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Political Literature and the Response of the Reader: Experimental Studies of Interpretation, Imagery, and Criticism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Steven R. Brown
Steven R. Brown*
Affiliation:
Kent State University
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Abstract

The influence of political literature has often proved elusive to empirical political science, partly because of the subjectivity of literary response, and partly because of social science methods which are largely incapable of dealing with subjective phenomena in a satisfactory way. A distinction is made between the experimental methods of expression which focus on objective responses, and the methods of impression which focus on subjective responses. Experimental methods are then applied to interpretations of Golding's Lord of the Flies, to the effects on imagery of reading Mazlish's In Search of Nixon, and to reactions to Burdick's The Ninth Wave. An illustration is also given of the experimental study of literary response in the single case.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 71 , Issue 2 , June 1977 , pp. 567 - 584
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1977

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Footnotes

*

Revised from a paper originally presented at a meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 1974. Appreciation is expressed to Rondal G. Downing and William Stephenson, both of the University of Missouri – the former for having shown me the importance of literature to the political process, the latter for having shown me how to begin measuring it. Ellen Siegelman was unusually helpful in clarifying matters of both method and substance.

References

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7 Maxwell, p. 82. Maxwell overstates his case somewhat: Much contemporary historical and interpretative criticism in literature is quite rigorous with the critic arguing directly from textual material available for others to see. Literary interpretation is not unguided impressionism, and, within limits characteristic of all explanations, many careful literary interpretations are replicable.

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14 Golding, p. 189. Golding's pessimistic view of mankind was somewhat modified in some of his later works.

15 Briefly, each reader provided a formal model of his interpretation of Lord of the Flies by Q-sorting the 50 statements from +5 (most like my interpretation) to −5 (most unlike) in a forced, quasi-normal distribution. The rank-ordering of the statements by each of the n = 45 students was then correlated with the rankings of all other students, eventuating in a 45 × 45 correlation matrix. Factor analysis indicates which students reached similar understandings of the novel, as determined by the magnitude of their intercorrelations, with each factor representing a different interpretation as advanced by readers with high loadings on that factor. The content of these differing interpretations is described in terms of the factor scores – i.e., on the basis of the scores (ranging from +5 to −5) assigned each of the statements in each of the factors. The scores which follow therefore indicate the extent to which groups of readers of the same type (with different types designated as factors A, B, C, and D) regard specific statements as congruent with (positive) or opposed to (negative) their own interpretations of the novel. The most detailed treatment of Q methodology is in Stephenson, William, The Study of Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar. Perhaps the best short introduction is by Kerlinger, Fred N., “Q Methodology in Behavioral Research,” in Science, Psychology, and Communication, ed. Brown, Steven R. and Brenner, Donald J. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1972), pp. 3–38 Google Scholar.

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17 Item No. 32 represents Golding's own view (see note 14). All of the other statements were drawn from the students' essays.

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21 It is likewise important to note that this distinction is preserved statistically. Hence, all 45 Q-sort interpretations of Golding's novel were subjective, each from the reader's own point of view and no two exactly alike. Factor communality, however, points to aspects of interpretation that are shared; systematic but noncomrhunal variability is specific to the individual, i.e., idiosyncratic but reliable; the remaining variance is unsystematic and attributed to error.

22 On the concept of factors as subjective operants, see Stephenson, William, “Application of Communication Theory: III. Intelligence and Multivalued Choice,” Psychological Record, 23 (Winter, 1973), 17–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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26 Stephenson, William, “Applications of Communication Theory: I. The Substructure of Science,” Psychological Record, 22 (Winter, 1972), 17 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Italics in original.

27 See in this connection Jaffin, David, “The Methodology of the Historian and Psychoanalysis: Can Subjectivity Be Eliminated?” International Journal of Offender Therapy, 12 (No. 2, 1968), 85–89 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Mazlish, , In Search of Nixon; Barber, James D., The Presidential Character (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972)Google Scholar.

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30 Professor Mazlish also kindly consented to provide a Q-sort representation of the way in which he believed Nixon would describe himself: That variate was also purely loaded on factor I by an amount 0.78.

31 For parallel observations concerning the psychological reaction to Nixon, see Rangell, Leo, “Lessons From Watergate: A Derivative for Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 45 (January, 1976), 37–61 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

32 Cook, Thomas J., Scioli, Frank P., and Brown, Steven R., “Experimental Design and Q-Methodology: Improving the Analysis of Attitude Change,” Political Methodology, 2 (No. 1, 1975), 51–69 Google Scholar.

33 Snow, The Two Cultures.

34 Waldo, Dwight, The Novelist on Organization and Administration (Berkeley: Institute of Government Studies, University of California, 1968), p. 5 Google Scholar.

