Willie van Peer is professor emeritus in the Faculty of Languages and Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. He is a linguist, literary scholar, and one of the founders of the

empirical study of literature The empirical study of literature is an interdisciplinary field of research which includes the psychology, sociology, and philosophy of texts, the contextual study of literature, and the history of reading literary Literature is any collectio ...

. Van Peer has published extensively in his main areas of research:

foregrounding Foregrounding is a concept in literary studies concerning making a linguistic utterance (word, clause, phrase, phoneme, etc.) stand out from the surrounding linguistic context, from given literary traditions or from more general world knowledge. It ...

narratology Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. It is an anglicisation of French ''narratologie'', coined by Tzvetan Todorov (''Grammaire du Décaméron'', 1969). Its theoretical li ...

, literary evaluation, literary theory and

emotion Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiology, neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or suffering, displeasure. There is currently no scientific ...

in literature. Van Peer was Vice President of the

International Association of Empirical Aesthetics The International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA) is a psychological organization founded to scientifically investigate the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic behavior. The group has members in over 25 countries. IAEA was found ...

(IAEA, 1996–1998), Chair of the

Poetics and Linguistics Association The Poetics and Linguistics Association is an international academic association which exists to promote the research, teaching and learning in the study of linguistic style and the language of literature. The Poetics and Linguistics Association i ...

(PALA, 2000–2003) and President of the

International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature The International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media (IGEL: Internationale Gesellschaft für Empirische Literaturwissenschaft) is a learned society with the object of promoting empirical approach to the study of literature and ...

(IGEL, 2004-2006). He was (co-)editor of the series Linguistic Approaches t
Literature
(2000–2010) and founding editor of '' Scientific Study of Literature'' (2011). ''Directions in Empirical Literary Studies'' was published in his honour in 2008. Van Peer’s PhD and the book ''Stylistics and Psychology. Investigations of Foregrounding'' (1986) was the first attempt to

empirically In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological theory that holds that knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empir ...

validate the concept of

, originally developed by the Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists.

REDES project

The Research and Development in Empirical Studies project (REDES, 2002–2012) was inaugurated when Willie van Peer and Frank Hakemulder (

Utrecht University Utrecht University (UU; nl, Universiteit Utrecht, formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2018, it had an enrollme ...

) were invited to teach a summer course at the

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro or University of Brazil (UFRJ; pt, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro or ') is a public research university located in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is the largest federal university in the ...

, Brazil, and came into contact with an on-going project being carried out by Sonia Zyngier following the tenets of

critical pedagogy Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related traditions to the field of education and the study of culture. It insists that issues of social justice and de ...

. They invited Anna Chesnokova (then

Kyiv National Linguistic University Kyiv National Linguistic University ( uk, Київський національний лінгвістичний університет) is a public university located in Kyiv, Ukraine. It was founded in 1948 as Kyiv State Pedagogical Institute ...

) to join. The central goal of the project was to promote an environment where students could become

autonomous In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy, from , ''autonomos'', from αὐτο- ''auto-'' "self" and νόμος ''nomos'', "law", hence when combined understood to mean "one who gives oneself one's ow ...

researchers through

intercultural Cross-cultural communication is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures. Intercultural commu ...

cooperation over the internet and through face to face events. For a decade, the REDES international research group investigated culture, literature, language and media from a

multicultural The term multiculturalism has a range of meanings within the contexts of sociology, political philosophy, and colloquial use. In sociology and in everyday usage, it is a synonym for " ethnic pluralism", with the two terms often used interchang ...

perspective.

Selected works

* * * van Peer, Willie and Anna Chesnokova (2022)
''Experiencing Poetry: A Guidebook to Psychopoetics''
Bloomsbury.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:van Peer, Willie Living people Academic staff of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Empiricists German literature academics Literary scholars 1947 births