place in the world’, and ‘the enormous process of turning things around’ in order to achieve this. Like Ken’s story, ‘a coming-of-age story, about arriving at something, about overcoming something’, Nina’s is a story of a quest: to overcome, by healing the split in her psyche, and to arrive at a point where she can express herself in an authentic and creative manner. In my interpretation I look at the nature of Nina’s crisis, showing how it can best be understood as an inner exile, an identity crisis made up of four distinct stages: foreclosure, diffusion, moratorium and achievement. These correspond to the various life-phases she recounts: conversion and apostasy, the ‘terribly frightening rootless years’, being ‘confronted with herself’ and subsequently having to withdraw from the world for years, before finally realising that she is a musician. I understand her protracted crisis of diffusion to be due to her experience of poor self-esteem and unattainable ideals for herself. Only by a gradual process of transmuting internalisation, in which the repeated readings of Flicka is essential to her self-restoration, does she achieve identity. This deepening attunement to the work through repeated readings I propose to call palilexia.

The third narrative is that of Esther’s encounter with Norwegian poet Inger Hagerup’s Episode. Esther’s experience of her parents’ troubled marriage was severe enough to make her suffer an internal conflict constituting a crisis. I interpret her reading experience in terms of a metamorphosis: just as the visage of the poems’ character is transformed, so is her view of her parents. This recognition of the underlying truth about her parents’ union is a special kind of anagnorisis: it is deeply affective and strikes Esther as a sudden revelation. Through a process of catharsis her confusion and despair is dispelled, allowing her to achieve a sense of inner reconciliation with her parents. The transformative reading experience motivates her quest to learn the language of emotions. This search takes the shape of a ‘voyage and return’, in which Esther looks for a way of helping people recognise the truth of their relationships. When she eventually discovers it in the form of Emotion-Focused Couples’ Therapy, with its focus on the subtext of vulnerability, it also marks the return to Episode. The life-long return to, and development of, the transformative affective images and patterns embedded in the poem is reflected in her work as a therapist. The poem and the experience of reading it is still alive and active, lending a profound meaning to Esther’s remark that she ‘learned the poem by heart’.

The fourth narrative concerns Jane’s reading of Doris Lessing’s Shikasta. Her reading experience begins before she opens the book, and goes on for many years after she closes it. It has ‘shaped her life’ and is both the centre and the circumference of her redemptive life story. Jane’s story fits neatly into McAdams’s study of generative adults: those who begin life by being a special child, experience adversity before turning things around and gradually find a way to give of themselves to a larger community. At the right time, in a moment of kairos, Jane encounters Shikasta. She loves and trusts Lessing, yet she is shocked by the truth the book reveals. I interpret this ‘Big Bang’ as a special kind of sublime experience. In her deeply affective and contemplative reading of Shikasta, Jane seems to enact a metabolic mode of engagement, marked by slow digestion and an immediate turn from one framework to another. This brings about a metanoia, a change of mind and heart. She spends many years accommodating the Big Bang, before she finally discovers her vocation: Shared Reading.

The final narrative presented is about Sue’s discovery of the vitality of poetry through her encounter with Matthew Arnold’s The Buried Life. In his phenomenological investigation of subjective experience that leads to change, Daniel Stern suggests that conscious present moments be divided into three different kinds. The first kind is the regular, ordinary present moment. Secondly, there is the now moment. This is a present moment that ‘suddenly pops up and is highly charged with immediately impending consequences’.⁷ Thirdly, there is a moment of meeting ‘in which the two parties achieve an intersubjective meeting and each becomes aware of the other’s experiencing. They share a sufficiently similar mental landscape so that a sense of ‘specific fittedness’ is achieved.’⁸ These moments of meeting usually follow immediately upon now moments, and, argues Stern, constitute ‘the key moments of change in psychotherapy’.⁹ My interpretation revolves around several such moments of meeting: Sue and The Buried Life; Sue and I in dialogue; my own reading of the poem; and my understanding of her story. I seek to understand the nature of her affective realisation, how being lifted up in the encounter with the poem can effect a re-membering of a forgotten part of the lived body. I argue that Sue’s mode of engagement with the poem can be understood as an interaffective attunement that opens up contact with a deep source of vitality.

