Interpretaciones: Experimental Criticism and the Metrics of Latin American Literature

By Nick Mansfield

Interpretaciones: Experimental Criticism and the Metrics of Latin American Literature examines readers' reactions to short texts during crucial moments of the reading experience. These readers are students at universities in the US and several Spanish-speaking countries. Far from reducing the reading experience to a series of numbers, the data-driven approaches in the study instead underline the startling complexity and elusiveness of seemingly basic literary processes and concepts, including those pertaining to authorship, titles, conclusions, and so on. Simultaneously, Interpretaciones suggests alternative methodologies for gaining new and unexpected knowledge about literary texts themselves, whether from Latin America or elsewhere. Interpretaciones is an ambitious, interdisciplinary project geared toward those interested in literary theory, Latin American and Caribbean literature, and the nexus between literature and science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Department of Romance Studies
• Release date: Feb 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781469676678

Nick Mansfield

Rudyard J. Alcocer is the Forrest & Patsy Shumway Chair of Excellence in Romance Languages in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He teaches all levels of Latin American literature and culture, and has designed and taught advanced courses involving the Hispanic Caribbean and the African Diaspora in Spanish America.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

So far critics have only interpreted literature, it is now a question of transforming it.

Gérard Genette

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.

W. E. B. Du Bois

IN A TALE ATTRIBUTED to Nasreddin, the thirteenth-century Seljuk philosopher, a man lost his ring inside his house but searched for it in the yard. His wife, understandably, asked him why he was looking for the ring outside when he had lost it inside. His response? Because outside the house there was light but inside it was dark.

In some respects, such is the situation with literary studies. Quite a number of us, myself included, have approached our subject where the light is already shining, or —for that matter—with conventional sources of light. The present study seeks to explore the darkness, which in this case involves features of literary texts written in Spanish and how voluntary readers respond to them during the most crucial moments of the reading experience. These moments correspond to a number of common features of the literary experience, and they are designed to produce measurable results. To this end, in the following pages we will be doing all the things one is not supposed to do with literary texts: falsify them, tweak them, conceal parts of them, and the like, all in an effort to determine how readers respond to the different versions. The results, which are informed by alternative approaches toward the experience of literature, are often startling in the insights they yield about the reading experience and, perhaps even more fundamentally, the literary object itself. Readers who would like to proceed directly to the experimental exercises are invited to do so, beginning in chapter one. Those who would prefer a more detailed theoretical introduction to the study need only keep reading.

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We are seeking in this study to shed light on the experience of reading literature. The preceding sentence, in its brevity, requires some unpacking. This process of unpacking, while less brief, should reward the interested reader. One could first choose to examine the word literature, a highly contested word with variable —if not unclear—definitions and delimitations. Reading is similarly complex. Combine the two words, reading literature, and the complexities multiply. Add the third term, the experience of reading literature, and the complexities seem to increase an additional order of magnitude. Taken together, however, the three terms actually clarify our subject matter.

If Gérard Genette revised —in one of this introduction’s epigraphs—Karl Marx’s ambitious dictum about philosophy, the present study revises Genette’s own ambitious revision: our purpose now is to transform, even if in some small way, our knowledge about the experience of reading literature, and the manner in which we attain this knowledge. To be clear, our focus lies here, rather than in other possible experiences involving literature (writing it, selling it, ignoring it, etc.). That stated, there will be points of relevance to these other types of experience.

What do we know about the experience of reading literature and how have we attained this knowledge? Furthermore, how —theoretically speaking, perhaps—is such knowledge attainable? Much of our knowledge about literature has come from professional readers, otherwise known as literary scholars or literary critics. These individual expert readers have provided the lion’s share of insights we have on literature, literary processes, authors, and so on. More recently, big data approaches and cognitive studies have yielded their own insights into these matters. Throughout, with the exception of Reader Response studies (more on this below), readers themselves have often been overlooked: their responses, if acknowledged, have merely been intuited and imagined by the literary critics.

Yet, there remains much to be known about the experience of reading literature. The challenge in many respects lies in identifying new approaches, new pathways toward knowledge. An additional challenge is the fact that the experience of reading literature is, already, such vast terrain for critical inquiry. It has to be parceled out. There is, in fact, no such thing as a full and accurate account of the reading experience, no matter the method, text, or participants involved: there is no reading experience; instead, there are experiences, inflected by language, historical moments, cultural contexts, a reader’s idiosyncrasies, and so on.

