Stijn Vervaet
Literature makes you feel and it can get you thinking too. But how do you move from signs on the page to thoughts and feelings? And why does fiction sometimes feel more real than the world around us? My name is Stijn Vervaet and together with my colleagues from the Literature, Cognition and Emotions project, LCE for short, we will discuss these and other questions in the coming weeks. Today's guest is Olivia Fialho, an affiliated researcher to LCE and researcher at the Huygens Institute of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, who also teaches comparative literature at Utrecht University. Olivia is working in the field of empirical literary studies and our topic today is transformative reading. Welcome, Olivia.
Olivia Fialho
Thank you for inviting me to be here.
Stijn Vervaet
My pleasure. I'd like to start mentioning that you work in, as I said, in the field of empirical literary studies and on transformative reading, more specifically. Could you please briefly say something about how we should understand this notion? Would you call it a theory process or a concept? Where does it come from and what does it imply? Would it imply that by just... by reading literary text we can change ourselves for better or for worse?
Olivia Fialho
Yes, transformative waiting at the moment is a concept. So it is a phenomenological concept or construct or phenomenon. So, to be precise, transformative reading is one mode of experiencing literary texts, so it's one form of experiencing text. So, for example, when we read we might experience text as being entertaining or being absorbing or grotesque, suspenseful, among many other forms of experiences — and transformative experience is one of them. So it is a form of experience in which readers have a sense, that through reading a work of fiction they have… they see themselves and feel the world differently. And in this process they might change perceptions about themselves and about others — be they fictional or real others — so perceptions of people, they know… out there. So to put it in more popular terms, readers feel that the particular fictional book or story that they are reading has changed their lives. That's what we call transformative reading. And so far, research has focused on gaining access to the phenomenon — or to the concept — to describe it. So we do research to describe what is transformative reading, what is the experience like, but also… So we understand what components are involved in the process, and how the components interact. And for that we carry out experimental studies. So transformative reading builds from a theory. It builds from a dishabituation theory of literature, which was proposed by David Meyer in 2006 in his book Literary reading. So the dishabituation theory is a theory of literariness. So the proposal is that literariness is seen as the product of a distinctive mode of reading, that is identifiable through three key components. For grounded textual or narrative features, readers’ defamiliarizing responses to them, and the consequent modification of personal meanings.
Stijn Vervaet
So, the main two components would be, to put it very simply, the text and the reader, right? So transformative reading, and the approach is that you use, can shed potentially new light on the interactions between the reader and the text. And one tradition, within which transformative reading could then be situated, is probably that of reader response theory, — yeah? — so the study of the interaction between reader and text. The group of scholars interested in how readers respond to literary texts, and how in responding to literary text they actually generate meaning. So how do you build upon these and related older approaches? And how does transformative reading then differ from them?
Olivia Fialho
Yes, thank you for the question. Yes, it is… Transformative reading has certainly shed lights on the interaction between text and reader. So it is about the relationship or the transactional experience that occurs when readers engage with texts. So it has from the one hand been clarifying the components involved in this process, so it has provided information on the kinds of textual, foregrounded textual or narrative components, but also readers defamiliarizing responses, and also on the process of modification of personal meanings and how it occurs. But the question of transformative reading and the power of literature, and arts in general, to change the reader is not new. So, as you have mentioned correctly, it has been present since human beings realised that they could influence others through discourse. And in the course of the development of literary theories, opinions are divided as regards to whether literature’s transformative powers are desirable or not, so whether it changes the reader for the better or the worse.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, is it Plato you're referring now to?
Olivia Fialho
Yeah, exactly. And the second is the aspect of life that literature changes. So in poetics, for example, Aristotle was already mentioning the effects of drama, in how the audience understands or reacts to tragedy and comedy.
Stijn Vervaet
And the question of catharsis, probably, or?
Olivia Fialho
Exactly — which is a mode of… which is a form of transformative reading.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, I see.
