(Re-)Constructing Perspective
Narrative Structures and Psychological Effects in Reading Literary Texts
A transdisciplinary research project on narrative perspective, literary reading and reader response.
How do literary texts guide readers into particular points of view? (Re-)Constructing Perspective investigates how narrative perspective is built in narratives and how readers process, perceive, and remember it.
Why perspective matters
Perspective cues shape how stories are told and how readers experience them. From narrative voice and focalization to distance, dramatic mode, and represented speech and thought, literary texts offer multiple ways of organizing a narrated world. This project asks how those formal choices affect reading as a cognitive and emotional process.
What the project explores
(Re-)Constructing Perspective studies narrative perspective through a genuinely transdisciplinary lens. It brings together narratology, literary studies, digital humanities, psychology, and reading research to examine how perspective cues are described, how they appear in literary texts, and how readers respond to them while reading and remembering stories.
How the research works
The project combines theoretical analysis, creative-writing research, computational corpus work, eye-tracking, think-aloud protocols, story-recall studies, and the analysis of reader reviews. By linking textual structures with actual reception processes, it seeks to build a more precise and empirically grounded understanding of perspective in literary reading.
Why this matters now
In a culture shaped by competing viewpoints and diverging narratives, understanding how perspectives are constructed and processed is more important than ever. Literary texts offer a uniquely rich setting in which to study how people encounter, negotiate, and reconstruct perspectives.
Universities and Disciplines
Team
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Gerhard Lauer
Gerhard Lauer is Gutenberg Professor of Book History and Reading Research at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. His research focuses on the historical and systematic development of books and reading in our society.
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Danil Fokin
Danil Fokin is a PhD candidate at the University of Warsaw. His primary research focus is on empirical expert-novice studies in poetry. Using psycholinguistic approaches, he investigates differences in eye-movement strategies and poetry-induced effects on cognitive reactions between advanced and less experienced poetry readers.
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Günther Stocker
Günther Stocker is a Professor of German Literature at the Department of German Studies at the University of Vienna. Before joining Vienna, he worked at the Universities of Rome III and Cassino. He was PI of several funded research projects. His main research areas are cold war literature, Austrian literature, digital reading and reading research.
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Lukas Kosch
Lukas Kosch is postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of German Studies at the University of Vienna. After studying German language and literature and history, he focused on post-war philosophy, narratology, the consequences of the digitalization of literature and the processes of literary reading from a reception theory perspective.
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Jana Lüdtke
Jana Lüdtke studied psychology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and Humboldt University of Berlin and received her PhD in psycholinguistics from Technische Universität Berlin. She is currently a research associate and laboratory manager at the Institute of Education and Psychology at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on reading, with a particular interest in the processes involved in reading and text comprehension, the factors that influence these processes, and how they affect the subsequent recall of the information presented.
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Sascha Schröder
Sascha Schroeder studied psychology and musicology and received his PhD from the University of Cologne in 2008. From 2012 to 2018, he led the REaD research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Since 2018, he has been Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Göttingen. His research focuses on the cognitive foundations of reading, the identification and prevention of reading difficulties in children and adolescents, and the digitalization of teaching and learning environments.
