ABSTRACT
Contemporary models of text comprehension are not well equipped to account for the comprehension of literary texts. This is partly due to the persistent tendency of text comprehension researchers to focus on experimenter-gener ated text rather than on naturalistic text (Graesser, Haberlandt, & Magliano, 1994; van Oostendorp & Zwaan, 1994; Zwaan & van Oostendorp, 1993). However, literary texts prose specific problems for the comprehender that are not cap tured in experimenter-generated prose. For example, many literary texts are unique in the sense that they are deliberately constructed to be inconsiderate. In this chapter, I propose a model of literary comprehension that takes the “inconsiderateness” of literary discourse into account. The proposed model is essentially an extension of existing models of text comprehension that were developed by Kintsch and van Dijk (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Kintsch, 1988; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983).
