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Abstract

This paper presents the results of experiments made within the interdisciplinary project between the
Department for Comparative Literature at the
University of Tübingen and Max Planck Institute for
Biological Cybernetics. We examined the following
three questions using both psychophysical and
structuralistic-hermeneutical methods: a) Are there
regularities in the judgments of spatial descriptions by
different readers? b) Do readers encode the perceptual
perspective of characters during reading? c) Are there
correspondences between foregrounding effects and
the physiological reaction (galvanic skin response) of
readers? The results show that a) that the semantic
validation of spatial descriptions showed high
homogeneity; b) the method actually showed more
about literary strategies concerning object occluding
and required the development of new experiment
approaches to identify the perspective taken by the
reader, that c) the emotional response is quite
idiosyncratic but can be roughly divided into two
schemes (high or low response).