The Erotetic and the Aesthetic.

Suspense is an aesthetic quality of literary narrative texts that tends to increase their success. It is often considered to be a psychological phenomenon on the side of the reader that is caused by the literary text. Authors usually have an intuitive understanding of suspense and master techniques to create and increase suspense. In a literary text, as opposed to movies, for example, the only tool that authors may use to create suspense is language. Our goal is to better understand the relation between the linguistic form of literary texts and literary suspense. In order to achieve this, it is important to distinguish between the content of utterances and their linguistic form. In a literary narrative text, the content is the story itself, that which is being reported. The form is the way in which the narrative is expressed. The relation between form and content is asymmetric. The same content can be expressed in different ways. For example, the two sentences: Mary is chasing the dog and The dog is being chased by Mary have the (roughly) same content. The same form, however, cannot communicate (very) different contents. So, the form is never entirely independent of the content. In the project we are only interested in the role played by linguistic form in the licensing of suspense. Put differently: there may be inherently suspenseful events (a dangerous situation, for example) and events that inherently lack suspense (e.g. counting sheep). Distinguishing between these, is not part of our goal. However, the same event can be narrated in a more suspenseful or less suspenseful way. We are interested in the techniques of narration that increase suspense. Our main hypothesis is that suspense depends on the evocation and the probability of the resolution of questions. A suspenseful text makes the reader entertain certain polar questions that they deem important and which are only answered by the text with a certain delay. Thereby, the probability of a positive answer will fluctuate during the delay period. We are interested in at least the following three main questions: a) Which questions are suitable to license or increase suspense? b) How exactly does a suspenseful text delay the resolution of suspense-creating questions? c) What are those linguistic formal features that increase the importance of certain questions for the reader? To answer these questions, we compare the structure of more and less suspenseful literary narratives and conduct experiments in which we measure the way in which the suspense experienced by the reader changes when we make minimal formal manipulation in stories. This way we hope to explicate and make transparent with scientific precision the intuitive knowledge of authors on how to create, maintain or increase suspense in literary narratives.

The project "The Erotetic and the Aesthetic" explored the question: How does suspense emerge in literary texts? If we understand how suspense arises, we can predict and modify it, and utilize it as a tool for writing various text types to enhance aesthetic and psychological effects. The project therefore initially developed an innovative technological method enabling the real-time measurement of suspense experienced by readers even in longer texts. Using this method, suspense was measured across a wide variety of texts. It was found that although the intensity of suspense experienced by readers can differ, the points in the texts where suspense occurs largely coincide. Building on these findings, a new theory of literary narrative suspense was developed, stating fundamentally that suspense during reading is driven by important yet unanswered questions regarding future plot developments. These questions were analyzed using state-of-the-art formal-semantic and formal-pragmatic methodologies, leading to the discovery of a new logical relationship between questions. This relationship creates the impression, during reading, that the answer to an important question may-but not certainly-be provided right now, within the next few lines, thereby heightening the experience of suspense. Additionally, a psychological explanation of suspense was proposed, related to the so-called "near-miss effect," known to influence behavior such as gambling in casinos. In addition, the project also investigated the meaning of the word "suspense" and the ways in which people design suspenseful plots. Furthermore, the project developed a range of measurements and statistical models to test alternative theories of suspense, ultimately demonstrating that suspense is best captured at the intersection between linguistic and narratological text analysis.