Does it Matter Where You Read? Situating Narrative in Physical Environment

TLDR: The authors distinguishes between three different roles the environment can play in the reading experience and proposes that they can also serve as a prop for mental imagery and/or a locus of pleasure more generally.

Abstract: While language use in general is currently being explored as essentially situated in immediate physical environment, narrative reading is primarily regarded as a means of decoupling one's consciousness from the environment. In order to offer a more diversified view of narrative reading, the article distinguishes between 3 different roles the environment can play in the reading experience. Next to the traditional notion that environmental stimuli disrupt attention, the article proposes that they can also serve as a prop for mental imagery and/or a locus of pleasure more generally. The latter 2 perspectives presuppose a more clear-cut distinction between consciousness and attention than typically assumed in the communication literature. The article concludes with a list of implications for research and practice.

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Does it Matter Where You Read?
Situating Narrative in Physical Environment
Anežka Kuzmičová
Stockholm University
Author note:
Anežka Kuzmičová, Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University
This research was supported by the Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation for
Research in the Humanities. The author would like to thank Marco Caracciolo, Göran
Rossholm, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of
the manuscript.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to the author,
Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.
E-mail: anezka.kuzmicova@littvet.su.se
TO APPEAR IN COMMUNICATION THEORY (2016)
Accepted April 2015
Author’s pre-print
Penultimate copy available upon request at anezka.kuzmicova@littvet.su.se

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Abstract
While language use in general is currently being explored as essentially situated in immediate
physical environment, narrative reading is primarily regarded as a means of decoupling one’s
consciousness from the environment. In order to offer a more diversified view of narrative
reading, the essay distinguishes between three different roles the environment can play in the
reading experience. Next to the traditional notion that environmental stimuli disrupt attention,
the essay proposes that they can also serve as a prop for mental imagery and/or a locus of
pleasure more generally. The latter two perspectives presuppose a more clear-cut distinction
between consciousness and attention than typically assumed in the communication literature.
The essay concludes with a list of implications for research and practice.
Keywords: narrative, reading, environment, attention and consciousness,
pleasure, transportation

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Does it Matter Where You Read? Situating Narrative in Physical Environment
Books are portable devices. People read them in various places, but never in a
vacuum. This essay explores how the experience of narrative reading is environmentally
situated.
Situated cognition, i.e., the notion that the human mind and thought are one
with the body and environment, is among the most rapidly expanding theoretical frameworks
concerning language, culture, and learning. For instance, researchers pay close attention to
how gestures and ocular movements in spoken discourse, by their systematic orientation in
physical space, enhance meaning retrieval and comprehension (e.g. Spivey & Richardson,
2008). But what might the idea of a situated mind entail for our understanding of narrative
reading, another practice in which language, culture, and learning so intricately intersect? It
has long been explored how stories afford vastly different experiences depending on who the
reader is. Into every narrative experience, the individual reader brings a unique combination
of personality traits, sociocultural background, existential concerns, bodily makeup, and so
forth. This is an important albeit mostly figurative sense in which narrative reading may be
environmentally situated. At a slightly more literal level, researchers and practitioners probe
the different ways in which narrative reading is affected by immediate social environments in
spatially constrained book therapy meetings (Dowrick, Billington, Robinson, Hamer, &
Williams, 2012), discussion groups (Allington, 2011), or literature classes (Fialho, Zyngier,
& Miall, 2011). What remains wholly unexplored, however, is how solitary reading relates to
environment at its most literal: Does it make a difference where we read? And does this vary
across books? These are the two pivotal questions of this essay.
Few would doubt that the workings of visual and audial media are often
environment-sensitive. While literary readers, if explicitly asked, do indicate preferences for
particular places to read (Burke, 2011, pp. 99–101), little has been published on the more

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general mechanics at work between physical environment and reading experience. This may
be partly due to the common intuition that continuous reading, unlike other narrative-
receptive activities such as audiobook listening (Wittkower, 2011), is too taxing in terms of
attention and perception to allow for a simultaneous experience proper of the physical
environment. It is a fact that the continuous reading of connected narrative belongs among
the most complex processes the human mind is capable of accomplishing (e.g. Wolf &
Barzillai, 2009). However, the conclusion that conscious experience of narrative reading
prevents simultaneous experiences of the physical environment does not obviously follow
from this fact. I will argue against such a conclusion on the basis of two simple observations
borrowed from the philosophy of mind.
[a] There is more to immediate environment experience than what is in
attention.
[b] There is more to immediate environment experience than what is in
perception.
These observations, recently advocated by Schwitzgebel (2007), cannot be said to represent a
mainstream philosophical view of phenomenal consciousness. Yet Schwitzgebel makes a
persuasive case for them by reporting experimental evidence.
The present essay aims to complement an approach to narrative reading
frequently explored in communication studies and media psychology. This is an approach
epitomized by the metaphor of transportation, wherein readers are not only assumed to
engage in mental travel into distant imaginary worlds, but also become temporarily
decoupled from their own world as part of the same process of transportation. In Gerrig’s
words, the reader “goes some distance from his or her world of origin, which makes some
aspects of the world of origin inaccessible” (Gerrig, 1998, pp. 10–11). It is not entirely clear
whether the “world of origin” refers to a physical place any more than it refers to the reader’s

