Den talande bokens poetik - Doria

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The International Listening Association (ILA) defines listening as “the process
of receiving, constructing meaning from and responding to spoken and/or
nonverbal messages” (Purdy & Borisoff 1997, 6). In this dissertation the
meaning-making perspective is in focus and the chapter continues by examining
what happens in a reader’s encounter with a literary text. Repeated experiences,
regardless of whether you gain them in real life or in fictive stories, create
internal patterns of how to structure your experiences in order to understand
them and make meaning from them. In cognitive psychology these patterns are
called maps, schemas or scripts (Barton 1932; Beck 1995; Bolwby 1969;
Tolman 1948; Lundh 1992; Neisser 1976). These concepts have been used and
developed also in cognitive literary theory (Sørensen 2001) to better describe
how the reader uses prior experiences of life and texts when he or she interprets
fiction. Dialogue with previous research, for instance with Elise Seip Tønnessen
(2000), who has analyzed children’s encounters with TV, show that past
experience forms the schemas into structured scripts or expectations that will
affect the way a reader or listener will interpret future texts. Jean Matter Mandler
(1984) developed the concept story grammar, which is a form of script for
understanding stories, and she believes that the story grammar will have effects
both on processing and meaning-making in the process of perception and in the
process of interpretation. Story grammar will affect both what is perceived and
remembered and what is forgotten. Story grammar thus functions as a structure
of expectation in the reader’s mind. A perspective from critical pedagogy is also
introduced in the chapter. Jack Mezirov (1998, 34) has discussed schemas of
meaning which form perspectives of meaning. These perspectives of meaning
will form the personal frame of reference or value system for a single individual
and thus affect the meaning that this person creates. Schemas can change by
affording new experiences for the individual. Mezirov’s point of view is that by
changing a person’s schema of meaning you can change his or her perspective of
meaning. He thinks that learning processes can have effects on a person’s view
on himself or herself. In the extension of a transformative process like that you
can even change a person’s life world, Mezirov claims. This opinion is
embraced also in this thesis.
The Norwegian literature teacher and researcher Sylvi Penne (2010) has
summarized the Norwegian and Nordic classroom research with focus on
students in junior and senior high school. She stresses in relation to the
interpretation skills how important it is that the teacher challenges students both
to syntagmatic and to paradigmatic thinking (Bruner 1995). Through
syntagmatic thinking the student acquires narrative competence. This means that
the student acquires skills to understand stories as linear, tied to a line of time.
Interpretation according to paradigmatic thinking, on the other hand, is
important for the development of empathy and relationships (Penne 2010, 130–
131). Bruner’s thoughts about narrative thinking thus become a picture of how
meaning is created, based both on the interpretation schemas of the culture and
on the cognitive schemas of the individual. Penne emphasizes how important it