Olivia Fialho
So what research has shown so far is that we have been confirming Aristotle's theory. Yeah, so the notion of catharsis one form of being changed by texts, but it is not the only one. So, the contribution of research in this area is that we have been articulating other forms of transformation through reading fiction. And as you mentioned, Plato— yes yeah Pla-to —wanted to ban poets from his republic, exactly, for their power to change others. And the notion has been discussed with among… after romanticism, then after Romanticism, within formalist approaches to literature, yes. And also… so when you mentioned reader response theories, yes, it builds from reader response theories. However, and I use it in the plural, because there is not much like a literary theory of reader response, there are many theories. But they are primarily based on how highly specialised readers read, or they are theoretical concepts, or they are constructs. So, reader response theories have provided different models of reading. So for example, we have Fish, Stanley Fish, and his informed reader, from the seventies Wolfgang Iser’s implied reader. Much earlier, in 1959, we have great affairs and the model of the super reader, which is a statistical construct. So these approaches, or these models, have brought the reader to the limelight. But, as I said, their models are models of how highly specialised readers reads.
Stijn Vervaet
And you want to bring in the ordinary reader, or how should I understand this broadening of the reader, as said?
Olivia Fialho
I would like to bring the common reader, to use Virginia Woolf's…
Stijn Vervaet
OK, yeah.
Olivia Fialho
… let's say term here, but by common reader I mean the actual reader today. So the flesh and blood reader and all types of readers. So highly specialised readers as well as readers, the common readers, who are not students of literature.
Stijn Vervaet
Who read for entertainment, maybe, or…?
Olivia Fialho
Exactly, for their own pleasure, so…
Stijn Vervaet
And will read perhaps all kinds of literature as well, not just highbrow literature, but also popular…?
Olivia Fialho
Yeah, exactly.
Stijn Vervaet
A notion that you have mentioned several times now is the dishabituation or foregrounding — right? So the idea, to put it simply again, that literary texts use specific devices, which not only capture the attention of readers and direct its attention, but also can have far reaching effects on the reader. And this prehistory of foregrounding, we've mentioned Plato, Aristotle, and of literary… literariness more generally, this prehistory goes back as far as Aristotle, but key players in the debate were also the Russian formalists and the Prague linguistic circle. So could you tell us a bit more about this?
Olivia Fialho
Yes, that's a great summary. Yeah, so the term for grounding refers usually, actually this form of textual patterning, which is motivated specifically for literary aesthetic purposes. So, and that's of definition provided by stylisation Apple Simpson in 2014. So, according to him, foregrounding typically involves a stylistic distortion of some sort, so either through an aspect of the text, which deviates from a linguistic norm, or, alternatively, where an aspect of the text is brought to the fore through repetition or parallelism. So, uhm, in research on how these features affect readers is one of the most fruitful topics in this interdisciplinary field of literary scholarship. And of all concepts in literary theory, foregrounding is the most frequently tested, so often with compelling empirical evidence. And one approach at foregrounding that extends these original conceptions of the function of foregrounding, focuses on how reading experiences involve the self. And one approach that is particularly suitable to investigate these processes is qualitative research in-depth interviews.
Stijn Vervaet
And now we come to your method. So because you work a lot with empirical methods, I announced you as a scholar in the field of empirical literary studies, right? So could you explain with us how this works? How this looks like? How do you test your hypothesis? What kind of experiments do you do with your readers? Or should I say with your text? Because if I understood it correctly, you also manipulate literary texts, that you then ask readers to respond to. So can you give an idea of how this works?
Olivia Fialho
Certainly. So in empirical literary studies, yeah, we approach questions that emerge from literary studies, and we use methods from behavioural sciences, among others, to study them. So in transformative reading research, let's say, we carry out phenomenological studies, which means… so it began, or the way that I began this project, was to interview readers or the common readers. Yeah, so either I would ask them to come to the lab and read the short stories selected by myself aloud, or, bring books that have changed their lives, fictional books, and bring them to me so I would interview them about these books, and also ask them to select passages and read them aloud to me and talk about their experiences. And so these studies are about finding out more about what the experience is like, yeah, so what is it like to experience transformation through reading texts?
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so this would be a kind of qualitative interview in in-depth conversation with…?
