In this small essay, I will reflect on Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth's arguments on the decline of educational professionalism in the United States. The purpose is to consider this loss of professionalism, and I will consider it in light of the arts and humanities in the Danish educational debate. Two reflections are presented: first, the…

An initial study (Ram 1) in Denmark in 1970 determined whether methods could be developed to assess the effect of textual passages on readers' experiences of a short story. Subjects, 717 Danish secondary students, were given a questionnaire to check on the effect of specific auctorial techniques and to chart readers' attitudes and the way they…

Outlined in this paper are the plans for three additional pilot studies to be conducted in Denmark as part of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project. The project is concerned with the collective versus the individual nature of reader response to literature and the three pilot studies are: introspection studies during the reading,…

This article argues that discussions of folktales would be more meaningful if their brief existence as "ideal tales" in a narrative contract could be accepted. The article focuses on the concept of a folktale as an object of experience and of study, by a sustained discussion and charting of the tortuous ways by which so-called folktales…

Assembled in the course of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, which examined the nature of collective and individual response to fairytale literature, this bibliography cites materials pertinent to response assessment. Listed by author, the subjects of the approximately 150 titles include language and meaning, poetics, literary…

The theoretical background of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project is discussed in this paper. The paper first offers support for the working hypotheses of the Fairytale Project, which was designed to determine (1) if there are aesthetic principles that are universal and that guide the reader's experience of literary works; (2)…

This article describes a series of Scandinavian studies in reader response from 1968 to 1990. Studies chronologically discussed in the article are: (1) "Rhythm in Poetry"; (2) "The Esthetic Experience"; (3) "Meaning in Literary Texts"; (4) "Tension"; (5) the "Ram" study; (6) the…

The reader is a component part of the only form of a text which can be discussed meaningfully as a message. As readers with different linguistic backgrounds experience texts in fusions with their own personalities and their own social and cultural backgrounds, these dynamic texts differ in different languages. Accordingly, intranslatability exists…

This paper briefly reviews the state of the art in reader response research with special reference to the Danish studies in reader responses. The paper then proceeds to a discussion of a number of methodological problems inherent in setting up questions for cross-cultural (and international) studies in general, and for reader response studies in…

As part of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project concerning the nature of response to literature, this paper discusses the rationale, principles, and actual translation procedures behind nine fairytales considered for use in the study. Various sections of the report discuss (1) the texts to be chosen, including their authenticity,…

As part of the Folktale project, which explores similarities and dissimilarities in the response to literature from and in different cultures, advanced undergraduate students in classes on literary interpretation or literary history analyzed a Danish, a Greenlandic, and a Turkish folk tale. Two male and two female students in classes on literary…

This article discusses editorial "filters" in folktales, specifically the changes ("orientations") which editors deliberately impose on a tale because they want to reach a specific audience. A case in point is the tale called "Allerleirauh," in the Grimm collection, which not only is highly illustrative of editorial…

Prepared as part of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, this paper describes the design of a study intended to discover: (1) if there are aesthetic principles that are universal and that guide readers' experiences of works of literature; (2) whether the principles are built into people by their cultural, economic, and social…

This paper describes the folkloristic and literary theories centered on the traditional narrative that have a bearing on the Turko-Danish Fairytale Project. These theories were incorporated into the Fairytale Project because traditional prose tales (of which the fairy tale is one of the most prominent forms) are a genre that exists in both oral…

Summaries of the Danish internal reports of the essay studies, the introspection studies, and the literary analyses that are part of the larger interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project concerning the collective versus the individual nature of the response to literature are presented in this report. Various sections of the five papers…