Stijn Vervaet
Literature makes you feel and it can get you thinking too. But how do you move from signs on the page to thoughts and feelings, and why does fiction sometimes feel more real than the world around us? My name is Stijn Vervaet, and together with my colleagues from the Literature, Cognition and Emotions project, LCE for short, we will discuss these and other questions in the coming weeks. Today's guest is Natalia Igl, Marie-Curie fellow at the University of Oslo, working on a project titled “Readers as observers”. And our topic is the materiality of reading and the interactions between reader and text. Thank you for joining us, Natalia.
Natalia Igl
Thank you for inviting me.
Stijn Vervaet
I'd like to start by mentioning that you work on the materiality of reading, multimodality, and reading as a performative and multisensory experience. What is so fascinating about these aspects of reading? Could you perhaps briefly say something about how we should understand these notions? Where do they come from? What is new about them and/or how can they shed new light on the interactions between reader and text?
Natalia Igl
Yeah, let's maybe start with the notion of reading as a performative and multisensory experience. This is not a very or entirely new notion in book history research and reader research. It has long been the view that reading is a very active process. So the concept of the active reader, who does not only consume a literary text or kind of drink it in, and then it's in your mind or something, but rather is… Yeah, it's part of the co-construction of a text. Yeah, this is a notion that has been there for a while. Reading as a multisensory experience has been foregrounded a bit more lately. So when you look at the way we interact with texts or with literary media, then the body always also plays a role in this. We don't just process text, we don't just process written signs on the page, but we also process and interact with the textual medium as a whole. So while the notions of performative and multisensory aspects of reading are not entirely new, they have been foregrounded and highlighted recently or more recently. There is a renewed interest, also in literary studies, not just in media studies, but really in literary studies, focusing on the mediality of literature and hence also on the match reality of literature. And what this also does is put more focus on aspects of embodiment, when it comes to reading, on questions of how we as readers, who have a physical body, engage with literary media, be it book, be it also a screen, when we have an electronic device. We still do engage with also a physical object. It is also not just our minds that are engaged with the text we read, but really our body as embodied beings. And what also comes to the foreground when we look at materiality of literature, for instance, it's not just the book or the device – the reading device that is a material artefact and also the text world itself has material qualities. So when it comes to the question of multisensory experience in reading, it is also about what happens, let's say, inside us when we read the act of reading. So we bodily engaging with text or medium. But also our minds engaging with a kind of virtual embodied space with… we're activating when we read our sensory motor memories and perceptions. And so it has two sides to the coin.
Stijn Vervaet
When thinking of readers engagement with the text and the signs on the page, you've actually worked quite a lot on periodicals, on avantgarde periodicals, and multimodal novels. And as some of your favourite media to study these questions – right? – and so maybe we could zoom in now a bit on multimodality. So why are precisely avantgarde periodicals and modernist novels such a good starting point to think about multimodality? Is multimodality perhaps a condition of a kind of trigger that makes us more aware of the materiality of the reading process, or?
Natalia Igl
Well, let's maybe look at the notion of multimodality. First a bit more because it might be that not all listeners are too familiar with this term or concept behind this term. Multimodality as a, let's say technical term, refers on the one hand to phenomena in the world and on the other hand also to field a whole field of research really. So multimodality as a field of research looks into different modes or semiotic resources that people use to communicate with each other and to express themselves. So we do express ourselves not just in written language, in spoken language, but also in gesture, in sound, in visual forms, in – when it comes to written texts, for instance – in layout and typography, these things are important also semantic resources to create and convey meaning and not just kind of kind of edits… uh style, or just a bit of sprinkled on top, yeah?
Stijn Vervaet
So this podcast is actually also multimodal, to some extent.
