Influence of Deautomatization on the Narrative Tension and the Enjoyment Experience of Audiovisual Stories

Abstract

Literary theory has investigated what it is in the text that constitutes its literariness. From this text-oriented approach, it has been postulated that deautomatization is a core textual mechanism to ensure that the text produces aesthetic effects on the reader. On the other hand, from a reader-oriented approach, psychology and communication have evaluated these effects from the point of view of entertainment theory. The per-spectives have evolved in parallel. However, both perspectives are complementary and necessary for under-standing the complex phenomenon of the production and consumption of narratives. This research, adopting a perspective at the intersection between text-oriented and reader-oriented approaches, has investigated the functional relationship between the textual mechanisms of deautomatization and the enjoyment response. We created an audiovisual story with two versions, one automatized and the other deautomatized, and pre-sented it to two groups of participants (N = 305). The results confirm the hypothesis which posits that deau-tomatization produces an experience of estrangement that makes the reader direct attention toward the form. In this process, the world of the text and the world of the reader are brought together, which manifests as a cognitive and emotional phenomenon of narrative tension that seeks to resolve the disequilibrium created. When the reader resolves the estrangement, they experience enjoyment. Therefore, deautomatization is a tex-tual mechanism capable of inducing narrative tension and enjoyment. With this empirical support, the con-temporary appeal of the concept of deautomatization takes on renewed relevance for the psychology of aesthetics and narrative art.