ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to argue for the importance of the reader's affective response to narrative text in comprehending narrative text. It is an emphasis meant to complement structure-based explanations of comprehension of narrative (i.e., the story grammar perspective). This chapter uses Halliday and Hasan's (1976) concept of lexical cohesion as a tool for analysis. From the outset, it must be emphasized that the concept of lexical cohesion is not understood to operate independent of content, nor is a lexical cohesion analysis understood as a psychologically real determinant of a reader's affective response to narrative, nor is it a concept recommended for use by the teacher in the classroom. Rather, its use in this chapter is as a text-analytic tool for isolating stylistic choices of a writer relevant to discussion of affective response to narrative text. In the following pages, I discuss the role of affective response in comprehension, give an example of the potential power of affective response in comprehension, and conclude with a section on implications for teaching.