In the final chapter, I attempt to circle in a specific mode of engagement with literary works manifested in all these experiences, which I call ‘reading by heart’. I discuss how the experience of being moved may be a vital part of affective transformation, and the relations between such experiences and the resolution of life-crises.

1 http://www.lambdaliterary.org/memo/03/31/books-change-lives-sometimes-books-save-lives-queer-books-save-queer-lives/ .

2 For a discussion of this crisis, see Philip Davis, Reading and the Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), vii.

3 Rita Felski, ‘Context Stinks!’, New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 573–91: 575.

4 Ibid, 585.

5 Represented by, for instance, Barbara Czarniawska, Narratives in Social Science Research (London: Sage, 2006); D. Jean Clandinin, Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology (London: Sage, 2007); Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein, Analysing Narrative Reality (London: Sage, 2009).

6 Quoted in Catherine Kohler Riessman, Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2008), 183.

7 Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 151.

8 Ibid. Stern’s basic assumption is that ‘change is based on lived experience. In and of itself, verbally understanding, explaining or narrating something is not sufficient to bring about change. There must also be an actual experience, a subjectively lived happening’ (xiii). I concur with his view.

9 Ibid., xi.

Acknowledgements

When I first set out to investigate transformative reading experiences, I could not possibly envisage how rewarding this undertaking would prove to be. I am grateful for all that I have learned, and to all those who have helped me along the way. I wish to thank my editor at Anthem Press, Megan Grieving, for having great faith in this project, and the production team led by Kanimozhi Ramamurthy for invaluable help in bringing the book through to its completion. I am greatly indebted to Professor Philip Davis, who has read various versions of this manuscript and kindly encouraged me throughout, ever since inviting me to spend an invaluable six months as a guest researcher at the University of Liverpool. My heartfelt thanks also to Dr Jane Davis, founder and Director of the Reader for warmly welcoming me into the wondrous world of Shared Reading. I thank my wife and family for their unflagging support during the entire journey.

Finally, and above all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to each and every participant in this inquiry, who generously gave of their time and courageously shared their life-changing experiences. In sharing them, you have also changed me. Hjertelig takk.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

Transformative Reading Experiences

In her autobiography Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Wintersonwrites:

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot book helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it’s irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.¹

Winterson regards poetry as a medicine for the soul: ‘Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.’² This is of course an ancient idea. In The Therapy of Desire the philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes:

From Homer on we encounter, frequently and prominently, the idea that logos is to illnesses of the soul as medical treatment is to illnesses of the body. We also find the claim that logos is a powerful and perhaps even a sufficient remedy for these illnesses; frequently it is portrayed as the only available remedy. The diseases in question are frequently diseases of inappropriate or misinformed emotion. […] logos is being said to play a real healing role, and to heal through its complicated relationship to the intellect and the emotions.³

The interest in Logos as the medicine for the soul has seen a great revival in recent years with the emergence of various forms of bibliotherapy. ‘Over half of English library authorities are operating some form of bibliotherapy intervention,’ according to a study cited in the Guardian.⁴ Bibliotherapy includes not just fiction, however, and some forms have an instrumental rather than aesthetic orientation. And yet there are ways of mediating literature in which it is the very attention to the aesthetic dimension that brings about medicine for the soul. One programme of organised reading of imaginative literature, in which the emphasis is on the shared enjoyment of aesthetic experience and where therapeutic benefits in the form of increased mental well-being come as secondary gains, is the research-based community-intervention programme Shared Reading, a project initiated by the Reader Organisation in cooperation with the University of Liverpool.⁵

