(Inter-)action theoretical text analysis
Already the work with the textual manifestations of cultural phenomena – the text analysis – deals with (inter-) actions, i.e. with acts of aesthetic production. Therefore, the text analysis may not restrict itself to determine historic and textual meanings in the usual philological sense of the word. Text analysis also has to conduct the reconstructive and methodical analysis of mental interaction, more precisely: of acts of initiating a text-reader interaction. These acts go back to the ‘composition subject’ of the text and are directed at the reader – i.e. these acts are inherent in the text. Hence, already the text analysis of the literary and media “works” may not remain historic, descriptive or exegetic in the customary sense (which evidently is not at all an option for the second column of this multi-method approach to cultural research: the empirical interaction research with readers and authors). Rather, text analysis will undertake an (inter-)action theoretical and psychological reconstruction of how the text via its narrative structures is designed to initiate mental responses from its readers.
Therefore, the established methods of text analysis (semantic, syntactic and structural analysis) are supplemented by methods of qualitative-empirical hermeneutics, as for instance sequence by sequence hypothesis formation and interactional analysis. In addition, analytic tools from text-linguistics and narratology are employed. Such procedural innovations are able to provide a better methodological control and thus strengthen the inter-subjective validity of literary studies’ hermeneutic conclusions which in the past have sometimes been accused of being methodically shaky, vague or even pointless.
My two volume ‘Habilitation’-manuscript as well as some more recent publications ["Die Wüste lebt." Murakami (2008 d)] are dedicated to cover the first dimension of Literary and Media Interaction Research: text analysis. In these contributions I laid out the theoretical basis of my model of ‘literary interaction’ and gave analyses of literary texts thus exemplifying my (inter-) action theoretical and psychologically informed approach. A more recent version of the methodological approach which also includes text-linguistics and interdisciplinary narratology, is currently formulated as proposal to be submitted to various sources of research funding.
[Towards a new interdisciplinarity (2008s), Qualitative interaction research]
(inter-)action-theoretical foundation | two-fold concept | qualitative social and interactional research | interdisciplinary narratology |resources of psychology | innovative teaching approaches | post-graduate professional training program | university’s profile of excellence | media societies’ challenges | (inter-)action theoretical text analysis | reconstructive, qualitative analysis of readers’ response | clinical psycho-trauma studies | developmental psychology | qualitative psycho-therapy research