title: Power of the quill: consciousness presentation and the literary use of reference
title: The power of the quill: consciousness presentation and the literary use of reference
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Gu, Junyuan
name: Gu, Christy
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Literary Use of Reference
subject: psycholinguistics
subject: psycholinguistic theories on reference
subject: free indirect style (FIS)

description: In the course of literary reading, one inevitably encounters repeated references to particular characters. Such references can manifest themselves in various linguistic forms: for example, the same heroine in a novel can be linguistically realised with a pronoun (e.g., she), or a proper name (e.g., Clarissa), or a noun phrase (e.g., Mrs Dalloway). Within the field of psycholinguistics, much effort has been put into investigating what influences speakers’/writers’ decisions as to the choice of referring expressions and what influences listeners’/readers’ processing of the various forms of referring expressions they encounter. However, to date, existing psycholinguistic research on reference seems to have paid little attention to the literary use of reference as discussed within the field of literary studies. More precisely, the intricate relationship between the degree of immediacy involved in the presentation of a character’s consciousness (i.e., the perceiving consciousness) and the eventual textual manifestation of that perceiving consciousness has simply passed unnoticed amongst psycholinguistic scholars. As a consequence, current psycholinguistic theories on reference fail to make sufficiently nuanced predictions to account for the intricate patterns that have been observed in literary narratives. Considering that literary reading constitutes an essential part of many people’s reading experience, such lack of scholarly interest in the relevant literary phenomena is all the more lamentable. In literary/stylistic scholarship, the relationship between the use of different referring expressions and the literary practice of consciousness presentation has indeed attracted the attention of a few scholars. Regardless of the varying details, they seem to converge on the idea that the literary use of reference is contingent upon the manner in which the involved fictional events are presented, i.e., whether the fictional events are presented as if they were an uninterrupted and unmediated flowing of the character’s consciousness in response to its interaction with the outer world, or as if they were but a description or analysis, reorganised and translated by the omniscient narrator first before presenting them to the reader. However, despite the fact that literary scholars have endeavoured to unveil the subtle nuances of the involved literary phenomena, to date, most of the studies remain purely theoretical. That is to say, whether actual readers indeed display a sensitivity to those intricacies during reading is yet to be confirmed. Under such circumstances, it would not be too far-fetched to suggest that both areas may benefit from an attempt at interdisciplinary collaboration. Therefore, the primary purpose of the present thesis is to bridge this gap between the two fields by incorporating literary discussions of consciousness presentation into psycholinguistic frameworks on referring expressions. To this end, via a series of experiments in three separate studies, we investigate the potential effects of the literary practice of consciousness presentation upon readers’ expectations about (i) the appropriate referent for the pronoun and (ii) the appropriate linguistic realisation of the character whose consciousness is being presented. In this thesis, we focus on one particular literary technique for immediate consciousness presentation, namely, the free indirect style (FIS) technique. The first study (reported in Chapter 2) makes use of readers’ pronoun interpretation to examine the empirical validity of individual textual devices associated with the FIS technique. This study comprises three offline experiments, one eye-tracking experiment, a self-paced reading experiment and an offline follow-up experiment. In each offline experiment, we manipulated the presence/absence of one particular FIS device to create the contrast and then measured readers’ interpretation of the ambiguous pronoun. In each online experiment, we also relied on the employment vs. removal of one particular FIS device to either induce the reader to assume a subjective reading or discourage him/her from doing so. We then measured whether the reader experienced any change in processing difficulty upon encountering the pronoun whose gender only matched one character in the passage. Overall, across all offline experiments, the obtained results revealed a robust preference for the second-mentioned entity (in comparison with the first-mentioned entity) in the presence of the FIS device of interest, compared to when such devices were removed from the passage. However, no reliable effect was found upon readers’ online processing of pronouns. We interpret the results as evidence of the efficacy for individual FIS devices, with the efficacy being most apparent when readers’ offline judgement is probed. We also discuss the findings in the context of the existing psycholinguistic theories on pronoun resolution. The next two studies (reported in Chapter 3 and 4 respectively) are concerned with the relationship between the degree of immediacy involved in the presentation of fictional consciousness and the use of referring expressions in literary narratives, with each study dealing with a different literary phenomenon. Via two experiments, the study in Chapter 3 examines readers’ sensitivity towards the literary practice of pronominalising the character in an immediate rendering of that character’s consciousness. Building upon the findings from Chapter 2, this study made extensive use of FIS to maximise the illusion of immediate consciousness presentation. The results showed that there was an increase in readers’ preference for considering the pronoun (relative to the proper name) as the more appropriate linguistic realisation of the intended character when they were presented with an immediate rendering of the character’s interior movements, compared to when the literary technique for forcing such a special reading was removed from the text. In total, the study in Chapter 3 confirmed our hypothesis that the employment of FIS is capable of reducing the psychic distance felt by the reader between him/herself and the character and hence contributing to the illusion of plunging into that character’s consciousness with no mediation, which can in turn affect the reader’s perception as to the proper textual manifestation of the said character. Such a change in readerly preferences cannot be accounted for by the existing psycholinguistic theories on referring expressions. The study reported in Chapter 4 explores readers’ sensitivity towards an even subtler literary phenomenon, i.e., the reflexivisation of the pronoun designating the character whose consciousness is being presented in the narrative. Similarly, this study also relied heavily on FIS to create for the reader an illusion of being thrown into the character’s deep consciousness. By virtue of two experiments, we found that readers were indeed more disposed to consider the exempt reflexive as an acceptable alternative to linguistically realise the character, when confronted with an immediate and unedited flowing of that character’s interior movements, compared to when presented with an indirect rendering of that character’s inner experience, filtered and reorganised by the omniscient narrator first before presenting to the reader. This study also confirmed that readers’ perception of the narrative was indeed contingent upon the manner in which the fictional events were rendered. Again, to date, despite a number of theoretical discussions on the licensing of exempt reflexives, the intricacies of the exempt reflexive/pronoun alternation phenomenon in literary narratives has mainly passed unnoticed in psycholinguistic scholarship. Taken together, we suggest that our findings provide empirical evidence that modern readers, possibly due to their experience with literature, may have cultivated a fine sensitivity (albeit unconsciously) towards literary phenomena as subtle as the literary use of reference. From a psycholinguistic perspective, the fact that the modernist practice of consciousness presentation, as nuanced as it might appear, can indeed exert a perceptible effect upon readers’ final interpretation of pronouns and their expectations about the appropriateness involved in the choice of referring expressions foregrounds the need to incorporate literary discussions into the current psycholinguistic frameworks. In sum, the present thesis sheds light upon the possibility of embarking upon interdisciplinary research to investigate the production and comprehension of reference, as well as readers’ literary reading in general.