How Classic Novel Reading Is Influenced By Personal Perspective And Focalization

Fiction generally is a narrative form,consisting of people,events,or places that are imaginary—in other words,not based strictly on history or fact.A fictional story can be narrated from different personal perspectives—most simply a first-person narration or a third-person narration.The different narrative perspective may have different influence on readers' comprehension of the story as well as their empathetic reactions towards those fictional characters and events.In addition to adopting a certain personal narrative perspective,a story is also presented through the mediation of some “focalization”--it can be narrated from the story characters' perspective(i.e.,internal focalization)or the narrator's perspective(i.e.,external focalization).As important narrative techniques,both personal narrative perspective and focalization can influence how readers interpret narrative plots and empathize with the fictional characters.The potential association between reading different narrative techniques and empathy has been noted by narrative critics many decades ago.However,up until now,most of the existing studies on personal perspective and focalization are mainly restricted in theoretical debates and literary criticism,there is little empirical evidence available to support or argue against any of these theoretical assumptions.First,it is theoretically important whether the theoretical assumption of two distinctive modes of focalization--internal focalization and external focalization--can be supported by cognitive evidence.Second,it remains unclear how personal perspective and focalization work together to affect the psychological and cognitive process underlying novel reading and narrative understanding.This study,by adopting the cognitive approach of Event-related potentials(ERPs)and eye-tracking techniques,investigates how classic novel reading is influenced by personal narrative perspective and mode of focalization,and how these influences are modulated by readers' difference in social cognition(e.g.,mind-reading ability)and literary reading experience.An ERP experiment(Experiment 1)and an eye-tracking experiment(Experimental 2)are therefore carried out to test how these two factors influence the cognitive processes underlying classic novel reading.In these experiments,the personal narrative is manipulated by adopting the first-personal narration and the third-person narration,and focalization is manipulated by including narrative events with the internal focalization(in which the character is the focalizor)and the external focalization(in which the narrator is the focalizor).One hundred groups of narrative passages are extracted from five classic nineteenth-century British novels,which are Jane Eyre,by Charlotte Bront?,Wuthering Heights,by Emily Bront?,A Tale of Two Cities,by Charles Dickens,Pride,and Prejudice,and Emma,by Jane Austen.Among them,the stories in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are originally narrated from the first-person perspective whereas A Tale of Two Cities,Pride and Prejudice and Emma are originally narrated in the third-person perspective.To ensure that the selected narrative passages indeed belong to a particular mode of focalization and have a certain emotional valence,the initially selected one hundred narrative passages were normed in three separate pre-tests for focalization,narrative acceptability,and emotional valence,respectively.After these,sixty groups of narrative passages were finally chosen and used for the formal experiments,half of them are first-person narration and the other half are third-personal narration.To ensure that the study of personal perspective was not affected by the narrative text or other linguistic-level differences(grammar,tense,words,etc.),two versions of narrative text were created: One version retained the same as the original one,and the other version with a revised personal perspective and everything else completely remained unchanged.For example,the original first-person version would be changed into the third-person version by replacing the first-person pronoun “I” with the third-person pronoun “he/she”.The same operation applied to the original third-person version as well.Through this operation,all narrative texts remained the same except for the personal pronouns.Each of those passages belongs to one of the following three types: internal focalization,external focalization,or text with negative emotion.Forty-five native undergraduate or postgraduate students participated in the ERP study and another thirty-seven students participated in the eye-tracking study.During the ERP experiment,participants' brain activities(e.g.,P300 response,N400 response)were recorded moment-by-moment when they were comprehending the novel texts,and during the eye-tracking experiment,their eye-movements towards each word of the narrative texts(e.g.,first-pass reading time,second-pass reading time,total reading time,etc.)were recorded.After finishing data collection,the data were cleaned and analyzed via Analysis of variance(ANOVA)or Linear mixed-model in R.The main findings are as follows: First,the first-person narration evoked larger P300 brain responses than the third person narration regardless of whether the literary story was narrated from the character's perspective or the narrator's perspective or even the text was negative in emotional valence;Second,the third-person pronoun evoked larger sustained negativity(N600)and longer reading time(second-pass reading time and total reading time)than the first-person pronoun in narrative passages which were internally focalized but not in those which were externally focalized or those with a negative valence.Moreover,changing perspective from the first-person narration to the third-person narration had a greater impact on novel reading than changing from the third-person narration to the first-person narration.Finally,there was a significant positive correlation between the N600 effect and the readers' differences in empathy ability only when the narration was internally focalized,that is,the stories were described from the character's perspective.These results from both ERPs and eye-tracking techniques suggest that the cognitive process underlying novel reading is significantly influenced by the adopted personal narrative perspective.This supports the existing theoretical claim that the first-person narration is distinct from the third-person narration.Nonetheless,personal perspective itself cannot determine how readers should interpret a novel,focalization--the way of how a story is focalized,could exert different influence on different personal narrative.We found the distinction between the first-person narration and the third-person narration only when the story was internally focalized.This suggests that the effect of personal perspective is modulated by the mode of focalization.These findings provide strong evidence to support the theoretical distinction of two modes focalization: internal focalization and external focalization.To our knowledge,this is the first study that adopts a cognitive experiment approach to investigate how classic literary reading is influenced by both personal narrative perspective and the narrative focalization.This study can be considered as a very initial attempt to promote the interdisciplinary dialogue between cognitive science and traditional literary studies.