Horizon of Expectation on Popular Lyrical Poetry: Jauss’s Reader Response Perspective

Humans have various opinions in commenting on a literary work. This diversity of opinions will eventually participate in developing research in the literary world. Lyrics are a medium for an author to convey the message he wants to convey in a more free and elegant form. This study aims to describe the reader's perception of the messages and values contained in the lyrics of Rebel's Girl from Bikini Kill, Beyonce from Partition, and God Is a Woman from Ariana Grande. This study uses Jauss' theory of the Harapan Horizon where the role of the reader is the main key in conducting an investigation of a literary work. This research is a qualitative descriptive literature research using a questionnaire distributed to readers who are used as respondents. Respondents were selected randomly with the aim of knowing the differences in opinion of each respondent in responding to a literary work. The conclusion of this study is that the various opinions obtained are influenced by the diversity of backgrounds of the respondents such as differences in gender, age, level of education and experience. In addition, there are messages obtained by readers through the lyrics, namely; freedom of speech, feminism, inner beauty, and sex education.

One Hundred Frogs in Steve McCaffery’s The Basho Variations

The article discusses Steve McCaffery’s The Basho Variations with a focus on various modes of transtranslation/transcreation/transaption of Matsuo Bashō’s famous frog haiku. The emphasis is placed on the complexities (of the processuality) of transtranslation which deliberately alters, distorts and reimagines the source text. The intercultural and intertextual quality of McCaffery’s poems is discussed in the context of multilevel references to classical Japanese aesthetics of haiku writing. The comparative reading of McCaffery’s and Bashō’s texts foregrounds the issue of events, or “frogmentary events,” and the importance of the role of the reader in completing poetic messages.

How Readers Construct New Testament Characters: The Calling of Peter in the Gospels in Cognitive-Narratological Perspective

The discipline of cognitive narratology applies insights of cognitive linguistics to narrative analysis. This study seeks to demonstrate the value of cognitive narratology by exploring the role of the reader and the extent of the reader’s knowledge in constructing characters. While traditional narrative criticism often limits itself to the world of the text, cognitive narratology recognizes that the reader’s knowledge from other texts and the real world also contributes to the construction of characters. This study will show that the extent of the reader’s literary and social knowledge of a text affects the construction of characters. As a case study, we will examine the calling of Peter in the canonical Gospels and show how four readers with varying degrees of knowledge will arrive at different constructions of Peter’s character.

Dynamical modeling of the H3K27 epigenetic landscape in mouse embryonic stem cells

The Polycomb system via the methylation of the lysine 27 of histone H3 (H3K27) plays central roles in the silencing of many lineage-specific genes during development. Recent experimental evidence suggested that the recruitment of histone modifying enzymes like the Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2) at specific sites and their spreading capacities from these sites are key to the establishment and maintenance of a proper epigenomic landscape around Polycomb-target genes. Here, based on previous biochemical knowledge, we turned this hypothesis into a mathematical model that can predict the locus-specific distributions of H3K27 modifications. Within the biological context of mouse embryonic stem cells, our model showed quantitative agreement with experimental profiles of H3K27 acetylation and methylation around Polycomb-target genes in wild-type and mutants. In particular, we demonstrated the key role of the reader-writer module of PRC2 and of the competition between the binding of activating and repressing enzymes in shaping the H3K27 landscape around transcriptional start sites. The predicted dynamics of establishment and maintenance of the repressive trimethylated H3K27 state suggest a slow accumulation, in perfect agreement with experiments. Our approach represents a first step towards a quantitative description of PcG regulation in various cellular contexts and provides a generic framework to better characterize epigenetic regulation in normal or disease situations.

