Extratextual effects on the evaluation of narrative texts
Introduction
The practice of evaluation is at the heart of all aspects of literary life: authors, editors, literary agents, reviewers, librarians, literature instructors, booksellers, and readers of all stripes constantly engage in evaluative activity. To read is always, on some level, to assess, and conscious, deliberate evaluation is a sine qua non of literary response. It is therefore surprising that literary evaluation has received so little attention in literary and cultural studies and that we have little knowledge about how it functions as a cognitive and social process. In this paper, we consider how critical reviews, an instance of the more general class of extratextual information, may affect the process of evaluating fictional narratives. As discussed below, there is an appreciable body of research on the role of reviews in the evaluation of consumer products, and this evidence may be useful in approaching the question of how reviews affect literary evaluation. However, the appreciation of fictional narratives is potentially quite different than the evaluation of other kinds of products. In the first section of this paper, we begin by describing some of the seminal marketing and media studies research on the effects of reviews on the evaluation of consumer products evaluation. This research implicates two general classes of mechanisms, process orienting and evaluation adjustment, that may be responsible for the effects of reviews of literary works. Our interpretation of this research suggests two variables that are likely to affect the impact of critical reviews: source (who wrote them), and timing (when they are read). Finally, we present the results of a study in which readers evaluate texts in the context of critical reviews. These results support the view that the mechanisms engaged by extratextual information vary systematically with the source and timing.
Section snippets
Effects of review on evaluation
Abundant evidence now exists to support the claim that consumers are affected by the product assessment of other consumers (e.g., Willemsen et al., 2011). The variables mediating that effect has been the subject of numerous studies conducted by marketing researchers, economists, and communication specialists. These variables include the source of the review (Bickart and Schindler, 2001, Chakravarty et al., 2010), content (Willemsen et al., 2011, Chakravarty et al., 2010), whether the review has
Two mechanisms
While these results provide an important first step in assessing how extratextual information affects the evaluation of literary discourse, several questions remain unanswered. First, the role of review source is unclear. Readers are often exposed to reviews written by literary experts in newspapers, magazines, and jacket covers – do these have a different effect than online peer reviews? As outlined above, an argument based on previous research could be made either way. Second, we argue that
Research plan
In order to understand how extratextual information from different sources affects process orienting and evaluation adjustment, we conducted an experiment in which readers read both a critical review of a literary work and an excerpt from the work and then provided their own assessment. The reviews were either positive or negative, and the source of the review was described either as an established literary expert or a peer. In addition, the review was provided either first, before subjects
Materials
The stimuli were based on approximately the first two pages of four novels, The World Unseen (Sarif, 2001), The Number One Ladies Detective Agency (MacCall-Smith, 2002), How Elvis Saved Quebec (Sutherland, 2003), and Gateways (Wilson, 2003). The excerpts were 1118, 967, 1133, and 1131 words in length, respectively. For each excerpt, a positive and a negative capsule review were written. As an example, the reviews for The World Unseen are presented in Table 1. The reviews ranged in length from
Results
As can be seen in Fig. 1, the valence of the review generally had a substantial effect on evaluation. However, this effect was mediated by the source and timing of the review. When the review was read prior to the excerpt, this effect was limited to the negative expert reviews. In contrast, when the review was read after the excerpt, the effect occurred primarily with the positive peer reviews. This interpretation was supported by comparing the fit of nested linear models. We began by assuming
Discussion
The results reported here provide evidence for distinct mechanisms involved in the use of extratextual information. The model comparisons provide evidence that when the review was provided prior to the reading of the excerpt, an effect of the review on evaluations was found only when negative reviews were attributed to an expert. In contrast, when the review was read after the excerpt, positive reviews from peers had the largest effect (although the evidence for this pattern was weaker). This
Conclusion
In sum, our results imply that there must be a range of different ways in which extratextual information might affect the evaluation of a work. We describe two of these: orienting guides readers to focus on certain classes of information, while adjustment leads readers to alter their evaluations based on those of others. Although critical reviews are an important aspect of extratextual information, it is not the only one that is likely to affect the initial assessment of a novel. For example,
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by an Operating Grant to Bortolussi and Dixon from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Discovery Grant to Dixon from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Peter Dixon is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta. In addition to his work with Marisa Bortolussi on the cognitive processing of literature, he has published on a wide range of topics in cognition, including visual attention, action, cognitive control, working memory, and statistical methods.
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Peter Dixon is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta. In addition to his work with Marisa Bortolussi on the cognitive processing of literature, he has published on a wide range of topics in cognition, including visual attention, action, cognitive control, working memory, and statistical methods.
Marisa Bortolussi is a professor of Hispanic literature and culture in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies. Her collaborative research with Peter Dixon brings together cognitive psychology and literary theory to examine the mental processes involved in the reading of literature.
Paul Sopčák is an instructor in English at MacEwen University. His research interests include early modernist literature, the empirical study of literature, phenomenology, and existential philosophy.