tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post115567246887083645..comments2024-03-26T01:10:13.720+00:00Comments on Teach Me Tonight: Academics and Romance (2): What Is To Be Done?E. M. Selingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-1155802671889941772006-08-17T09:17:00.000+01:002006-08-17T09:17:00.000+01:00I have to say that I share your wariness when read...I have to say that I share your wariness when reading Freudian analyses of literature. The main reason for my own skepticism is that I don't believe any actual psychologists still think Freud was right. Now I confess that I am mostly familiar with experimental psych, not clinical, so I could certainly be wrong. But by and large both clinical treatment and psychological theories have moved on in the last 80 years, while many lit theorists seem to still be employing the system. The result is that ideas like an Oedipal complex are at best useful frames to do some exploration of a text, but they aren't really based on the current best understanding of human psychology. If what we want to do is take our best current understanding of the human mind and explore the experience of reading romance through that, then Freud is not the way to go. Now, I have discovered some "cognitive" approaches to reading and writing, and perhaps they are producing insights. I don't know.<BR/><BR/>As for research I would like to see done, many of the experimental items you indicate seem certainly possible. The main methodological problems you might encounter are 1) not having the experimental design itself interfere with what you are trying to study (a reader's emotions might be radically different in a lab than they are curled up in the bathtub) and 2) the sheer size of a required reading chunk to create the effect you wish to analyze. Most work on reading and listening that I know (I'm a doctoral student in linguistics) covers relatively small bits to be studied. For instance, a single sentence or word is the most common experimental stimulus. Sometimes this is increased to a paragraph of a few sentences. But to present an entire chapter or novel could be a very difficult proposition. Not insurmountable probably, but difficult.<BR/><BR/>I have loose dreams of getting into some of this work myself. I have done some work looking at intonational cues in speeches and discovered rather elaborate hierarchical structures. Certain phrases or sentences are frequently marked to dominate or be more readily accessible in memory than other pieces of a speech. The result is that you can draw some interesting hierarchical trees of the structure of a speech. But again I have only been working with 1-15 sentence groups. I would like to keep rolling this up into larger and larger units, such a work of fiction, but it may not be possible.pacatruehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04125048243775811714noreply@blogger.com