Michael Burke

Utrecht University | UU · University College Roosevelt

In popularization discourse, insights from academic discourse are recontextualized and reformulated into newsworthy, understandable knowledge for a lay audience. Training in popularization discourse is a relatively new and unexplored research topic. Existing studies in the science communication field suffer from under-utilized baseline assessments...

The question of how and where students read has been a subject of discussion, not least due to the rise of e-reading devices and an increased need for remote learning. Reports in mainstream media often report that there appears to be a decline in traditional ways of reading literature. With this study we test this assumption. We focus on reading me...

Mobile phones are reportedly the most rapidly expanding e-reading device worldwide. However, the embodied, cognitive, and affective implications of smartphone-supported fiction reading for leisure (m-reading) have yet to be investigated empirically. Revisiting the theoretical work of digitization scholar Anne Mangen, we argue that the digital readi...

Exploring Language and Linguistics - edited by Natalie Braber September 2015

Cambridge Core - English Language and Linguistics: General Interest - Exploring Language and Linguistics - edited by Natalie Braber

The means and locations of reading are becoming increasingly significant. This is not only reflected in the academic world but also in the press. This chapter addresses the question of whether the locations and means of reading have changed in the past ten years since the advent of the e-reader. Have the places and manner of reading become more fle...

Deliberations into what makes a literary text persuasive, what seduces readers to continue reading once the act of reading started, is often a combination of (a) what is written (the themes), (b) the order and manner in which the events of the story are presented (the narrative structure and how the text is filtered, and (c) how a story is written...

This book brings together researchers with cognitive-scientific and literary backgrounds to present innovative research in all three variations on the possible interactions between literary studies and cognitive science. The tripartite structure of the volume reflects a more ambitious conception of what cognitive approaches to literature are and co...

Style is an important aspect of literature, and stylistic deviations are sometimes labeled foregrounded, since their manner of expression deviates from the stylistic default. Russian Formalists have claimed that foregrounding increases processing demands and therefore causes slower reading – an effect called retardation. We tested this claim experi...

The objective of this article is to review extant empirical studies of empathy in narrative reading in light of (i) contemporary literary theory, and (ii) neuroscientific studies of empathy, and to discuss how a closer interplay between neuroscience and literary studies may enhance our understanding of empathy in narrative reading. An introduction...

At a meta-level this article seeks to reduce the perceived gap that exists between classical rhetoric on the one hand and linguistics on the other. The linguistic focus here will be on pragmatics and discourse phenomena. In this article, the main tenets of classical rhetoric will first be set out. Thereafter, some examples of productive crossover w...

Scientific Approaches to Literature in Learning Environments is not just about what takes place in literary classrooms. Settings do have a strong influence on student learning both directly and indirectly. These spaces may include the home, the workplace, science centers, libraries, that is, contexts that entail diverse social, physical, psychologi...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0154732.].

Personal pronouns have been shown to influence cognitive perspective taking during comprehension. Studies using single sentences found that 3rd person pronouns facilitate the construction of a mental model from an observer's perspective, whereas 2nd person pronouns support an actor's perspective. The direction of the effect for 1st person pronouns...

Example A: Officina Asmara. (DOCX)

(DOCX)

Example C: River. (DOCX)

(DOCX)

Example B: The Mexican dog. (DOCX)

(Dutch version) (DOCX)

(DOCX)

The mind and brain processes of the literary reading mind are most accurately defined as oceanic: the mind is an ocean. This is the essential premise that I put forward in my book Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (Routledge, 2011).1 The statement is of course a metaphor. It follows in a long line of metaph...

There is a paucity of neuroaesthetic studies on prose fiction. This is in contrast to the very many impressive studies that have been conducted in recent times on the neuroaesthetics of sister arts such as painting, music and dance. Why might this be the case, what are its causes and, of greatest importance, how can it best be resolved? In this art...

Metaphor is a productive domain for L2 and EFL research. Several illuminating pedagogical studies have been conducted into both traditional metaphor and conceptual metaphor (see, for example, Boers, 2000; Chen and Lai, 2011; Deignan et al., 1997; Gao and Meng, 2010; Hall, 2012; Lazar, 1996; Littlemore, 2004; Littlemore and Low, 2006). The same migh...

Much work has been conducted in the social psychological sciences both modelling and predicting how the storage and retrieval of images and words in the mind operate (e.g. Baddeley 1974, 2000, Damasio 1999, Barsalou 1999). The focus has largely been on the interactions between short-term and long-term regions of memory. Such studies have also on oc...

Much work has been conducted in the social psychological sciences both modelling and predicting how the storage and retrieval of images and words in the mind operate (e.g. Baddeley 1974, 2000, Damasio 1999, Barsalou 1999). The focus has largely been on the interactions between short-term and long-term regions of memory. Such studies have also on oc...

This work seeks to chart what happens in the embodied minds of engaged readers when they read literature. Despite the recent stylistic, linguistic, and cognitive advances that have been made in text-processing methodology and practice, very little is known about this cultural-cognitive process and especially about the role that emotion plays. Burk'...

How can we help our students to think clearly and plan wisely so that they can write better stylistics papers? This article evaluates a set of rhetorical pedagogical guidelines that I made for my own undergraduate stylistics students in an attempt to address this question. The article primarily reproduces the guidelines I designed, but also a quest...

In this article, a preliminary investigation will be conducted in order to try to discover whether or not Aristotle’s the Art of Rhetoric can have any relevance as a handbook for the rhetoricians of the twenty-first century and in particular for advertising designers. First, the background against which this question is posed will be set out. Secon...

This article is a pedagogical enquiry into how the recently emerging field of cognitive stylistics might best be taught in the university classroom in order to facilitate maximum learning and understanding. Based on my teaching experiences, and relying on qualitative research in the form of closed and open classes of written responses to a question...