What if we were to isolate certain moments of the reading experience based on a selection of features common to most literary texts? While it bears mentioning that doing so will necessarily not be the definitive account of the reading experience that has so long eluded literary scholarship, perhaps insights await nonetheless. Rather than a definitive account, instead we will aim for new approximations into the reading experience, most of which have been hiding in plain sight.

We begin by identifying some of the basic, constitutive elements of literary texts and designing interactive experiments related to those elements; stated differently, we will be looking for interactive potential in otherwise standard (but no less important) literary fare. Occasionally the interactive experiments in the study involve making slight modifications to the text or to how it is typically presented to its readership; then we compare reader responses to those versions with the responses to the unaltered versions. We then examine the results for patterns that may hold some significance. When there are no patterns, or when these patterns lack statistical significance, we comment appropriately. Occasionally, such a lack is compensated in other, unexpected, ways.

Other scholars have designed similar experiments, but this is the first book-length study that details a comprehensive approach organized around analyzing data derived from experiments based on important features of (or pertaining to) actual (i.e. published) literary texts. There are six such experiments, six such important features. Many additional features or elements are possible; for present purposes, however, we will limit ourselves to these, which will be described shortly.

Previous scholarship is divided as concerns the act of manipulating literary texts for research purposes. There have been several insightful studies premised on manipulated or even fully artificial literary texts created by scholars: Willie Van Peer and Ingrid Stöger (Psycho-Analysts and Day-Dreaming), for instance, have done this to examine the relationship between the point of view given primacy in a story and how readers identify with characters based on the prevailing point of view; each of the three versions of the story was told from a different character’s perspective. David Miall, in contrast, has argued that textual manipulation can also introduce unexpected secondary side-effects that, while unrelated to the variance that the experimenter hopes to isolate, also influence readers (Literary Reading 27). He refers in particular to literary experiments in which the original text is altered or rendered less literary, e.g. in neutral prose (26) to measure differences in response. To be fair, Van Peer and his collaborators are mindful of these issues and devote significant attention in their 2007 Muses and Measures study to outlining them as well as similar effects that can influence experimental research. Still, the issues call to mind the distinction between literary processes and literary texts. After all, how applicable to literary texts are research results derived from artificial texts that are created for research purposes? Conversely, to what extent —if at all—should literary texts be treated as inviolable objects that cannot be simulated in controlled conditions or approached with research tools available in other (even related) disciplines?

Issues pertaining to the validity of artificial literary texts, while important to keep in mind, are only tangentially relevant to the present study, which pursues other forms of textual manipulation. The literary texts this study involves are not artificial texts designed and written for experimental purposes: they are instead actual, published texts written to some degree or other with literary purposes in mind. In the study’s experiments I may tweak the texts or how I present them to readers, but I do so sparingly and strategically.

The experiments in Interpretaciones have a pedagogical dimension: this cannot be denied. Indeed, the study has its origins in the classroom, and it has implications for how literature is taught, especially shorter works. Sadly, literary studies seem to bifurcate conventional scholarship from pedagogy; this bifurcation is at our own peril. In addition, the six moments in the study are unashamedly playful. Play connotes many things, including fun, enjoyment, and games. Individuals can play games by themselves, certain card games, for example. Some games pit one opponent against another, while other games require teams. Similarly, the play in this study involves interactions that require the participation of other minds, in this case fellow readers. I know what I think about what I read; similarly, I know what prominent literary scholars think about what they have read. Through the activities I design for other readers, meanwhile, I obtain data that in some way represent their thoughts about what they read. More often than not, I find the responses of other readers more interesting than my own.

My task is not simply to ask readers what they think or what they feel about a literary reading or some fragment thereof; such approaches —so popular in Reader Response studies from prior decades—have been used by others. Instead, I isolate certain moments of the reading experience and employ basic empirical methodologies (for instance, control groups versus experimental groups, or control versus treatment groups) to determine and analyze the reading patterns of others.

