In this series of interviews, we will present the keynote speakers at the IGEL Conference 2018.

Professor Philip Davis is Director of CRILS: Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society, University of Liverpool and editor of The Reader magazine.

IGEL 2018 interview – Professor Philip Davis

Professor Philip Davis

What brought you to empirical research on literary reading in the first place?

I suppose ‘empirical’ wasn’t the first word that entered my head. I certainly didn’t want the ‘theoretical’ that has been so much in vogue in my working life since the seventies. I wanted what I would call ‘the individual’ and what I associate with that, ‘the real’. I found that when I was thinking about real individuals and their responses to a poem or short story or novel, then thinking about the literary work and its effect seemed less abstract, more urgent and exciting, humanly.

I then wanted also to think about the other dimension – the underlying mechanisms and processes going on secretly, mentally within serious literary reading: hence my interest in brain-imaging and physiological measures in an attempt to match the feelings with the spikes and lights that partly constituted them at another level. That is why I wanted to collaborate with scientists, psychologists and health professionals, taking my research out of a Department of English Literature, into an institute with interests in psychological wellbeing in the real world.  I wanted genuine experiments, not a mere semi-educated borrowing of the rhetoric of evolution or the vocabulary of brain science. Continue reading →

Prof. Karina van Dalen-Oskam

In this series of interviews, we will present the keynote speakers at the IGEL Conference 2018.

Karina van Dalen-Oskam is professor of Computational literary studies at the University of Amsterdam, and research leader of the department of Literary studies at the Huygens institute for the History of the Netherlands in Amsterdam.

Which topics will you address at the IGEL Conference 2018?

At the 2018 IGEL conference I will talk about my project The Riddle of Literary Quality. In this project, which is nearly finished, we combine stylometric and sociological methods in trying to unlock the current conventions of literary quality in the Netherlands. I will explain the reasoning behind this combination and present the results of the reader experiments and the text analysis.

What brought you to computational literary studies in the first place, and to quantitatively studying stylistic differences in texts, but also in genres, and across time and languages?

My main interest has always been literary texts, especially prose fiction. But I also enjoyed the strict logic behind many linguistic methods, much more than the approaches I saw literary scholars use. Continue reading →

Dr. Frank Hakemulder

In this series of interviews, we will present the keynote speakers at the IGEL Conference 2018.

Dr. Frank Hakemulder is an assistant professor at the Department for Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University. Hakemulder was President of IGEL from 2012-2016.

Which topics will you address at the IGEL Conference 2018?

I will present the results of the research projects that I am running in the Netherlands, focusing on the role of literature in enhancing self-knowledge and social perception.

What brought you to empirical research in the first place, and to studying the phenomenon of absorption in literary reading?

We know of no society, in history nor anywhere in the world, that does not have something that we can call ‘literature.’ That makes one wonder what it is for.

Scholarship has accumulated quite a number of theories and hypotheses about this – since ancient times philosophers, writers, and educators have speculated about all sorts of explanations. Often the assumed effects of literature on readers (or listeners) seem rather crucial; for instance: learning about the lives of others, gaining insights into the human condition and who we are.

Continue reading →