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beliefs, personal attitudes, and previous experiences. However, researchers drawing on
Gerrig’s account specifically make a point of suggesting that deep engagement with a story
makes people lose “awareness of their surroundings” (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009, p. 325).
Psychometric instruments designed to measure narrative engagement and similar constructs
feature items such as “my body was in the room, but my mind was inside the world created
by the story” (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009, p. 329).
The metaphor of transportation has inspired groundbreaking research on issues
such as narrative absorption, media enjoyment, or the persuasiveness of public narratives (for
a review and meta-analysis, see van Laer, de Ruyter, Visconti, & Wetzels, 2014). Thus they
have proven to capture essential elements of narrative response. Indeed, narrative reading is
often practiced with the express objective to mentally escape from unpleasant environments
such as crowded trains or waiting rooms. Even though this practice may have been truly
widespread for just a couple of centuries, owing among other things to relatively recent
developments in publishing technologies and personal mobility, it has taken over our folk
imagery of reading entirely. The image of the reader as an insulated traveler is so powerful
that even cognitive scientists who specialize in situated language processes (gestures, eye-
movements, etc.) consider narrative fiction an exceptionally non-situated form of language
use due to its reference to imaginary worlds and supposed dissociation from the reader’s
immediate environment (Spivey & Richardson, 2008, p. 393; Zwaan, 2014, p. 232). I will
attempt to modify this latter view by pointing at how the physical environment can interact,
in the reader’s consciousness, with the imaginary story world and other textual effects.
The essay is divided into three main sections based on three different, but
largely compatible, perspectives on the role of physical environment in reading. 1) First,
there is the traditional notion that stimuli from the environment are a distractor with respect
to one’s reading experience. Reviewing some of the research applications of this notion in the

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in this paper?

