Talking about ‘An Accommodation’: The implications of discussion group data for community engagement and pedagogy

Abstract

Community engagement is an important area of development both generally in Higher Education English departments and also in the disciplines of stylistics and cognitive poetics. Though claiming to be concerned with ‘real readers reading literature in the real world’ (Stockwell, 2002: 8), cognitive poetic and stylistic analyses could be biased towards the reading practices of academics (Miall, 2006). As a result, it is becoming increasingly popular for stylisticians to use empirical methods to investigate readers other than the analyst in their discussion of literary effect (e.g. Burke, 2010; Stockwell, 2009; Whiteley, 2011). This article examines extracts from group discussion data collected as part of the ‘Creative Writing in the Community’ project at the University of Sheffield. Five groups of readers were recorded discussing poems by contemporary British poet Simon Armitage. The groups consisted of cognitive poetic researchers, first-year undergraduate English students, and local reading groups respectively. I examine the style and content of their discussions in the light of existing research into the distinctions between ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’ readers, and consider what the similarities and differences between their discourse could signal for university departments’ engagement with readers both within and outside of the classroom.