Natalia Igl
Definitely for us. We're here in the room more so than for the listeners of course, but yeah, that's one of the points that media studies, or let's say, media study and symbiotic oriented multimodality research points out, is that every medium per southeast is multimodal, so and that's a very interesting and relevant point, also for us as literary scholars because for a long time, literature has more or less been also considered as, well, text. Yeah, we have texts and we're interested in the meaning and the contents, and not so much maybe in… of course also form, but not so much in the media. So especially when it comes to periodical research that you also asked about, it has been a long standing, let's say not problem maybe, or well maybe it has been a problem that the media per say have been a bit neglected. So people in periodical studies of course have looked at periodicals as media, but people who are interested in literature that has been published in periodicals, especially, for instance, in the 19th century, a lot of literature has a lot of… Also novels have first been published in periodicals.
Stijn Vervaet
In feuilleton like Dostoyevsky.
Natalia Igl
Exactly, yeah, and so literary scholars have been interested in those texts, but have been a bit, maybe hesitant or sometimes even… Yeah, because it's not our main object of study. A bit neglectant of the media that these texts have been published in, and so when it comes to periodicals, it's a very good entry point, also for literary scholars to keep in mind, or to really materialise before our own eyes as scholars, that literature also is mediated always and material, it is… we conceive it in a material form, be it also in print or also on screen.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so if we didn't move on a bit from from avantgarde periodicals or the traditional literary journal to what contemporary multimodal novels are doing? Is this then just a kind of a rehearsal of what the repetition of what the historical avantgarde was doing? Or or is it something completely different?
Natalia Igl
I would say it's definitely in a very close line of tradition. And yeah, maybe let's try to again visualise for our listeners a bit, what is or what are multi modal novels? So maybe some of our listeners have also read Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves. It's a multimodal, a bit of a horror thriller etc. novel, or they have read Jonathan Safran Foers 9/11 novel, Extremely loud and incredibly close. So you might already be familiar as our listeners here with multi modal novels and with their key strategies — namely they bring together text and visual elements, sometimes photographs that are printed within text, but also they highlight typography. They may exceed the boundaries of the printed page. They may play with the margins, add handwritten commentary etc. Yeah, yeah.
Stijn Vervaet
I see that you even brought some examples here. Of course, to our listeners this might be like watching a cooking programme on television without the possibility to smell or taste the food right, but maybe you could help them a bit with describing what these authors are precisely doing with the… Is it just the layout or is it a bit broader than that?
Natalia Igl
Yeah, and so I brought two examples and I will try to yeah materialise verbally a bit. So the first example, I already mentioned, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely loud and incredibly close, and this is more or less — If you pick it up – it's a novel. It's… I have the paperback version here, and it seems more or less like a quite classic novel. Yeah, so in the sense of a printed book, and you have text, of course, you have you these pages where there is more dialogue, but all of a sudden maybe you open the book and you see, if you flip it through, right? Or if you read it from start to finish… And you have pages where there are just columns of numbers, numbers and numbers and numbers. Or you have a page where the text begins to in a sense dissolve itself, because it gets ineligible, it overlays itself so, or you have photographs, pictures? Well, this is quite common. You would maybe say, and that's not something where you say, oh this is a multimodal novel, but rather, yeah, there are pictures. That's OK, I don't know. We can have pictures, but when you start reading this book, you will quite soon note that the narration is not merely based on text, and the way the story unfolds is in a sense, uh, if you just would read the text or try to read, try to make sense of the text, you would miss parts of the story, yeah?
Stijn Vervaet
So these illustrations and typographical interventions are not just illustrations, but they're really part of the narration and help bring forward the plot or the narration or...