Metadiscourse as a Way of Achieving Persuasion in Literary Criticism Texts

This study aims at examining the use of metadiscourse markers in literary criticism texts to identify the role of the reader and how these markers are used to produce more persuasive essays. The data of 72,727 words from 17 texts were written by three well-known authors, namely, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Stanley Fish. Hyland’s (2005) model of interpersonal metadiscourse markers was used to analyze the data. The analysis revealed that metadiscourse markers are used by literary critics to create coherent and persuasive texts. It was found out that the theory of criticism adopted by the literary critics does not affect the use of metadiscourse markers only maybe in terms of relying more on logos, ethos or pathos. The results of this study comply with those of previous research showing that metadiscourse markers are frequently used in literary criticism texts. This study will contribute to both the literary genre and the genre of critical essays by identifying the linguistic features to be used to produce more effective and convincing literary criticism texts. It will also help future critics to write more persuasive texts by highlighting the means that enable them to influence their readers and to produce more coherent and convincing texts. Keywords metadiscourse; persuasion; literary criticism; essays; critical theory

A Wandering Hyphen, The Reader and the Work

This is a reply to commentary by Matt Cohen, Ian Cornelius, and Alan Galey occasioned by the publication of Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and to a review of the book by John K. Young. A theory of the work based on the negative dialectic of document and text grounds the work as a regulative idea rather than an ideal entity and finds the role of the reader to be constitutive of it. The relationship (envisaged in the book as a slider) of archival and editorial digital projects, the potential cross-fertilization of philology and textual criticism, and an expanded role for textual studies inspired by D. F. McKenzie’s writings are discussed.

Reading in the Age of Compression

Compression is often considered a royal road to process data in ever-shorter time and to cater to our desire to outspeed the accelerating transmission of information in the digital age. This article explores how different techniques of accelerated text dissemination and reading, such as consonant writing, speed-reading apps, and the PDF file format, borrow from the language of compression yet, precisely in so doing, obscure the constitutive multilayered temporality of reading and the embodied role of the reader. While discussing different methods aspiring to compress textual objects and processes of reading, the author illuminates hidden assumptions that accompany the rhetoric of text compression and compressed reading.

On author’s strategies in literature

Though the term ‘author’s strategies in literature’ is being widely used, its extended definition has not been coined in literary theory encyclopedias and reference books yet. In an effort to partially fill in this gap, I would like to make an attempt to answer the following questions: What is the meaning of the notion ‘author’s strategies’ in literary studies? How do author’s strategies manifest themselves in the literary process? What is the role of the reader in author’s strategies? How do author’s strategies function in the text?

Reading aloud: The role of the reader and the conception of ‘self’

In this article I examine the prosody associated with different ways of reading aloud, in particular the speaker’s exploitation of pitch range, and I consider the way in which different styles project different speaking roles and with them different conceptions of self. I have chosen four different speaking styles: storytelling, newsreading, prayer and poetry-reading. They represent different degrees of markedness and are the styles that are referenced most frequently in a wide range of sources, allowing a comparison and synthesis of the different characterizations they contain. The sources from which I draw my evidence include impressionistic descriptions of ‘delivery’ in classical writings on rhetoric, and instructions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century manuals for recitation, public speaking and elocution training. All these accounts are aimed at improving the performance of individual speakers, but I also draw on more recent studies of intonation, which are motivated largely by potential applications in speech technology – speech recognition and speech synthesis. They combine qualitative and quantitative accounts based on acoustic analysis and include, for example, research on intonation and emotion and on the prosodic parameters of charismatic speech. Stylistic variation has traditionally been understood as variation according to situational context or setting, as is evident in the choice of styles for this article. An alternative view discussed here is Goffman’s notion of ‘participant roles’, important in socio-pragmatics, which relates ways of speaking to whether the speaker is acting for themselves or, for example, as a spokesperson, as in reading the news. Finally, in order to account for the overlap of prosodic features in ostensibly very different settings, such as poetry-reading and liturgy, I propose a unifying factor underlying the different styles, based on degrees of subjectivity and objectivity in the voice. I conclude that speakers respond not to a physical setting but to the kind of ‘self’ they wish to project.