Der explizite Leser

Production, text, and reception are the subject fields of classical, hermeneutic literary studies. The article argues that these fields also belong together for digital literary studies. Results of investigations in the data rich approach, which combines corpus analyses with the analysis of data from the institutional history of literature, substantiate the necessity to deal more with the reception side of literature. This includes conducting experiments whose empirical data must be integrated into the data systematics of literary studies. For this perspective, the reception-aesthetic notion of the ›implicit reader‹ who merely reacts to text structures falls short. Against the background of new evidence from cognitive science, it is shown that reading is always subject to the inherent laws of the cognitive processes involved. The ›explicit reader‹ offers the chance to reconsider central interdisciplinary questions such as the functioning of attention, the effect of narratives, or the probability practices of the fictional world and to take this into account in the analysis.