Olivia Fialho
Yes, but I have developed a method, which is actually… is a methodological procedure, which is a hybrid between qualitative and quantitative procedures, which is called leg snap. So it analyses leg snap, the short name for lexical basis for numerically aided phenomenology.
Stijn Vervaet
OK.
Olivia Fialho
In simple terms, we analyse what readers talk about, but also how they express what they are talking about. So for example, if a reader feels sympathy for our character. So then we identify, well, that's a form of this is sympathy, but how is this sympathy? How is sympathy expressed? So some readers say, well, it is very sad so that this character goes through this situation. Or they might say, I feel very sad when I read this story. Yes? So is the reader the agent of the experience or not? So this is the type of analysis that we do. It's a kind of fine grained analysis of the content of what readers say, but also the how they talk about their experiences.
Olivia Fialho
So these are phenomenological studies meant to gain access and describe the experience. But we also carry out experimental studies. Which means once we learn about what the experience is like, what the components are, that are involved, then we start testing them in experiments. So for example, today we have a scale or questionnaire of transformative reading. And then we are able to test whether transformative experiences occur in relation to any kind of text. So we change the variable text according to genre, for example. So we offer them modernist text, realist text, etc, and we check, whether their responses refer according to the type of text offered. Yeah, so this is one form of experiments that we have been carrying out. But, and so far, we have developed an exploratory explanatory model of transformative reading. So we were able to identify what these components are and what predicts transformations in sense of self and others.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, and what is it then? Or, how it should we relate it back to the issue of dishabituation or foregrounding, or not necessarily? I mean, is this now related to, how should I say, to the formal level of the text or kinds of triggers in the text, that… or kinds of phrasing or wording in the text, that trigger sympathy with the character? Or is it the plot? Or is it a combination of both? Or how do you see this?
Olivia Fialho
Yeah, so yeah, that's an important question. We have also been trying to shed light on these questions. So for example, the idea is that there are textual features that elicits empathy, for example. So we have some theories of how narrative empathy occurs, for example by Suzanne Keen. So these are narrative features — so the question of what in the text evokes empathy or sympathy or resonance are still pressing questions. So we try to find out… we are trying to map what it’s in the text that that elicits these modal responses. And then, and what the content looks like, so how is empathy expressed in readers’ discourse? And, on the other hand, we also look into the effects. So once they experience empathy, for example, what is the after effect? OK, so for example, empathy. Yeah, so we assume that there are certain features, textual features, that elicits empathy on the reader. So we have several hypotheses or several studies now being conducted to describe a narrative empathy. So one of the reference works in this area is Suzanne Keen’s work. So we try to eliminate questions of these kinds, yes, and then, so we assume that there are certain features and narrative features in the text that evoke empathy on the reader, and we describe also how empathy is expressed. How can we capture empathy when they talk about the experiences of reading.
Stijn Vervaet
So with empathy, more generally, you refer to the way in which readers feel along with the character or have sympathy with the character? Or is it not only with characters?
Olivia Fialho
Yeah, so empathy means to feel with. Yeah, so when you feel with the text, you'll feel with characters. And so in empathy there is usually, like, a merging of boundaries between self and other, whereas in sympathy when you feel for characters, there is a more distant… There is separation between self and others. Yeah, or this… the boundaries of self and others are clearly distinguished.
Stijn Vervaet
OK, yeah. Yeah, so that's a very important distinction, actually.
Olivia Fialho
Yes, so we know, for example, that transformative experiences, they do occur. One of the ways, or the best ways to feel transformed, occurs through a merging of boundaries between self and others. So for example, when readers read a text and they cannot differentiate, who is the speaker? Is it the character or is it himself or is it the narrator? So these are modes of experiences in which they say, well, I am this character. So if you want to understand my life when I was 19 years old, read this book. So through this form of engagement, which we call… — its a metaphorical engagement with the text — transformation occurs. Yeah, so going back to the question of foregrounding. Then study what's in the text, that would elicit empathy, for example. so the form of experience, how this empathy looks like. And what are the after effects? So what are the effects of empathy?
Stijn Vervaet
On the on the part of the reader.
Olivia Fialho
On the part of the reader. So, for example, is empathy a precursor? Is it an antecedent of sympathy, or does it happen after the experience of sympathy? So these are complex questions that we try to elucidate via experimental studies.
