Erlbaum Associates. 321-355. 9 Literary Discourse

Literary reading has been a topic of inquiry among scholars of literature and educationalists for nearly three quarters of a century (Richards, 1929; Rosenblatt, 1937). Among empirical researchers, in contrast, attention to literature is quite recent, with most studies having been carried out only over the last 20 years. The literary field is fraught with controversy, however. Basic differences over the object of study militate against the emergence of a single paradigm for empirical research. Disagreement over the nature of literature centers on whether literature is a fundamental category of discourse with distinctive properties or a cultural formation produced during the last 200 or 300 years (e.g., Terry, 1997) and sustained by specific conventions (possibly facing extinction in the face of new electronic media). In this chapter, therefore, although it is possible to elaborate a number of specific components of literary reading that have been studied empirically, at the present stage of research a coherent account of literary discourse remains out of reach.