ABSTRACT
The discussions held within reading groups or book clubs typically involve participants sharing, comparing and co-creating responses to specific literary texts. Usually, reading group members engage with a printed literary text in a process of solitary reading prior to a meeting. During meetings the literary text is then reconsidered and reconstituted in the acts of social reading performed by the group. Printed literary texts are both autonomous objects made of unchanging words on a page, and heteronomous objects which only come into being when engaged by an observing consciousness (Ingarden 1973a, 1973b; Stockwell 2002: 135–136). Cognitive stylistics (introduced in Section 1.1.1) is a form of reader-oriented literary study which examines both the autonomous and heteronomous aspects of literary texts, seeing them as ‘two complementary focus points’ in the analysis of reading (Stockwell 2002: 136). Yet the heteronomous objects traditionally examined in cognitive stylistic analysis tend to be those constructed by an individual observing consciousness during solitary reading. In this chapter we adopt a sociocognitive stylistic perspective, by considering the interactions between people reading socially in relation to the language of the printed written text (henceforth, the ‘original’ text) under discussion. We argue that reading group discussion can be used to expand the individualistic focus of cognitive stylistics, and that cognitive stylistics can profitably contribute to the analysis of the discourse of reading groups, illuminating, for instance, the way these groups ‘press texts into service for the meanings they transmit and the conversations they can generate’ (Long 2003: 147–148).
