Books’ Impact in Digital Social Reading: Towards a Conceptual and Methodological Framework

The aim of this panel is to debate the challenges and opportunities offered by online reviews for measuring the impact that books can have on readers (Boot and Koolen, 2020). The focus is specifically on culture- and language- specificity, thus we will compare insights from the analysis of Korean, English, Italian, German, and Dutch reviews. Digital social reading platforms – like Goodreads, Lovelybooks, or Naver Books – host millions of reviews and, thus, offer unique possibilities for research into literature, reading, and reader response (Rebora et al., 2021; Walsh and Antoniak, 2021). Computational tools are especially relevant, given the large amount of available data, but finding associations between textual features, cultural conventions (e.g. genre), and cognitive, affective, and aesthetic responses is not a straightforward task (Koolen et al., 2020; Pianzola et al., 2020). By comparing research done with different platforms, datasets, and languages, we aim at improving the methods that we employ, in a dialogue involving both data-driven insight and theoretical reflection on literature and readers. Questions that we will address are: what aspects of a book’s impact on readers can reviews help us to measure? What are the limitations of online book reviews for studying impact? How do we know to what extent these review texts reflect the actual reading experiences? What are unwanted, confounding influences (e.g. reviewers projecting a favourable self-image, socially desired responses, aspects of identity formation, fake reviews). How do online book reviews differ from experimentally controlled gathering of reader responses (lab studies, questionnaires, psychologically validated scales) (Lendvai et al., 2020)? How do platforms for reviewing and social interactions around books influence reviewers and their perceptions? How do reviewers compare to other readers? To answer such questions, we will present four case studies dealing with different languages and cultures, followed by an open discussion of the results and methods, reflecting on their generalizability, efficacy and limitations

A Tale of Two Ghosts: Autofiction, Film & Spectrality in Mark Cousins’ I Am Belfast

Since Serge Doubrovsky coined the term autofiction in 1977, it has taken on a wide variety of meanings, and recent scholarship has framed autofiction as the inability of the reader to interpret a text within either a fictional or factual framework alone. Often this is expressed by an integration of the Spectral into the narrative, for the ghost inhabits the murky space between the ontological poles of fiction and referentiality. Despite this broader conception, scholarly discussion of autofiction has considered only literary sources, and it has not yet been associated with other forms, such as film. This paper takes autofiction as a point of departure and suggests that it provides a neat framework with which to analyse Mark Cousins' genre-blurring film of 2015 I Am Belfast, in which he attempts to tell the story of his home city, with particular focus on the presence of the Spectral as a means to articulate the traumatic history of Northern Ireland's capital city. Although a tale of one city, the film is a tale of two ghosts. Firstly, while Cousins is ever-present in a documentary-like voice-over, he communicates with a ghostly 10,000-year-old woman called "Belfast" who guides the viewer through the city and narrates its traumatic story, and secondly, the spectre of Belfast's ill-fated ocean liner, the Titanic, stalks the cinematography, as if the Titanic's tragic demise prefigured the political crisis. In short, this paper suggests that the interplay between the fictional and the real in the process of traumatic testimony, led by the inclusion of the spectral, renders I Am Belfast a fitting example of autofictional film

Of Other Spaces and Others' Memories: Reading Graveyards in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Regina Scheer's Machandel

This article probes the relationship between spatial belonging and memorialization in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) and Regina Scheer's Machandel (2014), examining how the focus on graveyards in both novels ties in with their equally shared emphasis on social outsiders forming communities in (formerly) partitioned nations. It reassesses Michel Foucault's idea of heterotopias—exceptional spaces that reflect back on the rest of society—and shows how both texts position the perpetually shifting nature of such “other spaces” in contrast to the fixed and exclusionary notions of belonging that buttress contemporary right-wing nationalist discourses in India and Germany alike. Scrutinizing the memorializing function of the depicted graveyards in light of Michael Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory, the article then demonstrates how Ministry and Machandel connect differently marginalized groups' histories and propose present-day solidarity between them. Reading heterotopia through multidirectionality and vice versa, this analysis showcases how Foucault's and Rothberg's respective concerns with discourse-destabilizing spaces and despatialized memory discourses productively complicate and complement each other. It is through the interplay of alternative material spaces and connective approaches to memory that Roy's and Scheer's novel develop visions of community centering on those otherwise marginalized

“Al was hi sward, wat scaetde dat?” Courtly cultural exchange in the Roman van Moriaen

The Middle Dutch romance Moriaen features a black skinned knight as one of its heroes. His blackness leads to quite different emotional reactions from Arthur’s knights and from common people. These reactions will be compared to the way characters in Middle Dutch epic texts react to Saracens. Whereas in the epic story world, the encounter with a male Other leads to animosity and full combat mode, courtly romance takes a different position. Moriaen eventually turns out to be the son of one of Arthur’s knights, and his handsomeness, lineage and prowess overrule the negative reactions to his otherness

Maartje Draak (1907-1995)

Dit is een onderdeel in een groter artikel samengesteld door S, Rayner, 'Female Arthurian scholars