READ-IT related Symposium: “Pleasures and Displeasures of Reading”, 25-28 July 2018

Chloé Aubry (Le Mans University) and Cora Krömer (Le Mans University and Saarland University) co-organized the symposium “Pleasures and Displeasures of Reading” at the 16th Conference of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media (IGEL) on 25-28 July 2018 at University of Stavanger, Norway. Two other PhD students, Kristina Hauer (University of Copenhagen and University College Copenhagen) and Ilona Savolainen (University of Tampere), were co-presenters on the panel.

Chloé Aubry presented the paper “The form of the book: a contribution to the pleasure of reading? An investigation with readers on a corpus of European artists’ printed books (1990-2018)” and talked about her observations and interviews with readers. She concentrated especially on the perception of pleasure and displeasure provoked by the different senses (sight, touch, hearing, smelling) involved in the reading experience of this particular form of books.

Cora Krömer (chair) presented the paper “Reading (dis)pleasure in the digital age: reading experiences shared in an online reading community” and talked about the possibilities and difficulties to research terms indicating pleasure or displeasure in a sample of francophone online book reviews via text mining, classify the obtained terms and confront the results with notions and concepts of reading theories.

Flyers for the READ-IT project were distributed and the project was presented during several informal discussions.

Conference Website: http://igel2018.no

International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media Website: https://sites.google.com/igelassoc.org/igel2018/home