The issue of how literature affects our personal lives has often been bypassed in literary studies, which, while tacitly adumbrating the primacy of this deep engagement, remains parasitic upon it. Several of the major philosophers of hermeneutics and aesthetics explicitly assert the potential of literature to change the reader’s life or personality, marking it out as the aim of reading and the ontological legitimation of art. In Truth and Method, Gadamer writes:‘The work of art is not an object that stands over against a subject for itself. Instead the work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences it.’⁶ Transformative reading is what testifies to the truth of art: ‘In the experience of art we see a genuine experience induced by the work, which does not leave him who has it unchanged.’⁷ Paul Ricoeur maintains that fiction is as important for self-understanding as history: ‘Self-understanding [is] mediated by the conjoint reception – particularly through reading – of historical and fictional narratives. Knowing oneself is interpreting oneself under the double guidance of historical and fictional narrative.’⁸ Self-understanding is achieved via the appropriation of the truth of narratives. Moreover, the transformative power of fiction is what gives it its virtue: ‘The figuration of the self through the mediation of the other may be a genuine means of self-discovery […]. Self-construction might be a way of becoming what one really is […]. The fictive model has a revelatory virtue only insofar as it has a power of transformation.’⁹ Jan Mukarovsky, one of the most influential theorists in establishing Literary studies as a science, also highlights the transformative effects of art:

The work becomes capable of being closely connected to the entirely personal experiences, images and feelings of any perceiver – capable of affecting not only his conscious mental life but even of setting into motion forces which govern his subconscious. The perceiver’s entire personal relation to reality, whether active or contemplative, will henceforth be changed to a greater or lesser degree by this influence. Hence the work of art has such powerful effect upon man not because it gives him – as the common formula goes – an impression of the author’s personality, his experience and so forth, but because it influences the perceiver’s personality, his experiences and so forth.¹⁰

The work, because it is so intimately connected to our personal experience, can affect us so deeply that it changes us by influencing our personality and worldview. What these thinkers reiterate is the potential for transformative reading. Yet it is a phenomenon curiously under-researched, even in reader-response studies, although Louise Rosenblattpostulates the occurrence of life-changing reading experiences:

The reading of a book, it is true, has sometimes changed a person’s entire life. When that occurs, the book has undoubtedly come as a culminating experience that crystallises a long, subconscious development. In such cases the book usually opens up a new view of life or a new sense of the potentialities of human nature and thus resolves some profound need or struggle.¹¹

Reader-response criticism regards the interaction between reader and text as central, and reading is conceived as a personal event at a certain time in a certain context.¹² Whereas traditional reader-response theory did not address actual readers, but dealt with the concept of the ideal reader (Iser) and the model reader (Eco), Janice Radway underlined that reception studies should look at the experiences of real readers, and their encounters with works of literature. Louise Rosenblatt, one of the most influential proponents of reader-response approaches to literary studies, argued that literature must be understood in its living context. ‘Transaction’ was the term she chose to designate ‘a two-way process involving a reader and a text at a particular time under particular circumstances’.¹³ Rosenblatt differentiates between two modes of engagement in reading: the efferent and the aesthetic. In the efferent mode ‘attention focuses on what is to be carried away at the end of the reading’. When the aesthetic attitude predominates, ‘attention will shift inward, will center on what is actually being created during the actual reading. […] Out of these ideas and feelings, a new experience, the story or poem, is shaped and lived through.’¹⁴ The positive transformative effects Rosenblatt enlists as the aim of literary education rest upon the aesthetic mode of engagement. By ‘living through’ the work, the reader can achieve insight and emotional liberation.

