Political Literature and the Response of the Reader: Experimental Studies of Interpretation, Imagery, and Criticism

The influence of political literature has often proved elusive to empirical political science, partly because of the subjectivity of literary response, and partly because of social science methods which are largely incapable of dealing with subjective phenomena in a satisfactory way. A distinction is made between the experimental methods of expression which focus on objective responses, and the methods of impression which focus on subjective responses. Experimental methods are then applied to interpretations of Golding's Lord of the Flies, to the effects on imagery of reading Mazlish's In Search of Nixon, and to reactions to Burdick's The Ninth Wave. An illustration is also given of the experimental study of literary response in the single case.