Introduction to New Work in the Empirical Study of Literature and Culture

In order to understand literature, rather than looking only at the surface of the texts, it is more useful to look at ourselves as readers. Empirical research on texts studies human behavior in producing, distributing and using texts. Traditionally, literary studies proposed rules of interpretation, rather than trying to understand empirically observable events, while empirical observation shows that the same texts can generate different effects in different times and with different readers. Even the permanence in time depends on a sufficient amount of polyvalence, that makes it possible for a text to be read differently in different historical periods. In times of great contacts between different cultures, it is very easy to see that the same texts can be read differently. Meanings are not entities residing in texts, but they are the result of socioculturally oriented cognitive operations taking place in contexts.