Den talande bokens poetik - Doria

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1. Being out and stepping into an envisionment
2. Being in and moving through an envisionment
3. Stepping out and rethinking what one knows
4. Stepping out and objectifying the experience
In stance 1 the reader tries to gain a sense of what the work will be about. He or
she is looking for clues (about persons, actions, places) to be able to understand
the text. In stance 2 the understanding is developed through questions about
relationships, motives, feelings, causes and implications, that is, an
understanding of a deeper meaning. In stance 3 the reader temporarily steps
outside the text-world and uses his or her new knowledge to build and reevaluate
his or her knowledge. In this stance the reader asks him- or herself what the
ideas in the envisionment mean for his or her own life. In stance 4 the reader
distances himself or herself from the envisionment he or she has developed and
reflects back upon it. The reader acts as a criticizer and judges the literary
quality of the work. He or she also judges his or her own understanding and
compares it with prior reading.
Langer’s, Rosenblatt’s and Iser’s theories were used in the research project as a
base when the interview manual for the literature conversation was created.
Their concepts were also in use when analyzing the results. The literature
conversation started with ten questions about facts in the stories (the efferent
perspective). After the initial questions the informants were invited to share their
reflections upon what the story was about (the aesthetic perspective). The
informants were then invited to step in to the text-world of the story and gain
information about the persons, acts, surroundings and in which way these
circumstances interact (Langer’s stance 1). Then the informants were asked to
move to stance 2 and explore relationships, feelings and relations of reasons.
The literature conversation then continued with questions about how the
informants would have acted if they had been in the same situation as the
protagonist in the story (Langer’s stance 3). The literature conversation ended
with an affordance to the informants to take a metaperspective in relation to the
oral presentation of the audio book text that they had listened to (Langer’s stance
4). The informants here acted as criticizers, not to judge the literary quality of
the text but the form in which the text was performed as a talking book. The
research interest in this research project concerns the informant’s opinions about
the artistic presentation of the work concerning form.
Langer points out that the four stances do not occur in a linear sequence. They
can occur and recur at any time when the reader reads or when he or she
discusses, writes or reflects on the work. Langer thinks that the individual
“weaves a growing web of understanding” (Langer 1995, 19) over time when the
relationship between the reader and the text shifts from stance to stance.
Birthe Sørensen (2001), Bo Steffensen (2002) and Anna-Lena Østern
(2002/2003) have discussed what an active and co-creative literary education