Natalia Igl
Exactly, and that's maybe, to insert a small comment here again on the notion of multimodality, that's a bit of a problem, of course, when you come from semiotics or linguistics and have an understanding that every medium is per say multimodal, and then you look at this and say, oh this is a multimodal novel, then it would be redundant. Yeah, then, you would say, well wait a moment. Of course it is multimodal because even the layout adds and to the way I, as a reader for instance, perceive what this text does, how it expresses meaning, creates meaning, et cetera, but so the notion of multimodal novels is something that has been made use of, and I would say good use. Of course you can criticise it from a terminological point of view, but it has been made use of to, let's say, describe a group of texts, specifically that emerged around the yeah, 2000 years, around the near Millennium. A group of texts that do this extensively, that really make use of visual elements, typography, etc, as we mentioned, to narrate a story. Yeah, and so as a genre or text type kind of label, this term of multimodal novel works quite well. Of course we can keep in mind now there is a bit of a redundancy there, but if we think of multi modal novels as novels that foreground the multimodality, then it starts making real sense. Then we see OK, even if a model might contain illustrations. It it may not be a multi modal, yeah? Maybe I could talk shortly about the second example, because that makes it very obvious what multimodality in the case of a novel could mean. Uhm, the second novel I brought with me is a book called S. Well, the title I always add, also in brackets, is Ship of Theseus, because it's kind of a-book-in-a-book story from the original… or the actual authors are Dough Dorst & J.J. Abrams. The book in the book – You might hear the sound, I'm taking the book out of the book case. I have the bound version here. And the title I see on the cover is Ship of Theseus and the authors name here is V.M. Straka. So it's a-book-in-the-book story. It's a story about or… It sets this… in a… on the stage, kind of as a library book, and the most prominent feature or one of the most prominent features within the book, when you open it is, that you see there's commentary in different colours in the margins, handwritten commentary throughout the whole book, but the really, I would say, even more prominent figure, that there… or feature that springs on you if you, especially if you may open, may be open brings up, that's kind of full. Yeah, let's just say not know exactly as you say, not knowing what is waiting for you, then stuff falls out because there are many, many things inserted into the pages of the book. There are postcards and facsimiles of newspaper articles. Print clippings. Et cetera, yeah so. So this book comes with a real abundance of other material and, I would say, yeah, foregrounds as much reality as a physical artefacts.
Stijn Vervaet
But when we then move to our digital age, you've mentioned reading on screen several times, but is then this meta reality something that we lose when reading on screen? Or do you think it's just to a different degree, or?
Natalia Igl
Yeah, that's a good question and it is debated also. There is a lot of research or has been done quite some research also in the last few years. It's really here in Norway, especially, on a question of yeah, what happens when texts kind of move from the page to the screen? Yeah, what happens or what… What this does to the reading process and, so… so one thing that has been pointed out though, is also digital media of course have materiality, but a crucial difference that that we can perceive is when you look at, for instance again periodicals. Yeah, when you have a periodical, a printed periodical, then the thing is the thing. Yeah, you have the medium and you can hold this medium in your hands. When you have a, for instance here with a press reader at the university, you can also reach periodicals online or at the National Library online. You can look at historical periodicals on your screen , then the screen is not the medium, is not the periodical. Yeah, it’s the device and you interact with the device and that's a difference. When I have a periodical or a book in my hands, and I flip the pages and maybe there is, as often as in 19th century, early 20th century periodicals, uh, a satirical page with a tilt image or something, I can tilt the medium that I hold in my hands. I can, yeah, switch it, like you would say maybe in Norwegian. But then I see, OK this is funny. Yeah I can, I can understand the picture. When I have it on the screen, for instance historical periodical, the same thing, it's not that easy, I will not be able to maybe flip the fixed monitor. OK, I could flip my other device, but it's different. I interact with it differently.
Stijn Vervaet
And you cannot feel the texture right. You cannot feel the materiality of the paper and yeah, so.
Natalia Igl
Absolutely yeah.
Stijn Vervaet
Is that also perhaps maybe part of the explanation why these multimodal novels, that we have been discussing just a minute ago, are so popular nowadays, because writers are maybe harking back to these older forms of multimodal literature, because we've lost touch with our material environment, perhaps these writers are desperately trying to preserve the aura of an artwork by foregrounding this material aspect so intensively — But do you have any thoughts about that?
