Paradigms for Explaining the Experience of Reading

There has long been communication between phenomenology and the study of literature, especially regarding literary art. This has produced phenomenological accounts of reading by Ingarden, Sartre, Gadamer and Dufrenne, and influenced many other theories of literature. More recently, phenomenological concepts have sometimes been fused with assumptions from empirical psychology, cognitive linguistics, computation or neuroscience, as in the work of Monika Fludernik, David Herman, Paul Armstrong, Brook Miller and Anežka Kuzmičová. The current chapter will explore the assumptions of these approaches in the light of a phenomenological framing of experience. It will criticize certain reductive approaches to text reading. These can neglect the role which a synthesis of temporal difference must play in reading, or explain the unconscious by ascribing to bodily processes (e.g., neural networks) the ability to act as independent agents with their own goals.