The literary genre effect
A one-word science fiction (vs. realism) manipulation reveals intrinsic
text properties outweigh extrinsic expectations of literary quality
We test the literariness of genre fiction with an empirical
study that directly manipulates both intrinsic text properties and extrinsic
reader expectations of literary merit for science-fiction and narrative-realism
stories. Participants were told they were going to read a story of either low or
high literary merit and then read one of two stories that were identical except
for one genre-determining word. There were no differences between the
science-fiction and narrative-realism versions of the story in literary merit
perception, text comprehension, or inference effort for theory of mind and plot.
Participants did, however, exert more theory-of-world effort (i.e.,
world-building) for the science-fiction version. The more inference effort
science-fiction readers dedicated to theory of world, the more cognitively and
emotionally engaged they were. These results contradict the assumption that
science fiction cannot achieve literariness and instead demonstrate a “literary
genre effect.”
Article outline
- Current study
- Method
- Participants
- Source and text manipulation
- Questionnaires
- Procedure
- Results
- Inference effort
- Transportation
- Literary quality perception
- Comprehension
- Differential relationship between inference effort and
transportation
- General discussion
- Conclusion
-
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Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Kukkonen, Karin & Ylva Østby
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