Natalia Igl
Well, in a sense it seems to be about the aura of books as printed material, really, there is a notion that captures this quite nicely in research on multimodal novels – The notion of bookishness. And so, usually you would use this word to describe a person, maybe, a bookish person, who likes to read. But this notion really refers to, kind of, the features, the characters, the design of books, that foreground that they are books, that they are printed books and maybe they are tombs, they are heavy and thick. Or maybe they are kind of very stylishly artfully designed et cetera, so it seems to be a bit about that, and the playfulness that we find in avantgarde literature… If you for instance, also think not about novels so much at that point, but about movements such as Dada. Now the playful deconstruction of language, written language as material, and playing with that in an artful, playful way, making use of this to create something that has not been done before, I would say, in a sense, multimodal novels in the contemporary constellation do also work playfully with material. Of course they integrate other material and refer to other media, so sometimes they intensively refer to, yeah, electronic media, so the visual elements that we find sometimes in multimodal novels really are.. it's not the map to the Treasure Island or something, illustration, but kind of like snapshots of screens.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, but do print books and digital books and just things differently with the text, or do they also have a different effect on the reader? That is, do print books, because of this haptic material dimension perhaps enable a more stable mental representation of the text? I think you... I'm now quoting from your work pretty directly... or do they just trigger a different bodily reaction in the reader? So I don't know whether you could have...?
Natalia Igl
Yeah, the research would point in the first direction also so that material that, say print texts, allow for a more stable mental representation... But also the research is still ongoing and sometimes a lot of this research is done in an educational context, so reading development and reading acquisition, or let's say, really being or acquiring the….
Stijn Vervaet
Reading skills and attitudes.
Natalia Igl
Exactly, yeah, and reading skills also as a, yeah, deep reader, not just a surface reader, but someone who really manages… or a child who manages then to interact with long text with long forms. Yeah, and so this research definitely points towards or develops these hypothesis and test this hypothesis to say, OK, it seems that electronic reading, let's say reading of digital texts, seems to push a bit more towards the development of surface reading skills. Yeah, so it makes it harder, or tests showed that it makes it harder for pupils, for instance, to interact with longer forms and to memorise or to… let's not say, memorise, it's not about memorising, it is…
Stijn Vervaet
To remember.
Natalia Igl
… Remembering and to find your way in a text, yeah.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah yeah, so having a book as a material object or a journal periodical helps you also as a reader to navigate through the text and to have a kind of maybe intuitive understanding of where the beginning and the end are, or where the different sections are, or section breaks appear as well, yeah?
Natalia Igl
Yes, definitely yeah. And this may be, if I may add, this also shows that for instance the cognitively oriented research in studies of reading as a process and also as an experience. The cognitively oriented research that is done now is not to be seen in a vacuum. Of course, it also connects to the research that has been going on for quite some time, especially as I mentioned before, in book history, for instance. Book historians will tell us, of course, the book as a printed artefact, in the sense of the codex form artefact, provides a lot of, yeah, signposts for us as readers to find our way, to orient ourselves to, yeah, also make decisions in the reading process, maybe… to say OK, I can see I've already read 200 pages, or not just decisions, but also predictions that… I've already read 200 pages of this novel and it has 250 pages and so I think…
Stijn Vervaet
I'll manage this today.
Natalia Igl
But yeah, I'll manage this today, or maybe oh I'll see the story comes to a close yeah. If you have an electronic device, this sometimes, it's a bit of a problem where you can't really feel your… in a sense, where you are.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, where we are in the book, yeah. But this brings us actually to another crucial notion in your work, right? That of the embodied reader, which also harks back, to some extent, to the questions with which we started. So how do we use our bodies when reading? So isn't reading traditionally assumed to be a mental intellectual operation, yeah? And besides you've mentioned now the pupils who start to learn reading, but once they have a quiet… discuss…. when they're reading a really, a really good novel, or when we are reading a really good novel, don't we tend to forget about our bodies and delve instead into this fictional realm? Could you say something about this?
