Project Description

The overall goal of this project is to explore the role of perspective cues in literary narratives through theoretical, empirical, and computer-assisted means. We investigate how different forms of narrative perspective are used in literary texts, how they are processed by readers, and how they affect the reading experience. The project brings together three approaches to the study of perspective: textual dimensions (narratology and digital humanities), production aspects (creative writing), and reception aspects (empirical psychology). Each of the project’s three objectives is investigated transdisciplinarily, with each discipline contributing its specific expertise.

Objective 1: A Systematic Description of Perspective Structures

The first objective is a systematic review of the supposed effects of narrative perspective cues on the reading process in narratology, creative writing, and empirical studies.

From the perspective of literary studies, we scrutinize and systematize the diverse theoretical debate on narrative perspective from an explicitly reader-oriented point of view. The significance of narrative perspective in narratology is traced in a synopsis, with a particular focus on differentiating its often ambiguous terminology. Predominant perspective cues such as narrative voice, focalization, and internal or external perspectives through represented speech and thought provide the basis for making different theoretical approaches comparable. A central focus lies on the explicit or implicit assumptions concerning effects such as immersion, identification, empathy, or foregrounding that underlie different concepts of narrative perspective.

From a production-oriented perspective, we examine professional manuals and textbooks on creative writing. We ask which perspective techniques are taught, which combinations of techniques are favored, and which effects on readers are assumed. In this way, the project connects narratological theories of perspective with the practical knowledge and assumptions that inform the production and teaching of narrative texts.

The psychological part of this objective provides a systematic review of empirical studies on narrative perspective. It focuses on the influence of perspective cues such as focalization, personal pronouns, verb tense, and direct or indirect speech on readers’ processing of literary texts and on their aesthetic and emotional responses.

Together, these three approaches provide a theoretical and empirical basis for describing specific perspective cues and their supposed effects on the reading process.

Objective 2: Patterns and Sequences of Perspective Cues

The second objective is a detailed analysis of how different perspective cues are used together in literary texts and how sequences of such patterns are dynamically processed while reading. Literary narratives usually contain multiple perspective cues that occur in different combinations and sequences. Internal and external perspectivizations of narrated events can change throughout a text, and different cues may systematically interact to convey a narrative as more immediate or indirect, or closer to or more distant from the narrated events.

To systematically describe these structures, we develop an annotation scheme for perspective cues in literary narratives. The typologization of literary categories and their translation into an empirically testable terminology are intended to capture specific strategies and structures of perspective that can affect the reception process. Particular attention is paid to identifying patterns and sequences that frequently occur in literary texts.

Building on this annotation scheme, the digital humanities part of the project conducts a computational corpus analysis of contemporary German narrative literature. Computational methods, including transformer models and large language models, are used to identify prevalent patterns and sequences of perspective cues in a large corpus of narrative fiction. The analysis examines their frequency, their combinations and sequences, as well as systematic differences between different types of literary texts.

These textual analyses are connected to an empirical investigation of how readers process dynamic changes between contrasting perspective structures. Using longer literary texts in which different perspective configurations alternate, an eye-tracking study investigates whether these passages are processed differently. Questionnaire measures additionally capture aspects of the reading experience such as liking, immersion, and identification with characters.

This combination of narratological annotation, computational corpus analysis, and experimental reading research allows us to move from identifying perspective structures in literary texts to investigating how their dynamic changes are actually processed by readers.

Objective 3: Readers’ Responses to Narrative Perspective

The third objective investigates readers’ explicit responses to narrative perspective during the reading process, story recall, and text evaluation.

A think-aloud study focuses on readers’ subjective experiences during the reading process. Participants articulate what comes to mind while reading, allowing us to reconstruct processes of literary comprehension and engagement in close temporal proximity to the actual act of reading. The resulting verbal data are transcribed, coded, analyzed, and interpreted in order to investigate how individual readers perceive and evaluate changing perspective cues.

The digital humanities part of this objective investigates the relevance of narrative perspective in reader reviews on digital social reading platforms and in professional literary reviews. We ask whether perspective is an argument readers use to evaluate books, which types of evaluation are associated with particular perspective structures, and how experts and lay readers differ in the relevance they attribute to narrative perspective. These responses can then be compared with the perspective patterns identified in the literary texts themselves.

Finally, psychological experiments investigate the effects of narrative perspective on story recall. Participants read literary texts containing different perspective cues and are subsequently asked to recall the stories. This makes it possible to examine whether different forms of narrative voice, focalization, and represented speech influence which information readers remember, its centrality, and the order in which it is recalled. 

Work Programme

To address our first objective, we will systematically investigate the proposed effects of different perspective cues from theoretical (WP1), practical (WP2), and empirical (WP3) perspectives. This involves analyzing key concepts in narratology and creative writing, as well as the relevant empirical findings.

Our second objective is to investigate which sequences of perspective cues are used and how they are processed. To this end, we will develop an annotation scheme for detecting perspective cues and their patterns and sequences (WP4), conduct a computational corpus analysis (WP5), and empirically investigate changes between contrasting perspective cues during the reading process (WP6).

To address our third objective, we will explore readers’ actual responses to narrative perspective based on self-perceptions, evaluations, and story recall. Accordingly, WP7 will focus on readers’ subjective experiences during the reading process using think-aloud techniques; WP8 will investigate interactions between readers and their communication about narrative perspective on social reading platforms; and WP9 will focus on the effects of different perspective cues on readers’ memory and reproduction of the text.