In a seminal work in reception studies, Hans Robert Jauss argues that all aesthetic enjoyment is the result of a meeting between reader and work.¹⁵ Although he uses the term ‘interaction’ and emphasises the historical horizon of expectation in which the reader is embedded, his concept is similar to Rosenblatt’s ‘transaction’ in that he seeks todifferentiate progressive from regressive encounters between reader and work. ‘Self-enjoyment in the enjoyment of something other’ is the formulation Jauss has chosen to designate the balance needed for the interaction to be progressive. It is a ‘pendulum movement in which the self enjoys not only its real object, the aesthetic object, but also its correlate, the equally irrealised subject which has been released from its always already given reality’.¹⁶ He identifies five interaction modes which are predicated upon identification with the hero. In the admiring mode of identification with the perfect hero, the progressive form is characterised by emulation and exemplariness; the negative by entertainment by the extraordinary and a need for escape. In the sympathetic mode of identification with the imperfect hero, the progressive is marked by compassion as the result of moral interest, solidarity and readiness to act, whereas sentimentality (enjoyment of pain) and self-confirmation leads to regression. In the cathartic mode of identification with the suffering hero of tragic works the progressive response takes the form of disinterestedness and free reflection; whereas the progressive response to the beset hero of comedy is marked by sympathetic laughter and free moral judgement. The regressive responses to this mode are marked by bewitched fascination and mockery, respectively. In the ironic mode of identification with the anti-hero, there is either progression in the form of creative response and refinement of perception, or there is regressive boredom and solipsism. Each of these patterns allows for a progressive or a regressive attitude. An important caveat made by Jauss is that ‘this model is provisional and has the specific weakness of lacking the foundation that a theory of emotions would give it’.¹⁷ Although several theories of emotion have been developed in the years since Jauss offered his model, I do not know of any attempts to apply such theories to an expansion of his model.

A central idea in the theories of Rosenblatt and Jauss is the reciprocity of text-interpretation and self-interpretation. This reciprocity, however, may be of either a virtuous/progressive/self-modificatory or vicious/regressive/self-absorbed kind. The former marks the potentiality for transformative reading experiences. However, it is necessary to investigate actual occurrences. As David Miall concedes, ‘reading is potentially capable of transforming the self, although the extent to which it actually does so will depend upon the concerns that emerge from the reader’s prior experience, or […] the extent to which the reader’s imagination is seized by the text’.¹⁸

Expressive Enactment and Self-Modifying Feelings

In his close, personal, readings of works that have influenced him, Philip Davis embellishes on what is at stake in such progressive modes of reading:

For despite the undeniable risk that the personal may be the place of utmost falsification, I know that anything I really think and believe is registered most deeply when it is registered at the personal level. Some other levels are safer, but none in the state of present society is more finally testing. I am not suggesting that you read simply in order ‘to find your self’ – the self, in that sense, is all too often and too consciously an egoistic fabrication. I am talking about taking books personally to such a depth inside, that you no longer have a merely secure idea of self and relevance to self, but a deeper exploratory sense of a reality somehow finding unexpected relations and echoes in you.¹⁹

Davis’s description bears similarities with the empirical findings made by Kuiken et al. in a series of phenomenologically inspired experiments. They identify a mode of engagement they call ‘expressive enactment’. Such enactment is marked precisely by a self-modificatory pendulum movement as opposed to a self-absorbed mode of interaction. Their empirical work has the advantage of affording greater analytic precision than the vague term ‘identification’ allows for. Kuikenet al. aim to ‘reawaken interest in the notion of aesthetic experience’²⁰ and to investigate empirically ‘the transformative potential of literary reading’.²¹ They argue that other reader-response approaches have failed to take into account how the reader’s sense of self influences and is being affected by reading. The basic premise for their approach to empirical reading studies is that literary texts afford a different mode of understanding than that offered by non-literary texts: ‘We read literary texts because they enable us to reflect on our feelings and concerns, clarify what they are, and reconfigure them within an altered understanding of our own and other’s lives.’²² Through combining experimental studies and numerically aided phenomenology, Kuiken et al. have identified what they call ‘expressive enactment’, ‘a form of reading that penetrates and alters a reader’s understanding of everyday life’ and ‘modifies feeling, and reshapes the self’.²³ The think-aloud and self-probed retrospection approach, in which readers mark striking passages when reading and subsequently comment upon them, is designed to ‘capture the temporally unfolding experience of a text rather than its consummating interpretation’.²⁴ They argue that such ‘expressive reading’ constitutes a distinct and particular level of feeling in relation to literary reading. These self-modifying feelings ‘restructure the reader’s understanding of the textual narrative and, simultaneously, the reader’s sense of self’.²⁵ The dynamics of feeling response in this domain is such that ‘aesthetic and narrative feelings interact to produce metaphors of personal identification that modify self-understanding’.²⁶ According to the authors, it is within this fourth domain that ‘we can locate what is distinctive to literary response’.²⁷ In several studies they have attempted to determine the distinctive characteristics of this form of self-implicating reading and the affective response that literary texts invite from readers. Not all readers engage in this form of reading; in fact only a minority do so. They found that nine out of forty readers manifested commentaries that reflected expressive enactment.²⁸