The participating readers are all students of literature. Previous scholarship has also cautioned against taking the responses of students seriously (Jonathan Culler’s 1981 The Pursuit of Signs, for instance).¹ What, it is fair to ask, can students of literature teach literature professors about their subject? After all, in most fields of learning —a driving school, for example—the acquisition of knowledge is understood to flow in only one direction: from instructor to student. In this study, however, one of my contentions is that —under the right conditions and depending, as well, on how we approach our subject—instructors of literature have much to learn from their students. This is not to suggest that the students know more than their teachers but, rather, that they know (and sometimes do not know) differently, in ways that may be of interest to anyone who takes literary studies seriously.

While this study has its origins in pedagogy, it has since transcended these origins. In some respects, the very same experiments designed to help me gauge students’ varying understandings about the basic components of literature would simultaneously undermine and call into question the essence of what I intended to teach. Take the title of a poem, for instance: the first of our six moments in reading. Authors may spend untold hours deciding on a title, while teachers and critics spend similarly vast amounts of time analyzing such authorial decisions. In line with this way of thinking about titles, we can ask our students to examine a title, to analyze it, to identify its strengths and weaknesses. What exactly is a title, though? What is it supposed to do? How have titles evolved over the centuries? Literary scholars have provided interesting answers to these questions over the years. To say that titles are (or at the very least can be) important is to state the obvious. That some titles are better than others is also stating the obvious. When, however, we ask readers to do some of the initial, fundamental brainwork as concerns titles, the conversation quickly moves in other, unexpected directions. What happens, for example, when we play with the title by concealing it and asking readers themselves to supply it? Beyond providing a facile and potentially unproductive answer to the question, Do titles matter? (of course they do … sometimes), such an exercise —when administered at a pivotal moment—may begin to reveal how a title matters. This, then, is my primary interest and my principal focus in this study: to describe six ways of interacting with literature and to describe the results when readers of literature partake in these activities under conditions that isolate each of these six ways. Such interactions are in many ways also at the inter section of reading, pedagogy, and literary criticism. We will be neither deconstructing literary texts nor placing them on a pedestal. Instead, we will be tinkering with them and analyzing the results.

Who are the participants? They are all university students, sometimes my own at the University of Tennessee, or at other universities in a total of four countries, three of them primarily Spanish-speaking. There were approximately 328 participants in the study,² at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Given the nature of the experiments I designed and the complexities of obtaining clearance for research with human subjects from institutional review boards at several institutions, I have chosen to prioritize smaller data sources. Rather than, for example, enlisting vast numbers of paid (or unpaid) subject-pool participants or using online mechanical turks, my study is inextricably linked to at times highly interactive teaching and learning processes involving conventional literary texts: in other words, processes more in line with my academic training and experiences. Further, the study was conducted in what Van Peer (Muses and Measures 152) would describe as an intact experimental setting: namely, in academic classrooms, as opposed to a laboratory. In sum, this study does not divorce or in any way distance data (and its acquisition) from the learning process. Some may see this as a flaw in methodology given that I am reporting on data provided by just over 300 readers rather than ten or a hundred times that number. Others, however, may understand that this is, in the final analysis, a humanistic study rather than a clinical trial: my objectives are exercises that can lead to sustained and intense engagement between readers and what they read, and depth in their responses: these objectives, in turn, are underwritten by the premise that there is much to be learned from experiments that call on readers to interact with literary texts both playfully and intensively. The readers, in theory, need not be students: they merely have to be readers —in large enough numbers—predisposed in some way to read literary texts carefully; for instance, Victor Nell, an experimental psychologist, found participants for his own study among members of South African reading clubs. Such groups could have worked for the present study (even though Nell’s ludic readers were far from being the careful readers I sought). Meanwhile, for purposes of consistency and coherence, all readers in the present study are student readers. This is an important fact in that it reveals some of the study’s limitations: because it involves university readers in traditional, pre-covid classroom settings, Interpretaciones can at best suggest broader applicability to how other types of readers in other environments would respond.

