It isn’t a long piece, barely a half column, a fraction of the other Braxton Herald opinion page contributors. Jim’s letter to the editor appeared that morning.
#YOU STUPID SOUND EFFECT FULL#
An older waitress Jim doesn’t know by name eventually plods over to his table, slaps a menu on his placemat without a word or glance, and then continues to the next booth where she chats and giggles a full minute before taking orders. Sally-a woman Jim dated back in high school-squeaks the heel of her sneaker as she pivots and vanishes into the shadows of the kitchen. Moyers glances at him once and then drops her eyes to her menu, which she continues reading with improbable intensity as Jim walks past her booth. Jim takes a deep breath, bracing himself before pushing open the glass door. That’s not what happened, which we discuss in the study. According to another study’s definition, “literary” fiction promotes theory-of-mind inferences, and so, we hypothesized, these statements should lower that inferencing and so also lower impressions of “literary” merit. I’ve published about four dozen short stories in literary journals, including one anthologized in Best American Fantasy, but I would never submit these texts anywhere, regardless of genre.įinally, I’m including below the two additional texts that feature what Dan and I termed “theory-of-mind explanations.” These are topic-sentence-like statements usually at the beginning of paragraphs that declare overtly what characters are thinking and feeling. I wrote them solely for the purpose of experimental manipulation. Personally, I consider both texts to be at best mediocre. The question of quality might come in too, since setting-defined science fiction, while still a subset of science fiction, might indicate a lower level of merit. When I tried a mini-version of the experiment unofficially with one of my advanced creative writing classes, one student inferred deeper levels of significance from the setting details, saying: “The main character feels a tension with humanity and artificial life feels conflicted about the technological changes around him, the role that pain and messiness play in this structured, manipulated world.” No one described the setting of the narrative realism version as having as much significance. But the setting variations in the two experimental texts can produce more than just surface differences. I tend to agree, though I still consider space westerns a form of science fiction.
Only a subset includes a futuristic, other-worldly setting, so our study is limited to that subset.īy some definitions of science fiction, setting isn’t sufficient, since it is only a surface element. While narrative realism may include a lot of things, it typically includes a contemporary, seemingly real-world setting. That means any generalizations we suggest about the larger genres are limited to setting-based definitions. At the sentence level, our two texts vary only according to setting-revealing words and phrases, which then produce two drastically different story worlds, one set in a contemporary small town, another in a futuristic space station. We needed short passages, no more than 1,000 words each, and so the texts are also necessarily flash fiction. We had originally tried to alter actual published stories, but that produced too many variables. The conclusions that Dan and I draw refer specifically to these texts and so only tentatively to the larger genres of science fiction and narrative realism, which are each vast and diverse. Since they aren’t included in the actual journal publication, I can post them here unabridged. I responded to a range of excellent comments last week, and, to continue that conversation, I am including below the four texts that Dan and I used in the experiment. I wasn’t expecting the post to draw attention beyond my usual readers, but it quickly became the third most viewed in this blog’s six-year history. I titled the post “Science Fiction Makes You Stupid,” but a more accurate title would have been: “Readers Who Are Stupid Enough to be Biased Against Science Fiction Read Science Fiction Stupidly.” Realism) Manipulation Decreases Inference Effort, Reading Comprehension, and Perceptions of Literary Merit,” which I co-wrote with cognitive psychologist Dan Johnson and is newly published by the journal Scientific Study of Literature. Two weeks ago I posted an excerpt of my essay “ The Genre Effect: A Science Fiction (vs.
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