Stijn Vervaet
After all these years of studying how readers respond to literary texts, would you say that there is a difference between trained readers and lights…? Yeah, or do we train ourselves anyway, just by reading, just through the practise of reading? At the beginning of our talk, you also mentioned that these earlier theorists of reader response studies, they had a kind of abstract and idealised reader in their minds. What do, in your view, is the difference between trained readers, readers who have like studied comparative literature, who work as professional literary critics or just high school readers, or anyone who just likes to enjoy the theory text?
Olivia Fialho
From our quantitative perspective, it seems that these two types of readers, as specialised versus non specialised readers, and their responses don't seem to differ. However, the quality of responses, and from a qualitative perspective, then we can see some differences. So for example, students of literature or highly specialised readers, they seem to provide more complex responses. So for example, they seem to resort from more complex cognitive and emotional apparatus is when responding to texts. And this is so, so we can also understand this by means of one of the effects or the roles of reading fiction, that we have some preliminary finds, that actually reading fiction changes the physiology of our brain. And that's important, because it looks like fiction has a role in our brains, that we start making new and fresh synapses. And so this might explain these differences in the quality of responses, and I can imagine this could be the same for someone who studies mathematics a lot. They develop other forms of thinking, yes, but it's still this finding’s too preliminary, so lots of research and that's how science progresses step by step, so we're still gathering more information about how these processes occur.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so the question is not… or the issue is not just… or the assumption is not just that people will have a broader or more fine grained theoretical apparatus to discuss literature, that they respond in more complex way to your questions, but also that people will just read a lot… and they perhaps have developed some… their brain in a different way? Or am I now oversimplifying it completely?
Olivia Fialho
No, that's great, because actually, to put it in simple terms. So, both specialised readers and the common reader, all of them sympathise with characters, they get absorbed by reading stories, and they might reject or have negative feelings towards characters. But while they express their experiences, they provide lengthier analysis or a lengthier descriptions of their experiences, and so then their narratives are more complex. And that is one of the ways in which… by means of which we gain information about our cognitive… how we process texts, cognitively speaking.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so it's not about how we process text, theoretically speaking, but cognitively and emotionally. So this brings us, I think, to the broader societal relevance or the impact. If you want to use a fancy word, the impact of your research on transformative reading. So I think there is an important component to your research, that shows the potential and perspectives of transformative reading, namely its applicability in education. And, not accidentally, you have also been running transformative reading projects in education in the Netherlands and in Portugal. So do you think we then need new ways of teaching literature, perhaps?
Olivia Fialho
Yes, so since literature has been institutionalised in the 19th century, what we have been doing with the teaching of literature has been focusing on the question, what is this text about? So we have been primarily focusing on how to interpret texts, right? But, as Stanley Fish also puts it, interpretation, I wouldn’t disagree with him, he said well, interpretation is not the only game in town, yes? So there's also an experiential dimension which is extremely relevant. It is part of aesthetic experiences, and that's what these transformative reading workshops, they focus on the experiential aspects. So in other words, in experiencing or living through texts. So, and I don't think this should be an either or situation, but the point is that, in addition to what we have already been doing successfully in literary education, we also include or give the space for the experiential dimension, and so both to… that classrooms, for example, they also become the space for the experiential dimensions of reading, for students to come and experience texts in the classroom, but also to theorise. So from a metacognitive perspective, how can we even theorise about experiencing texts, discuss about the relationship between texts and readers...?
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so instead of just teaching pupils or students how to interpret literary texts or how to read and come up with meaning, how to make a formal analysis of the text, you want to shift the perspective to maybe teaching pupils how to like to read, or how to experience reading, because students or pupils read less and less. At least that's what we hear.
Olivia Fialho
Yes, so the idea is to just create the space for them to bring their own experiences and their personal experiences, their personal, emotional reactions. So to put that on the table too, so that we can discuss what is the role of those emotional reactions, even in the interpretation of texts. And so, teaching literature. So as I said, it's not an either or situation, but in addition to the courses we already offer, it's about also giving the space to this experiential dimension, to invite them to live through texts, To offer them different ways to live through texts, that might be similar or different to how they are used to experiencing texts in their lives out there, and also to, from a metacognitive perspective, to reflect on, or to theorise on these experiences.