They have found two different factors that dispose readers towards expressive enactment. The first factor is a personality trait named ‘absorption’.²⁹ Readers who score highly on this trait are ‘more likely to report affective theme variations and self-perceptual shifts’.³⁰ The second factor, coming to light in an experimental study where expressive enactment occurred frequently among readers who had suffered a significant loss, was the impact of personal crisis.³¹ We do not know exactly how these two factors co-operate. However, we may reasonably conjecture that both are necessary if the transformative reading experience is to have lasting effect in the life of the reader and become an integrative part of their self-concept. Kuiken and Miall consider that this approach to reading may be ‘more deeply tied to particular life circumstances than theoretical discussions of historically relative and institutionalized reading practices would allow’, and raise the following question of utmost relevance to an inquiry into life-changing reading experiences: ‘What if, for example, expressive enactment […] occurred with greater regularity among individuals who are psychologically predisposed by experiences of loss, death, and bereavement?’³² Without expanding on other types of possible life crises, Kuiken and Miall stipulate that self-modifying reading may be ‘dependent upon the opening – or closing – of experiential windows during such seemingly inevitable life crises’.³³

Kuikenet al. examine two different forms of self-implication, one that functions like simile and one that functions like metaphor. The former is marked by explicitly recognised similarity between personal memories and aspects of text-world in a comparative gesture; the latter is characterised by metaphors of personal identification in a process during which the reader comes to identify asymmetrically with an instance in the text: I am like the character, but the character is not like me. In their example of readers’ engagement with a short story by Katherine Mansfield, when the reader finds that ‘I am Mrs Bean’ this is not equivalent to her saying ‘Mrs Bean is me’.³⁴ Kuiken et al. posit that it is this metaphoric self-implication that constitutes the distinct mode of engagement termed ‘expressive enactment’. Regarding one of the readers who participated in a study in which bereaved persons read this poem, Kuiken et al. uncovered three significant aspects of her account. They found that she spoke ‘with the characteristic attunement to feeling’; she used the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘we’; and ‘she repeatedly returns to a theme in the poem that, through its successive variations, is gradually woven into the imaginative life that accompanies her grief and into her reflections about the loss of her grandfather and father’.³⁵ The expressive mode of reading is regarded as a ‘hybrid mode of engagement’ that is attentive to both narrative and stylistic aspects of the text.