Because I teach literature written in Spanish, Interpretaciones is centered on Spanish-speaking readers in several countries in the Western Hemisphere, especially in Latin America. As such, it constitutes a needed corrective to related studies that focus largely or entirely on literature written in English or on readers in Western Europe and North America. These countries, which include Peru, Puerto Rico, Mexico, as well as the United States, were selected purposefully so as to encompass as efficiently as possible the diversity of the Spanish-speaking world. Nevertheless, this study will not be the final word on the Spanish-language literary texts at its center, and much less so on other literary texts from other cultural traditions. This caveat notwithstanding, I invite you to explore with me the significance that may be derived from the specific interactions specific readers had with specific literary texts. My hope is that the study will be of interest to casual readers and scholars alike in the (occasionally overlapping) fields of Latin American and Caribbean literatures, comparative literature, cognitive literary studies, reader reception studies, empirical approaches to literary studies, and creative writing: in short, anyone interested in the experience of reading literature, regardless of their preferred national literary tradition.

THE USES OF LITERATURE

The notion of tinkering with literature, of finding ways to make it interactive in enjoyable but meaningful ways is but one way of using literature. There are, in fact, myriad ways of understanding what it means to use literature, and a survey of these ways will contextualize the project at hand. We can, for instance, follow Rita Felski’s account of the important —albeit neglected—ways we respond to literary texts: ways that can activate or produce recognition, enchantment, knowledge, or shock (Uses of Literature). We can, on the other hand, identify in Leah Price’s pioneering work the debates during the Victorian period regarding practical uses of literary objects (e.g., as coffee table decoration). We know, moreover, of the various schools of literary criticism, each of which prescribes a preferred way of using and understanding literary objects, whether these be Deconstruction, New Historicism, Marxist criticism, and so on. Lastly, scholars have in recent years sought to take literature beyond the classroom and private study: hospitals and prisons are but a few of the new venues devoted to the use of literature, often with therapeutic objectives that merge humanistic enterprises with those more commonly found in the social and natural sciences (see Billington’s 2019 edited volume, and Davis and Magee’s 2020 Reading).

Broadly stated, the way of using literature that pertains most strongly to this study entails the analysis of the reading experiences of real readers, as well as the longstanding debates regarding the relationship —both actual and theoretical—between literary texts and their readers. These debates have taken place largely within the North American and European academy; generally speaking, scholars working within Latin American literary traditions —especially scholars housed within academic institutions in Latin America itself—have largely been uninterested in these issues. The present study is not the venue for interrogating the reasons for this lack of interest, which is implied by research that focuses elsewhere and that employs different tools. In its unusual treatment of Latin American texts, it may be that Interpretaciones is suggesting new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the literary object and scholarship meant to elucidate it.

In ways that may be unfamiliar to scholars in non-humanistic disciplines in whatever geographical region they happen to reside, literary theorists have often grappled in self-reflexive manner with the definition of our discipline, including the nature of the relationship between texts and readers. This grappling, in effect, calls into question the distinction between the objects and subjects of study. Conventional understanding holds that on one side of the relationship lie the literary texts themselves while on the other side lie the subjects —that is, readers—who in some manner interact with these texts through a process called reading. Over the decades, literary scholars have given priority to one side or the other of this relationship. The New Critics during the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, gave primacy to the text and deemed irrelevant both the participation of readers as well as any concern beyond the text itself, whether cultural, historical, political, and the like. By the 1970s and 80s, however, some scholars in a growing field loosely labeled reception studies or Reader Response Criticism would begin challenging —along with scholars belonging to other schools—the basic tenets of the New Critics. Some Reader Response theorists would assert that there is, in fact, no text per se, but rather communities of readers or interpretive communities that establish the basic parameters for reading any given text (see, for example, Stanley Fish’s 1980 Is There a Text in This Class?). From these parameters we extrapolate mental constructs we commonly associate with texthood. Fish’s notions have been widely debated and, in recent years, increasingly challenged. David Miall, for instance, has argued persuasively that the supposed progression from the New Critics to Fish’s notion of an interpretive community is a problematic one. The latter, he explains, is perhaps also as much a myth in its turn. Actual readers, as we have found, vary considerably in the meanings they will attribute to the same text (Miall, Empowering the Reader 471–72). More recently, Rita Felski has argued that the transactions between texts and readers are varied, contingent, and often unpredictable (The Limits of Critique 9).

