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Curiosity Without Curiosity: Challenging an Absurdity in the Structural Affect Theory
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Curiosity Without Curiosity: Challenging an Absurdity in the Structural Affect Theory
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Journal Article
Curiosity Without Curiosity: Challenging an Absurdity in the Structural Affect Theory
2025
Overview
Placing the outcome at the beginning of a story before the reasoning for that outcome does not necessarily make the reader curious, contrary to what some structural affect theorists posit. Using reader-response theory, this article explores six instances drawn from Thousand and One Nights and The Odyssey where the outcome appears at the beginning and the details leading up to that outcome are later explained. The main difference between these two in terms of generating curiosity in the reader through structural manipulation is that the author of The Odyssey waits an unreasonably long time before addressing the situation again, with the author distracting the reader with unnecessary side stories in the interim. The author of Thousand and One Nights, on the other hand, stays focused on the situation first raised when stating the outcome. While one might think that such a difference is only a matter of degree, the difference has a significant impact on the reader's experience inasmuch as the approach in Thousand and One Nights generates feelings of actual curiosity in the reader, while that of The Odyssey does not. This article represents a pilot study of how readers react to literature, based on the reader-response theory, with a focus on tension between the different notions of curiosity. In essence, the difference in these two types of curiosity resembles the difference between the efferent stance and the aesthetic stance of reader-response theory, with the first focusing on the personal experience of the reader, while the second focuses on pure analysis of the text's structure. Keywords: Structural affect theory, curiosity, world literature, reader-response theory
Publisher
Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics
