Examples of application

pp. 25-40

in: Anders Pettersson, The concept of literary application, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

Thus far, I only introduced one example of an application performed by an ordinary reader: the thoughts to which Harry Mulisch's The Black Light gave rise in the mind of the young man called Art. This example was taken from Els Andringa's empirical study "The Interface between Fiction and Life: Patterns of Identification in Reading Autobiographies' (2004). Andringa recruited six male and six female Dutch students aged between 22 and 32 and asked them to describe their histories as readers; in that way she was able to collect twelve ""reading autobiographies' in which subjects report their own reading histories by writing down their memories of books, reading experiences, and reading behaviors".¹ Andringa uses the autobiographical texts to discuss developmental aspects of reading and gender differences in reading. She directly quotes many of her informants.