Poetics最新文献

Studies in the social cognition literature indicate that several strategies play a role in how observers understand an observed actor, including by simulating the actor's perspective (identification), and/or an audience member projecting their own perspective onto the actor's mind (egocentric projection). In processing story characters, there is evidence that taking a character's perspective and projecting one's own perspective are distinct psychological mechanisms used to understand a character. Manipulating a common and much studied narrative feature—character morality—we examined how morality influences the way audience members process story characters. Three experiments consistently found that audience members tend to have higher levels of both egocentric projection and identification with the character when interpreting moral characters, compared to immoral characters. Confirmatory factor analysis shows that egocentric projection and identification are two distinct constructs.

How do contested emerging subgenres become legitimated and institutionalized? This case illustrates the meso-level negotiation of community sense (Wohl, 2015) as stakeholders of a genre (romance fiction) debate whether genre boundaries include a new subgenre (erotic romance). Erotic romance upended conventions by introducing explicit and sometimes unconventional sex into the traditionally heteronormative romance genre. However, opposition to subgenre inclusion involved more than sexual content. Drawing on interviews (n = 40) and text data from Romantic Times (n = 360) and Romance Writers Report (n = 180), I find that mainstream incorporation of erotic romance involved community negotiation of multiple symbolic boundary debates: (1) What is acceptable sexuality? (2) What is a real book? (3) Who is a professional author? Erotic romance was fully institutionalized after best-selling Fifty Shades of Grey forced the community to confront all three boundary debates at once. Each debate represents a different symbolic boundary around the mainstream romance genre, but the case can only be fully understood by examining how they intersect. I conceptualize that intersection as the symbolic boundary nexus and argue that analyzing genre classifications as a set of intersecting boundaries is a productive approach for understanding how cultural communities negotiate contested classification processes.

When conventions change, how do cultural producers respond to new trends in heteronomous fields? Established artists in heteronomous fields will be supplanted by newer styles created by new entrants to the field. Market-oriented artists must bend to changing conventions rather than keep to the kinds of cohesive trajectories that shape restricted field careers. Regardless of whether established cultural producers like or appreciate changing conventions in their field, they must respond to emergent movements, norms, ideas, and styles in their own work. Using interviews with 40 commercially successful songwriters, I find that when faced with a new trend, songwriters who stay in the field accommodate new trends through strategic, habitual practices. By adapting to new aesthetic features of trends through “research” or mimicry and by adopting new, trendy artists into collaborative creative groups, established artists can successfully incorporate new trends into their creative labor. These practices allow artists to continue producing relevant creative work despite misalignment between new conventions and their own preferences. Attending to the ways that artists incorporate new aesthetic features and new collaborators into their work contributes an understanding of the everyday practices that lead to trend accommodation.

Organizations benefit when they are perceived as authentic. Yet, explanations for this effect typically rely on context-specific attributions that can carry different meanings for different people. Here we develop some elements of a broader theory of authenticity. In sketching our theory, we draw from ideas about signaling and transparency in organization theory, and essentialism in psychology. Using signaling and transparency, we derive arguments implying that observable organizational features representing obviously costly investments convey a sense of authenticity. Using essentialism, we derive alternative counter-arguments that posit unobservable features associated with the intangible essence of a firm will generate perceptions of authenticity. We study distilled spirits producers across a multi-method program of empirical studies including wiki surveys, archival analyses, surveys and online experiments. In the empirical work, we find that producers who present profiles with clusters of observable backward vertical integration activities (including internal production systems) are more likely to be described as authentic by potential consumers. But we also find that individual observable features (e.g., internalized stills, farms) presented in isolation from other features do not consistently appear more salient to consumers than unobservable features (e.g., tradition and terroir). Because they carry multiple messages in varying modalities, profiles of clustered features may be more widely recognized and impactful in projecting authenticity.

