Point-driven understanding: Pragmatic and cognitive dimensions of literary reading

Listeners generally attempt to understand oral conversational stories by figuring out what the narrator is ‘getting at’; their understanding is point-driven in this sense. Analogously, a form of reading in which readers expect to be able to impute motives to authors may also be called point-driven; it is a mode that seems especially useful for reading so-called ‘literary’ texts. Point-driven reading is conceptually distinguishable from story-driven and information-driven types. We argue that each type is asociated with a number of cognitive strategies, with point-driven reading, specifically, characterized by coherence, narrative surface, and transactional strategies. Using a modern short story, we illustrate how point-driven readings might be differentiated from other kinds. An advantage of this conceptualization is that it enables one to generate empirically testable hypotheses about literary reading; we suggest a number of such hypotheses and methods of testing them.