Projects

 

ACCELS hosts a variety of projects that contribute to the investigation of reception processes on the basis of cognitive approaches and with the help of qualitative and quantitative empirical methods.

The central research concept that connects all projects is our own, reader-oriented understanding of the experientiality of literature: Both on the aesthetic level and on the level of the fictional worlds they create, texts trigger a variety of cognitive and emotional processes in readers, who can experience an absorption into the storyworld, activate and potentially restructure their experiential background.

ARTCogLit - Aachen Research Team Cognitive Literary Studies

The recently founded Aachen Research Team Cognitive Literary Studies, ARTCogLit for short, is dedicated to cognitive literature and combines it with empirical approaches.

T-Rex - triggers of emotions and intensive reading experiences

A cognitive and empirical research program on literature reception

E-LiLi - Empirical Linguistics and Literary Studies

An Innovative Research Module in the Master's Programme in Literature and Linguistics

These projects under the roof of ACCELS investigate these factors, using, to varying degrees, input from cognitive psychology, cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics, literary theory, and cultural studies. They also combine methods of text analysis with models from cognitive reception theory and empirical studies of literary reception. We use a range of methods, including those from Digital Humanities, in particular corpus-linguistic analysis, and various forms of interviews and questionnaires, as well as body-centered methods such as eye tracking, and gesture analysis. On a general level, we understand literary reception to be the interface between individual meaning-making and cultural signification.