US colleges and universities are defined by their exclusivity, and the most prestigious schools reject most of those who apply. Yet these same schools also widely advertise their inclusiveness, encouraging students from all backgrounds to submit applications and highlighting evaluation protocols that identify many characteristics worthy of consideration for admission. We surface this paradox and use it as motivation to theorize a little studied component of college applications: personal essays. Drawing from cultural sociology, we posit that the commission and production of essays extolling applicant worth and worthiness is a ritual practice that instantiates an idea of merit that is broadly shared among those who submit applications to admissions-selective schools. We pursue this work empirically by observing essay prompt selections of 55,016 applicants to the University of California in 2016 and conducting human readings and statistical analyses of 3,519 unique essays. Results indicate that prompts and essays encompass a broad but bounded range of life challenges that selective schools and applicants consider meritorious. The entire process of application to selective US schools helps to reify a national faith in a broad and inclusive conception of merit.

Social scientists of class and inequality have documented the rise of omnivorousness, informality, ordinariness, and emphasis on meritocracy. This apparent decline in class closure contrasts sharply with rising inequality and declining economic mobility. How are these competing developments reflected in everyday class distinction-making? In this article, we answer this question by applying Goffman's work on the symbols of class status to the analysis of unique data: a corpus of etiquette books published between 1922 and 2017. We use word embeddings to quantify the salience of six class concepts (affluence, cultivation, education, employment, morality, and status) in the corpus. We find that education and employment are increasingly salient while status, affluence, cultivation, and morality decline in their salience to class distinction-making. These results signal a decline of class operating as a status group through cultural closure, the rise of education and employment as the carriers of class in everyday life, and the corresponding legitimation of class position and class inequality based on supposedly meritocratic grounds. This research opens up new avenues for studies of class and the application of computational methods to investigations of social change.

We report three randomised and pre-registered experiments examining the effects of narrative fiction (vs. narrative non-fiction vs. expository non-fiction) on concern for animal welfare. In Experiment 1a (N = 363) there was no significant increase in concern for animal welfare or willingness to donate to an animal charity among participants who read a narrative fiction text about a monkey's plight (vs. narrative non-fiction or expository non-fiction texts about a monkey). In Experiment 1b (N =121) concern for animal welfare and willingness to donate was greater after reading the narrative fiction text compared to a narrative non-fiction text unrelated to animals. Experiment 2 (N =184) employed a simplified design and more severe depiction of animal abuse, but showed no beneficial effect of reading a narrative fiction text about a monkey's plight (vs. a narrative non-fiction text unrelated to animals) on either measure. Experiment 3 (N =290) compared a narrative fiction and a non-fiction text about a monkey or a lizard; participants who read a narrative fiction text, irrespective of the animal depicted, reported greater concern for animal welfare, monkey welfare, lizard welfare and nature (vs. a narrative non-fiction text). However, participants were no more willing to donate in the narrative fiction (vs. non-fiction) condition. These results suggest that reading a narrative fiction text about an animal's plight has a limited effect on concern for animal welfare.

In this paper, I focus on how major fiction publishers renegotiate the art/commerce balance in the contemporary Czech literary field and I discuss their strategies in terms of conservative and progressive variants of rules of art and rules of commerce. I show that Czech publishers face many similar challenges known from the global literary field: they feel the field is getting faster, tighter, and more money-driven. Their responses still may be specific given the differences in historical development and culture they act within. In these conditions, new aspects of shifting literary rules may emerge. Thus, the paper contributes to the discussion on the shifting and blending rules in literary fields nowadays. The study is based on Bourdieu's theoretical model of the literary field and works with 24 semi-structured interviews with publishing professionals from houses that produce fiction of various types – highbrow, commercial, Czech, and translated – and that are of sizes from small to mid-sized to large. The research was conducted from 2010-16.

This paper examines how a Copenhagen Night Church worked to affirm and bridge cultural boundaries by relating worship services to an incomprehensible corpo-affective experience and construing the atmosphere as a type of boundary object; an object that provides an interpretational flexibility while conserving an underlying common identity. It starts by exploring a public trial concerning the use of music in the Night Church. The trial forced the clergy to engage in boundary work in order to establish the Night Church events as worship services and not concerts. Most importantly, this included relating worship services and religion to an incomprehensible corpo-affective experience unmediated by meaning-making. This helped protect and transform pastoral authority as pastors emerged as theologically minded aesthetic workers just as it created a sense of coherence with an imagined religious past. However, if it helped establish a cultural border, it also afforded a crossing of cultural boundaries outside the context of the trial. Drawing on data generated from fieldwork in the Night Church, we explore how it helped position the Night Church atmosphere as a boundary quasi-object intended to connect a younger, more secular generation to religion.