Natalia Igl
Yeah, yeah, this again seems to be one of these things where it has two sides. And so. As research shows, reading is per se quite an embodied process. Yeah, so we, we do interact. As we mentioned, we do interact with the medium or with the device, yeah, and more or less strong senses, but our body is activated. Be it our senses, really, we perceive text or visual elements, we perceive also the feel of the page, the pages, or the weight of the book, if I again have this this heavy multimodal novel here in front of me, or the device that we hold in our hands. It is also… or the body also comes into play in the sense of reading as a, let's say, social situation, so when you sit, you sit somewhere, you maybe lean somewhere on a wall in between waiting for the bus or something. Yeah, so your body is present. Yeah, that's the one thing and it is kind of working. It's doing its thing, yeah? However, as you mentioned, literature seems to be more about the, yeah, not being here and now and sitting here and reading the book, but being immersed in a book, being transposed, being transformed also, and transported into a story world, yeah, for instance. And yeah, Karin Kukkonen actually points this out in her latest study, that it seems to be precisely the backgrounding of our physical bodies, during the active reading, that makes it possible for literature to do the magic, so to speak, as sitting still and reading, possibly forgetting our immediate surroundings, and ables us as readers to have a heightened embodied experience – in the sense of, yeah, being there, not being here, but being there, yeah. Still it is important to keep in mind that it's not an either/or situation, yeah, and there is a notion that I really think is quite fruitful here to keep that in mind… so that the body is, in a sense, twofold and, and so… another research and scholar and cognitive literary studies, Marco Caracciolo. Uhm, speaks of the virtual body of the reader. Also, to make this distinction between the physical body of the reader, that kind of grounds us in the here and now and our surroundings, but also the virtual body of the reader, uh, the kind of the embodied aspect that is able to be transported, that is able to be shifted to a different here and now in a story.
Stijn Vervaet
Well yeah, so maybe we could push this question about the effect of this reading as experience on our bodies a bit further, because you also work a lot on emotions and mood. So how does reading affect us, not just in terms of reading a shocking story or a thriller, or a detective or… But what other kinds of techniques and devices does a literary work operationalize that effect?
Natalia Igl
Yeah, so the one, let's say device that I'm very interested in, to that respect, is rhythm, and is so something that we might be talking about as literary scholars when we look at poetry and we speak of metre and prosody, yeah, but we also, yeah, speak of rhythm. Text has a certain rhythm and also prose text as novel...
Stijn Vervaet
Yes, our texts are made of language, after all, right? It's like just signs on the page and yeah. So is written… then just a kind of stylistic ornament, or a decoration or formal property of a text or... A relic of specific eras and genres. So, so the study of it is then characteristic of a kind of old school formalistic analysis of poems? Or is there something else to this written? And what this language and the rhythm of language do to us as a reader?
Natalia Igl
Yeah, that's a very good question, I think, and also a question that points out to me that you don't have to have the expert terminology, necessarily, to kind of care about metre and prosody. Yeah, it's a bit like, you don't need to be able to explain how breathing works, since still you have quite an interest in in breathing, and maybe also an understanding of how yeah how breathing in different ways can really affect you and your bodily perception and feel.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah thanks OK.
Natalia Igl
So as an everyday reader, you may not know the different words for iambic metre or etc and you may not be able to analyse and describe in so many words, but you may still be variable, of course to, to feel to perceive and to notice that rhythm of a text of a poem of a novel of passage in a novel has a direct, really direct effect on you.
Stijn Vervaet
So regardless of whether we read out loud or in silence, we cannot ignore the sound and the rhythm of the rhythmic patterns in a text.
Natalia Igl
Yes, yeah yeah. And I think that's what makes it such a strong device and such a strong means to engage readers because it is so immediate.
Stijn Vervaet
Would you like to, or would you mind to, give us some example and read some a poem or?