The New Criticism, however, would be assailed from a number of directions, well before Fish’s intervention. Generally speaking, the trend was toward a recognition of the important, indeed, crucial role readers and other extratextual elements play in literary processes. Compounding, for example, the already problematic nature of the text/reader relationship and further punctuating the shift in theoretical focus from text to reader are several additional contextual factors. These factors are manifold and can inform the reading process in a variety of often intertwined ways. They include historical considerations of various types, often-contested political ideologies, and a greater focus placed on differences in class, gender, race and ethnicity, to name only a few. Such contextual factors are no longer dismissed in a New Critical manner and have come instead to be seen as central concerns of the reading process. Meanwhile, over the decades, scholars interested in reception theory have advanced a variety of metaphors to describe what they see as the reader’s active contribution to the reading process (resisting, according to Judith Fetterley [1978]; performing, according to Wolfgang Iser [1981]; poaching, according to Michel de Certeau [1984]; eating, according to Victor Nell [1988], and so on). In very broad terms, then, as the psychologist Ellen Winner has argued, The text is not a vessel of meaning which readers receive. Rather, readers construct the text (265). With respect to the experience of reading narratives, Winner’s fellow psychologists Richard Gerrig and William Wenzel concur: Readers’ narrative experiences are anything but passive (362).

A great challenge we face in literary studies lies in showing how and why, exactly, the reading experience is not passive, and in the correlated task of fostering active reading. After all, if it has become a truism that reading is an active process, we also know that not all reading and not all readers share the same degree of activeness. In other words, reading that is both active and careful is —for most of us, anyway—a learned activity. Because of this, it is crucial that we provide students with assignments that establish the possibility of and the desire for careful thought (akin to Daniel Kahneman’s slow thinking) about the literary texts they read, or that at the very least do not get in the way of such thought on the part of students.

A PIVOTAL TURN

While Interpretaciones may be grounded in pedagogy, a turn that I consider pivotal for the study is that it does not stop there. The literary experiments I developed were of benefit to me and, I hope, to my students; similarly, these experiments —modified or not—can be used for pedagogical purposes by other instructors and students of literature. That stated, as I conducted early versions of the experiments I began wondering if there might not be benefits to the discipline of literary studies in gathering data provided by the students as they responded to the experiments. I decided to make my overall approach as synergistic and efficient as possible: I selected texts in accordance with their compatibility with the experiments I was designing, the experiments were informed by the literary questions I was hoping to elucidate, these questions —in turn—stemmed from issues that preoccupied me and my students in class, and, finally, all of the preceding concerns depended on the likelihood that the experiments would yield meaningful data.

One of the premises behind the study is that all aspects of the literary experience are potentially significant and worthy of scholarly interest, whether these involve features of the text itself, the ways readers engage with the text, or —in Gérard Genette’s phrasing—with some of the paratextual elements associated with the text. In his vast oeuvre, Genette delineates several characteristics of the reading experience and of a text’s always-already existing relationships to other texts, intertextuality being but one example. The paratexts are, according to Genette, those features of a text that constitute its threshold, and that may or may not have been the creation of the text’s author: features —sometimes inserted by editors—like epigraphs, prefaces, and footnotes; in other words, features that occupy an undefined zone without any hard and fast boundary (2) and that are customarily seen as being —in a certain way—distinct from the text itself, which for Genette is akin to a text’s prose, especially in the case of narrative. While some readers may object to these sometimes-tenuous distinctions between text and paratext, the present study does follow Genette in his explorations of certain crucial paratextual or extratextual elements, including the function and significance of a text’s title, its author, and its physical presentation. The focus at other moments of this study, moreover, amounts to a departure from Genette’s paratexts, and centers either more squarely on conventional understandings of text or on how readers respond to texts. I am reminded of a conversation I had several years ago with a social scientist who happens to be quite interested in literature and whose work occasionally involves it. His understanding of the literature department at his institution was such that, as far as he could tell, literary scholars were no longer interested in literature per se and did not use literary texts in their teaching and research, neither as a point of entry into literary studies nor as a destination. In some respects, his observation is accurate, and is confirmed by scholars within literary studies itself: Felski, for instance, has eloquently lamented literary theory’s turn toward what Paul Ricoeur had earlier described as a hermeneutics of suspicion and away from actual experiences between readers and literary texts. Others, including James Phelan and Leah Price, have in their own ways mapped out what it means to experience literature as well as the practical functions and dimensions of literary objects.

In my present attempts to create new maps of the reading experience, I use a simple approach: prior to asking participants to read any given text, I attempt to isolate in each text —and occasionally as concerns each text—a moment