Title: Philosophy of Science, Methodology, and Theory Development in Empirical Studies of Literary Experience
Abstract: This chapter presses the still open empirical question of the construct validity of “literary experience,” encouraging collective efforts to determine in what exactly literary experience consists and how it may be related to and/or distinguished from other experience-level constructs such as “aesthetic experience” or “mindfulness meditation.” A considerable challenge in this urgent project inheres in the fact that first-person reports of literary experience are arguably interpretations rather than direct descriptions of experience and so, at best, only indirect measures of the construct literary experience and, even then, only if such reports are not significantly influenced by demand characteristics and other confounds. How can a construct of (immersive and aesthetic) literary experience modeled upon and measured by possibly confounded first-person reports be effectively validated at its own experiential (and partly pre-reflective) level of analysis? “Synchronic” and “diachronic” opportunities for this validation project include research alliances with empirical programs focused on comparable experiential states, as well as historiometric probes of the vast archive of literary commentary.
Publication Year: 2021
Publication Date: 2021-09-20
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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