Natalia Igl
Yes, yes with pleasure. So I brought about a lot of books but I brought also one collection here of an author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I won't go into detail about her work per se, but there is a very short poem that I really felt was a good example to see how immediate, in a sense, rhythm works, and how a text, also, I think a very important point, how a text guides us to find the right rhythm and to read it.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah OK, yeah.
Natalia Igl
So the poem is called “A Moonrise”. It's from 1893, so a bit older, but still, the moonrise is kind of universal, so it still does rise, and I'll just read the poem. So:
"A Moonrise"
The heavy mountains, lying huge and dim,
With uncouth outline breaking heaven's brim;
And while I watched and waited, o'er them soon,
Cloudy, enormous, spectral, rose the moon.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so we have a kind of a change of the rhythm towards the end of the first, uh.
Natalia Igl
Yeah exactly yeah. So the poem is really short, it's just those four verses and the last verse, as you said, we have a change in rhythm. And maybe, so I've read this poem before. Yeah, now maybe if someone reads this for the first time, they might, or I also as a first time reader of this poem, might stumble a bit, because I would predict that all verses might have the same rhythm. And then I stumbled. But what happens here is this inversion of metre and last verse. Yeah, with this “cloudy, enormous”…There is a pause. And if you think about the moonrise as an image, we all have this image and we share this. I would say this is common, not just knowledge, but really an image that we have, a moonrise or also a sunrise or something, and you really take the time to watch and you see it goes in steps, maybe, for you to perceive it. But then it has this effect that you see this image here of the… of the shining moon against this dark sky.
Stijn Vervaet
Gradually moving over time, yeah.
Natalia Igl
Exactly, and this is something that is not just in the contents of this short poem, but is really also conveyed by the rhythm of it. It's not telling us that this moonrise situation is going so and so. It's describing something, but it's also performing something through the rhythm of the text.
Stijn Vervaet
And maybe this alteration in the rhythm also invite us to read it again or to pause a bit, or to ponder on the meaning. Or yeah.
Natalia Igl
Definitely yeah, yeah.
Stijn Vervaet
Thank you Natalia. Maybe to conclude, I would like to ask you for a reading recommendation for the listener. So we've discussed quite a few books, but is there one which you would really, really recommend?
Natalia Igl
Yeah it, uh. I could say, I thought a lot about it, but I have to admit I didn't really have to think so long about it, because there is a book that I think deserves much more attention. It's a German novel, but it's also been translated, and also I think in a recent, new translation. The book is by an author called Vicki Baum. It's from 1929, so it's, yeah, modernist avantgarde. A historical novel in a sense. And in German and the original, it's called Menschen im Hotel and it's quite… in a sense it's quite famous, because it has also been made into not just one, but more films, but I think one film is from the 70s or something. Yeah so the translated title is Grand Hotel. Yeah, and so this novel really captures what I think of, when I speak of readers as observers. Yeah, so it's kind of a training scenario, you could say, for the reader, for the early 20th century reader, but still also for us, to position themselves as observers of not just the story, but really of… So it's a Berlin novel. It's a novel about modern metropolis, the one modern metropolis, that Germany had also in that in that period, and the text really trains you as a reader to not just distantly observe, but to get engaged in a multisensory embodied way. So there are, for instance, passages in this novel where you follow the… or one of the main characters, driving or riding as a passenger in a very, very fast car and so you really perceive this acceleration and the lights that just run past you – Or the character? – but there it's narrated in the sense that you really get a feel for this, and what I also like about it, is that it blends a lot of genres, and it brings a beautiful irony and also a bit of kind of a pop culture Pulp Fiction-tendency to not take itself so seriously, and maybe that's the thing that... I don't know, if those contemporary multimodal models always, uh, always really achieve to not take themselves so seriously. Maybe that's something that also contemporary literature can take as a good message from, yeah yeah, modernist and avantgarde literature sometimes.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so back to the avantgarde after all. Yeah, thank you, Natalia.
Natalia Igl
Yes, maybe. Thank you.