EDSEL PARKE: After giving a presentation on the gist of my PhD at a recent empirical literary studies conference, I was challenged by one of the audience members about the distinction between the ‘experimentalist’ and ‘naturalistic’ strands I identified within reception studies. This surprised me a little, given that the person in question was a scholar of some renown within audience and communications studies. I later reflected that, perhaps, that I had been viewing this distinction as an epistemological given throughout the whole of my project, seeing it as an intuitive enough way of reading the lay of the land within empirical reception. It seemed that this language of ‘experimentalist’ and (or contra) ‘naturalistic’ did not sit well with scholars whose work was based on mixed methods. Surely, your work sits in either one domain or the other, and you do what you can to downplay or even denigrate the opposing approach.
While I now see that there is more to the question than that, I do wish to uphold this way of ‘reading’ the different types of research within reception studies. I think it provides a more comprehensive account of research than the standard division between quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. The following reflection is not an argument for which might be ‘better’ or more useful, but more a meditation on how we, as reception scholars of both empirical and theoretical persuasions, can better come to grips with our seemingly nebulous field.
I first came across the idea of this distinction in a stylistics article written by Whiteley and Canning (2017). They observed that: “Research into reader response tends to take place in two separate and oppositional fields: experimental and naturalistic […] both experimental and naturalistic approaches should be regarded as empirical” (p. 78). Experimentalist research, in a positivist vein, maintains a clear researcher–participant distinction; researchers typically provide set texts for readers to interpret, and responses are efficiently analysed via quantitative instruments. In other words, the laboratory is home base for the reader and the researcher. On the flipside, naturalistic research considers reading as something situated within the identity of readers, accounting for sociohistorical considerations and recounted experience. It tends toward the discursive and the qualitative, and seeks out those places where reading naturally occurs.
Now, my own research and experience is firmly rooted in the latter tradition. When Schreier (2001) said that “research on reception […] requires the use of qualitative methods” (p. 49), that was enough for me to, by and large, push aside the experimentalist. But something quite remarkable has happened in my recent thinking. As I read over the drafts of my Literature Review and Methodology, I see a stance towards this experimentalist side of things that seems somewhat too dismissive and, at times, reductive. Of course, the rhetorical requirements of something like a Literature Review necessitate an author take a judicious and defensible position on things. However, having now met scholars within the experimentalist tradition (and putting a human face to that which I had heretofore perceived as clinical), I feel a renewed call to evaluate the place that experimentalist research might have in my own project—or, at least, to re-evaluate the way I have treated it in my Literature Review…
It now seems to me that much contemporary work within reception at large (not specifically empirical reception) feels much more comfortable with the naturalistic way of doing things, rather than with P-values and cold, hard statistics. And yet, as Schreier (2001) believes, due recognition must be given to both the experimentalist as well as the naturalistic. One thing I have had to learn over the course of my qualitative PhD is that just because the toolkit of the experimentalist researcher differs to my own—and just because this approach seems to be further removed from resemblance to the activity of reading itself—it is quite unfair to ignore, dismiss, and even fear it. The fact that my panel at the aforementioned conference had me presenting alongside a poetry therapist and a computational linguist attests to a rich complementarity across methodological boundaries.
Whiteley and Canning (2017) conclude by arguing that “stylistics is the only discipline that can embrace both naturalistic and experimental methods and theories of readers” (p. 78). As I reflect on things during the final drafting stages of my PhD, I challenge this claim a little: not only the stylistician, not only the empirical reception scholar, but all working within the field of reception studies should maintain a sense and an appreciation of the other, vastly different approaches at work parallel to them within this colossal field. A first step to this end is attempting to understand the strengths, limitations, and points of communication between what I have identified here as experimentalist and naturalistic stances toward reception research. In the end, all approaches, no matter their origin, converge as they confront that infinitely complex question: why does reading matter to us?
References
Schreier, M. (2001). Qualitative Methods in Studying Text Reception. In D. Schram & G. J. Steen (Eds.), The Psychology and Sociology of Literature (pp. 35–56). John Benjamins Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1075/upal.35
Whiteley, S., & Canning, P. (2017). Reader response research in stylistics. Language and Literature, 26(2), 71–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947017704724
Australian Reception Network 