Kuiken et al. have related their phenomenological findings to the two central affective concepts in literary history, catharsis and the sublime. Kuiken and Miall propose that the concept of catharsis constitutes one particular form of the more general pattern of ‘hybrid engagement’ of aesthetic and narrative feelings. They suggest that when a sequence of affective responses constitute a modification of a first feeling by a second, this may be considered a form of catharsis. This is because in Aristotle’s theory, they maintain, catharsis modifies inappropriate emotions, and ‘fear in the end appears to be modified by pity’; this ‘radical qualification of one emotion by another in our rereading of catharsis suggests that Aristotle’s tragic catharsis is a special case of a more general process in literary reading’.³⁶ A cathartic shift may have occurred in several of the readers that took part in their study, ‘as earlier feelings are recontextualised by other more inclusive feelings’.³⁷ In another study, Kuiken et al. discuss ‘apex experiential reading moments’ in terms of the sublime. They identify a core process involving apex moments that leads to self-alteration. Building on Gendlin’s phenomenological concept of felt sense, they delineate a process through which ‘an inexpressible felt sense guides reflective explication of the something more that the felt sense prescribes’, leading to either of two forms of sublime feeling, sublime enthrallment and sublime disquietude.³⁸ These are characterised in terms of affective bearing and epistemic tone: ‘the expressive depth of sublime enthrallment also has the affective bearing of wonder and the epistemic tone of reverence while the expressive depth of sublime disquietude also has the affective bearing of disquietude and the epistemic tone of discord’.³⁹

Studies of expressive enactment have not looked at how it may lead to long-lasting self-change. Raymond Mar et al., in their review of empirical research ‘on the dynamic interaction between emotion and literature’, conclude that ‘studies of reading and of emotion tend to examine short-term outcomes; it is time to begin looking at whether profound and long-lasting changes can occur after engagement with meaningful narrative fiction.’⁴⁰ Some such studies have been made already.

Catherine Ross, in the context of studying information-seeking and the role that reading for pleasure may serve, conducted interviews with 194 self-declared avid pleasure-readers. The premise behind the study was that ‘since meanings are constructed by readers, we must ask the readers about the uses they make of texts in the context of their lives’.⁴¹ What transpired was that the majority of readers reported serendipitous encounters in which a book had made a significant difference to their life. Among the questions put to all informants was the following: ‘Has there ever been a book that has helped you or made a difference to your life in one way or another?’⁴² Ross found that ‘approximately 60 per cent of the readers in the study provided sufficient detail about one or more particular books that it was possible to discern a significant way in which a book had helped in the context of their lives’.⁴³ What is not clear from the report is how many of these significant reading experiences involved works of fiction. What the study did show, however, was that ‘their key feature is that they tell a story that readers can relate to their own lives’, says Ross, with the caveat that ‘the resemblances between reader’s life and the life represented in the text may be discernible only to the reader’.⁴⁴ Moreover, ‘sometimes the encounter with the significant book was accidental’, and in all cases ‘reading was interwoven into the texture of their lives, not separate from it’.⁴⁵ Ross subsequently analysed 15 accounts of significant reading experiences, finding:

The most commonly occurring claim (in one third of all the cases) was that the book had opened up a new perspective, helped its reader see things differently, or offered an enlarged set of possibilities […] In about a quarter of all cases, readers said books provided models, examples to follow, rules to live by, and sometimes inspiration. […] In some cases, reading changed the readers’ beliefs, attitudes or pictures of the world, which change in turn altered the way readers chose to live their lives after the book was closed.⁴⁶

Ross concludes that the interviews provide evidence that ‘when the right match is made between reader and story, readers use the text to create a story about themselves. They read themselves into the story and then read the story into their lives, which then becomes a part of them.’⁴⁷

The phenomenological psychologist Paul F. Colaizzi made the first inquiry into what he terms ‘existential change occasioned by reading’.⁴⁸ Colaizzi found that the outcome of the reading experience ‘is not so much the creation of a new world as of discovering a new way of living one’s own world’.⁴⁹ The reading does not provide information about the world, but restructures the way the persons relate to themselves and their lifeworld. According to Colaizzi, the transformative reading experience falls into three temporal phases: before the reading commences (‘Readiness’), during the act of reading (‘revealing power of the book’) and the after-effects of the reading (‘consequences’). Other studies corroborate the before-during-after structure identified by Colaizzi. The psychologists Swatton and O’Callaghan investigated the significance of healing reading experiences in the life history of their informants. They identified three main elements which correspond to Colaizzi’s categories. First, there is a ‘context of struggle’ that preceded the healing process. Secondly, there is the unfolding of