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Beschreibungen/Notizen
Literary theorists have developed tools to analyze the kind and degree of a narrator's presence in narration. The analytical concepts mostly assume effects of ‘narrative distance’ on the readers; however, empirical evidence is still very rare. This article presents two identically constructed experimental studies testing hypotheses about effects of narrative distance on readers' feelings of involvement, appreciation, and perception of story characters' emotional states. Short stories by Borges and Chekhov were presented to two reader groups differing in reading experience. Half the readers received the original text which contains a ‘visible’ narrator, the other half read a manipulated version in which the narrator's presence was reduced. All informants were given the same set of scales to indicate feelings of involvement and appreciation and a set of schales to rate the characters' emotional states. The main results were that narrative distance — surprisingly — did not exert a significant influence on the readers' involvement. The most convincing differences were found for appreciation: expert readers showed a preference for the original texts, while less experienced readers preferred the simpler manipulated versions. A connection was found between the text's attractiveness and feelings of sympathy and understanding for the main character. Contrary to the expectation, however, the correlation was highest for the experienced readers. Regression analysis indicated ‘sympathy for the main character‘ as an important predictor for aesthetic appreciation in experienced, but not in unexperienced readers. This outcome was interpreted as an indication of qualitative development in ‘aesthetic judgment’: expert readers are supposedly more aware of how they represent the story characters, as well as of their own feelings of sympathy and understanding.