Stijn Vervaet
So it's not doing away with older ways of teaching literature, but more as a compliment. Yeah, so maybe also invite students to think what literature can do for them, yeah? And then we're discussing what the benefits of reading literature would be… You're also collaborating with a team from the medical faculty at University of Oslo, which would be another interdisciplinary collaboration that points to the relevance of your research, the applicability of transformative reading beyond literary studies. So would you like to tell us something about that as well? Or is this still work in progress and top secret?
Olivia Fialho
Now I'm very pleased to talk about that project, among several. I am very thankful for this invitation and to join the team in the Faculty of Medicine here in Oslo. And the idea of the project is to work with moral learning, yeah?
Stijn Vervaet
Moral learning? Yeah, so bring in ethical questions, yeah?
Olivia Fialho
Yes or. Yes, so that's developed together with the centre of medical humanities, here at the University of Oslo, and their idea was to create didactical opportunities for health care practitioners, right, and on how more specifically on how to deal with more residue. So, for example, health care practitioners, they are confronted on their everyday basis with moral questions. And at times there are no right or wrong answers, but they do have to make a choice. Any situations of this kind might cause quite some stress for them, so the idea... So then, the invitation was to adapt the transformative reading programme from medical ethics education, and to… with the goal, not to cure them, because this is part of their everyday life, their profession, yes, but to help them live with and through more residue.
Stijn Vervaet
And the ambiguities of making these choices within a very limited time frame or under pressure, or?
Olivia Fialho
Yes, so this would be a contribution for transformative reading, but also for medical ethics teaching. So these interdisciplinary efforts, they can really enrich scholarship, but also teaching, and our experiences of what literature can do for the reader.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so how should we then envisage such a workshop? You select a couple of texts, or you ask the medical students to come with text or?
Olivia Fialho
Yes, so transformative reading programme is evidence based. So, which means, that there is a way for selecting texts, and so there is a method on how to select texts. There is also… so lesson plans they are based on the components of transformative reading, so we carry out different workshops to foster those modes — these varied modes of experience, that are part of transformative reading — and then we studied the outcome. So is it… does it really happen? Is it really true, that after experiencing transformative workshops, we can change or we can cause an impact on empathy, for example. And we have been demonstrated that yes, yes, so giving lectures or workshops they do... We confirm well, and we find out more about the benefits of transformative reading. So some benefits, that we know, are that it impacts creativity. It also raises language awareness. It produces… They usually score participants in these workshops. They score higher on eudaimonic reading, which is meaningful reading, so reading not for hedonic, but for meaningfulness.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so not for enjoyment, but to for philosophical reasons or to…?
Olivia Fialho
Yes, or for gaining deeper insight into themselves. Yeah, and it also impacts, or increases, motivation to read and motivation to study literature. Yes.
Stijn Vervaet
OK.
Olivia Fialho
And we have also… the experiments that we carried out, actually, they were intervention studies in educational context. One of the benefits is to impact moral concepts, yeah, so transformative reading workshops ,they do have an impact on moral self-concepts. So now we just bring this to the foreground, or we… This is the aim, so we make that we turn the question around, so we make it a goal, yeah, one of the goals of this transformative reading in the medical ethics context, is to impact moral self-concepts.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so rather than just using, to put it like this, the medical students as neutral participants in an experiment, you want to acquire them a higher awareness of moral concepts and the ambiguity of moral concepts, or to increase their reflection about those concepts?
Olivia Fialho
Yes, yes, so the workshops. The idea of the workshops is to bring the experience or to raise their awareness of what moral residue is. Yeah, how does it feel for them? Does it feel similarly or differently among peers. So in this process they are not talking about themselves explicitly, but they are talking about stories, and so they discuss characters and fictional situations. When we read stories — yeah, that's a theory of transformative reading — it's, when we read stories, we are actually reading ourselves through stories, but that's a process that… We don't lecture them about it, but we invite them to live through texts. And by this process they find out how they live with through moral residue. And when they… and we also provide the space for them to talk about those experiences. And, we know from research, also, that talking about experiences of reading or experiences that are difficult for you, as just having this environment in which you are able to talk through or about anything about experiences already helps them cope with situations.
