(Re-)Constructing Perspective

Every representation of a narrated world presupposes a particular perspective that is, a specific point of view from which a story is told. Literary studies have therefore long been concerned with the question of how such perspectives are constructed in narratives and how they can be analyzed precisely. Over time, numerous terms and approaches have emerged to describe the various forms of perspectival constructions. While there are theoretical assumptions about how narrative perspectives affect readers, how they influence the reading experience, and how they shape the construction of mental models of the narrated world and its characters, there is no well-established body of research on these issues. Existing theories from literary studies and psychology generally assume that different narrative perspectives lead to different reading experiences. However, many of these assumptions have so far been only rarely tested empirically. The project therefore aims to investigate the role that narrative perspectives play in literary texts and how they influence reading and comprehension. To this end, theoretical, empirical, and computer- based methods are combined. The first step will be to provide a systematic overview of the effects attributed to different narrative perspectives in literary theory, in the numerous manuals and courses on creative writing, and in the empirical studies conducted to date. Building on this, the project will analyze how cues to perspective are used in literary texts and how readers perceive and process such textual features during reading. Finally, it will explore how people respond to different narrative perspectives, what feelings and thoughts they develop in the process, and how these affect their memory and retelling of stories. To answer these questions, various methods are employed: theoretical analyses, computer-assisted corpus studies, eye-tracking to observe eye movements during reading, the think-aloud method to capture reading experiences, and the examination of extensive discussions about books and reading on digital social reading platforms such as Lovelybooks, Goodreads, and BookTok. This international and transdisciplinary project brings together experts from literary studies, narratology, computational linguistics, psychology, and reading research. It combines theoretical analysis with empirical investigation and employs state-of-the-art technological methods. In doing so, the project contributes to a deeper understanding of a central literary phenomenon.