Original scientific paper

EMPIRICAL READERS - STATE OF AFFAIRS

Lovro Škopljanac ; Faculty of philosophy in Zagreb, University of Zagreb

Abstract

The paper offers an overview of contemporary insights in the research concerning so-called empirical readers. The readers in question are those who are constructed using exclusively information gained from verifiable experiments, and which lead to the average reader, i. e. audience, via abstraction. Having in mind the extent of the research efforts and the bounds of the paper, it focuses on two of the most active directions of research at present: readers' motivation and reading mediation. The paper presents only those efforts which were made after the „Sokal Affair“ shook up the humanities, and it designates it as the starting point of a renewed interest in verifiable readers. Moreover, it deals with the issue of transportation during the act of reading literary texts as the point of interest in which both motivation and mediation converge. As those key concepts found in both areas of research are intertwined in real readers' environment, with motivation influencing mediation and vice versa, the implications of such an interrelationship are also considered.

Keywords

empirical approaches to literature; motivation; mediation; transportation

Hrčak ID:

158175

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/158175

Publication date:

9.5.2016.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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