Stijn Vervaet
Can you give me a hint, what kind of texts do you use? What kind of, yeah… or should this text deal with the medical situation or not at all?
Olivia Fialho
Not necessarily, but these are all… all of these assumptions are put to test. So usually we choose texts thematically. So, for example… So first we need to understand, what is moral residue? So, for us, in according to our definition, moral residue is not a monolithic concept, but it involves impermissible emotions, it involves moral dilemmas and normative ignorance, yes. So the idea is that we use texts, from literature, that offer textual representations of impermissible emotions or moral dilemmas. I mean, literature is all about moral dilemma, so we have a…
Stijn Vervaet
Raskolnikov and Crime and Punishment? Or is it a bit too far-fetched?
Olivia Fialho
Yes, Crime and Punishment, I mean, it's the hallmark of, one of the hallmarks, of literature, and it is a school for more learning in itself. But, for many readers, Crime and Punishment is quite a difficult and complex text and to read. But what we? So yeah, so reading Crime and Punishment is a great candidate to be included in the list. But it is about… how Crime and Punishment is a novel that really makes us question who we are as moral beings. How do we even make moral choices? How can we love a criminal? So work with those impermissible emotions, huh?
Stijn Vervaet
And would we grab the axe as well? That is… Perhaps a bit over the top, but yeah… So we start with questions about identifying ourselves, how can we have sympathy or empathy with the character of Raskolnikov and his thoughts, yeah. Yeah, thank you To conclude, I would like to ask you for a reading recommendation for the listeners. Would it be Dostoyevsky or something completely different?
Olivia Fialho
I certainly recommend Dostoyevsky. But, one of the things, that we have been finding out, is that if you want to change your life or concepts of self and others, you must read literary narrative fiction. So it has to be literary, and it has to be fiction. And we know that literary narrative fiction reading has an important role in our lives. So it helps us cope with situations in our lives. It helps us find possible scenarios to challenges, we currently face, or to revisit past memories, and then… we give a different meaning to past memories, for example. So I would recommend making thematic choices. So, to the theme that is relevant for your life now. Yeah, so something that is a current challenge or current, uh, that you're facing, for example. So think about a theme, then visit a bookstore and look for books that discuss that given theme, and that can be any kind of… and that's how you also find new fiction that you might not have known before. Yes, so this is one tip that I will give.
Stijn Vervaet
But it should be fiction. No essays, no newspapers, no scientific articles. It should be fiction, and why fiction?
Olivia Fialho
Yes, so we have scientific evidence that really fiction, written literary narrative fiction, for example, makes us more empathic beings. And that's… so in experiments, in which contrast reading fiction versus non-fiction — So newspapers. Uh, scientific journals — that doesn't seem… it doesn't impact theory of mind, yeah, or our emotion and cognitive capacities, at the same level that reading literary narrative fiction does. So we have a publication in Science in 2013. By Kedan Castano. Let's say, it was quite an important publication for the field, because they could demonstrate that reading literary narrative fiction impacts theory of minds, as compared to non-nonfiction. Yes. So then, the first tip would be to select text according to themes, but the other tip is to also draw from the transformative books list, that I have collected over the years. So it doesn't mean that those are the only books that could change your life, but this is really… I have a list of 150 titles of literary narrative fiction, that have changed the lives of the readers, that I have interviewed. And among them we have, for example, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. We have Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. We have Alison Bechdel’s Fun home, family tragic comedy, among many others, Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red.
Stijn Vervaet
But now, Olivia, really, to close our conversation, I cannot resist asking you, which book has changed your life?
Olivia Fialho
Several! Several books have changed my life. And I actually started this project, because I was truly interested about this phenomenon. So one of them has been Voltaire's Candide, which is actually a book that I revisit in my mind many times, through several situations in my life. Yeah, this is to name one.
Stijn Vervaet
OK, thank you very much.
Olivia Fialho
My pleasure.