However, the conclusion that conscious experience of narrative reading prevents simultaneous experiences of the physical environment does not obviously follow from this fact. The present essay aims to complement an approach to narrative reading frequently explored in communication studies and media psychology. Two alternative proposals concerning the role of environment will follow from this reassessment. This item is part of the Narrative Engagement Scale, developed by Busselle and Bilandzic with feature film and television viewers but readily adopted in research on reading ( e. g. Mangen, 2012 ). Transportation, defined as “ an integrative melding of attention, imagery, and feelings ” ( Green & Brock, 2000, p. 701 ), is modelled to decrease to the extent that readers report being conscious of their surroundings. ” ( Green & Brock, 2000, p. 704 ) Drawing on Gerrig, Green SITUATING NARRATIVE 8 and Brock comment: “ the reader loses access to some real-world facts in favor of accepting the narrative world that the author has created. The first item on its Attention Subscale, for instance, reads as follows: “ The story gripped me in such a way that I could close myself off for things that were happening around me. Consider for instance the following statement: “ I used to love reading in the college church and in the stacks of the library. ” ( Burke, 2011, p. 100 ) This statement was provided in an investigation conducted by Burke, who surveyed a population of college students on their reading habits and general attitudes to literature. On this view, one that seems to underlie the psychometric work reviewed above, the two notions of attention and consciousness would be synonymous and interchangeable. Others, proponents of the rich account of consciousness ( e. g. Searle, 1992 ), claim that their consciousness is invariably flooded with peripheral experience of unattended stimuli, such as the softness of a chair in which the authors are reading, the cutaneous sensation of heat on a sunny balcony, the soothing sounds of water or music. Assigned to several groups each receiving slightly different instructions, the subjects then reported different aspects of their experience, some of them reporting on the peripheries of their tactile or visual experience specifically ( having vs. not having sensations in the left foot or far right visual field ). Importantly, Schwitzgebel ’ s findings warrant neither an exclusively thin nor an exclusively rich account of consciousness, but rather a third, moderate account ; all participants in his study reported instances of absent peripheral experience as well as instances of more or less ample peripheral experience. From the way the study was set up, it is impossible to tell whether the reported instances of rich experience were not really instances of rapid task switching, i. e., a flipping SITUATING NARRATIVE 11 back and forth of focal attention. Yet this is irrelevant as the goal of the study was to investigate first-person experience rather than the underlying psychophysiological mechanisms. The environment as a prop for mental imagery Consider the following scenario: Vice versa, the author ’ s descriptions of the Congo make you more acutely, albeit peripherally, conscious of the sound of water in your own physical environment. 14 Schwitzgebel gives the following example of epistemic awareness: Epistemic awareness of moving cars and traffic lights is what regulates the overt behavior of an experienced driver whose mind is fully engaged in daydreaming. The relevance of such a notion of epistemic awareness for their Heart of Darkness scenario, the River version, can be summarized as follows: Unperceived and imperceptible stimuli in the environment can regulate their behavior. This immediacy distinguishes aesthetic pleasure from the more complex notion of enjoyment as known among media psychologists, including the authors of above-mentioned psychometric studies, who define enjoyment as an attitude toward an elapsed narrative experience rather than its intrinsic feature ( Kuijpers et al., 2014 ). The present section aims to go beyond the obvious on two points: Compare for example the following two situations: But should the authors consider the difference between the two situations in terms of environmental situatedness only, the following may be observed: Although books do not leave as many possibilities for simultaneous environment perception due to their blocking of the reader ’ s vision, there is no reason why they should not, in principle, afford similar projections of aesthetic pleasure onto the environment. Imagine now the following situation: Instead, complex texts and other media products tend to be primarily studied from the viewpoint of additional, higher-order responses, such as insight ( Miall & Kuiken, 1995 ) or appreciation ( Oliver & Bartsch, 2010 ). Some of the respondents in Burke ’ s ( 2011, p. 100 ) survey, for example, report a certain preference for auditory stimulation during reading. As a next step, environments could be varied within the course of a study. Its inclusion in the observed range of experience would enable entirely new types of self-report. However, researchers drawing on Gerrig ’ s account specifically make a point of suggesting that deep engagement with a story makes people lose “ awareness of their surroundings ” ( Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009, p. 325 ). Furthermore, I will argue that such pleasure transfer between a narrative experience and an environment experience can occur in both directions. The phrasing of the item suggests that in order for narrative presence to arise, the reader must become mentally dissociated from her immediate environment. As for the particular role of physical environment, I have previously suggested that laboratory settings may be more likely than natural environments to instigate a thin mindset, wherein subjects screen off any aspects of their experience that are not related to the experimenterimposed reading task. I will describe a process of environmental propping wherein distinct text effects in the reader ’ s consciousness are reinforced precisely by the reader ’ s peripheral SITUATING NARRATIVE 12 experience of the environment – rather than by a sense of dissociation from this environment as suggested by established theories of narrative engagement, transportation, and absorption. Does the reader ’ s visual handicap entail that an actual yet inaudible river lined with tropical wilderness, all potentially within sight, would lack the same capacity of propping ? That is, as long as a reader knows, at some level, that there is a river lined with wilderness potentially within sight of where she is reading, this knowledge alone has the power to prop her mental imagery of the Congo River as called forth by Heart of Darkness. I will further suggest that narratives below the basic level of complexity, by contrast, may be incapable of generating pleasure apart from situations when pleasure from the environment is subnormal, e. g., during travel. Using computer games as an example, Sherry ( 2003 ) suggests that enjoyment follows from a balance between an individual ’ s abilities on the one hand and the cognitive challenges posed by a particular stimulus ( e. g. a game ) on the other. 

Q2. What is the main reason why the activity of reading leaves us largely perceptually imp?

The main reason why the activity of reading leaves us largely perceptuallyimpoverished is that vision, the single sensory modality most important to environment exploration, is blocked. 

Q3. What is the common and often gratifying thing about the Transportation Scale?

Being so immersed in a narrative as to fail noticing a person entering the roomis one, rather common and often gratifying, thing. 

Q4. What is the effect of environmental propping?

In a process of mutual propping, your auditory perception of real water merges with your auditory, visual, or multimodal (Kuzmičová, 2014) mental images of a river plowed by a nineteenth century steamer. 

Q5. What is the relationship between interestingness and pleasure?

While interestingness ratings increased linearly with complexity, pleasure was related to complexity by an inverted U-shaped function. 

Q6. What is the common misconception about the environment used in narrative response research?

The laboratory environments used in narrative response research are even typically thought of as free from extrinsic stimuli altogether. 

Q7. What would be the way to get subjects to read?

For a more naturalistic reading experience, subjects could simply take the narratives to their preferred environmentsthe course of a study. 

Q8. What is the role of environment in the study?

As for the particular role of physical environment, The authorhave previously suggested that laboratory settings may be more likely than natural environments to instigate a thin mindset, wherein subjects screen off any aspects of their experience that are not related to the experimenterimposed reading task. 

Q9. What would be the natural consequence of adopting an environmentally situated approach to reading?

the most natural consequence of adopting an environmentally situated approach to reading would be to try and move the experiment outside controlled settings altogether.