Impressed by Reading: Measuring the Impact

Literature is a complex phenomenon of human culture, approached by scholars from different disciplines, but still largely mystifying in terms of both its inner structure and the reactions of its readers. By bringing together the strengths of different approaches to the study of the effects of literature, we may be able to better explain literature and its effects on readers and human culture. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in the effects of literature to share their research questions and methods, to understand how much we understand literary text and what it does to us as its readers. We also invite you to think with us about future research in the form of a possible shared research agenda and guidelines. Your contribution will make future research more effective, and the results would facilitate the work of librarians, teachers, narratologists, psychologists, computational linguists and literary scholars.