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38 The Ninth Wave (New York: Dell, 1975)Google Scholar. Burdick, of course, is not in the same category with Orwell or Golding, but his novel, according to Blotner, “is a competent one in the tradition of tough but intelligent realism. The principal defect is that the story is too episodic, that the events of Freesmith's career give the effect of being spread out so that they fail to build sufficiently to the strong climax which the novel needs.” See Blotner, Joseph, The Modern American Political Novel, 1900–1960 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), p. 86 Google Scholar.

39 It is in this sense, as noted previously, that Q-technique provides an adjunct to experimental method. As Nimmo and Savage have pointed out, the fundamental logic of experimentation can be extended into the field by introducing experimental designs, such as in Table 5, into the data-collection procedure. (See Nimmo, Dan and Savage, Robert L., “Image Typologies in a Senatorial Campaign: A Comparison of Forced Versus Free Distribution Data,” Political Methodology, 2 (August, 1975), 293–318 Google Scholar.)

40 The most sustained attention to the single case in literature has been by Holland, Norman N., 5 Readers Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; and Holland, , Poems in Persons (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973)Google Scholar. An earlier effort is by Wilson, Robert N., “Literary Experience and Personality,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15 (September, 1956), 47–57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the theory of single-case design, see Brown, Steven R., “Intensive Analysis in Political Research,” Political Methodology, 1 (Winter, 1974), 1–25 Google Scholar; and Baas, Larry R. and Brown, Steven R., “Generating Rules for Intensive Analysis: The Study of Transformations,” Psychiatry, 36 (May, 1973), 172–183 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Holland, Gorman N., The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 274 Google Scholar. The same principle underlies Sartre's idea of engagement: “… the literary object has no other substance than the reader's subjectivity; Raskolnikov's waiting is my waiting which I lend him. Without this impatience of the reader he would remain only a collection of signs. His hatred of the police magistrate who questions him is my hatred which has been solicited and wheedled out of me by signs, and the police magistrate himself would not exist without the hatred I have for him via Raskolnikov. That is what animates him, it is his very flesh.” See Sartre, , What is Literature?, p. 31 Google Scholar.

42 In this connection, it is important to recall William James's distinction between what is me as opposed to what is merely mine. M is deeply implicated in factors Ml and M2 in that the images of her self, her ideal self, and relevant others are significantly interrelated. Factor M3, on the other hand, is composed of images that she entertains without apparent self-involvement: They are hers, but are not her in a more fundamental sense. See James, William, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), I, 291 Google Scholar.

43 Holland, , Dynamics of Literary Response, p. 30 Google Scholar. This dynamic is given more extended treatment by Holland, , “Unity Identity Text Self,” PMLA, 90 (October, 1975), 813–822 Google Scholar. See also Bleich, David, “Emotional Origins of Literary Meaning,” College English, 31 (October, 1969), 30–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Relevant works in this area are literally too numerous to mention. In addition to the forementioned, representative titles of direct interest to political science include Clowers, Myles L. and Letendre, Lorin, Understanding American Politics Through Fiction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973)Google Scholar; Edwards, Thomas R., Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Greenbeig, Martin H. and Warrick, Patricia S., eds., Political Science Fiction (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974)Google Scholar; Holland, Henry M. Jr., ed., Politics Through Literature (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968)Google Scholar; Howe, Irving, Politics and the Novel (Cleveland: World, 1957)Google Scholar; Lucas, John, ed., Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1971)Google Scholar; Scattergood, V. J., Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London: Blanford Press, 1971)Google Scholar; and Warren, Robert Penn, Democracy and Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. On the political thought of writers, see Calleo, David P., Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Fleishman, Avrom, Conrad's Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967)Google Scholar; and Swingewood, Alan, The Novel and Revolution (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The upsurge of interest in literature in related disciplines is exemplified by Coser, Lewis A., ed., Sociology Through Literature, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972)Google Scholar; Fernandez, Ronald, ed., Social Psychology Through Literature (New York: Wiley, 1972)Google Scholar; and Milstead, John W., Greenberg, Martin H., Olander, Joseph D., and Warrick, Patricia, eds., Sociology Through Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974)Google Scholar. As a methodological sidelight, an additional application of Q technique to literary studies, in addition to Stephenson (see note 10), is to be found in Kohlberg, Lawrence “Psychological Analysis and Literary Form: A Study of the Doubles in Dostoevsky,” Daedalus, 92 (Spring, 1963), 345–362 Google Scholar.

45 Skinner, B. F., “A Lecture on ‘Having’ a Poem,” in Cumulative Record, 3rd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972), pp. 345–355 Google Scholar.

46 Brown, Steven R. and Taylor, Richard W., “Frames of Reference and the Observation of Behavior,” Social Science Quarterly, 54 (June, 1973), 29–40 Google Scholar.

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