36# A new study employing my difficulty model

I have fond memories of the Journal of Literary Semantics (JLS), for it was there that a series of articles by Iris Yaron on poetic difficulty appeared in 2002, 2003 and 2008, inspiring me to write a doctoral thesis on this very topic from 2011 to 2015. In 2013, JLS published my first article on this topic (I would then published two other works: an empirical study on Language and Literature in 2017, and a Palgrave monograph in 2019: see RESEARCH/RICERCA – DAVIDE CASTIGLIONE).

Now this academic relay race has resumed or – if you prefer another metaphor – its underground stream has just resurfaced: last week, a new article (see also here on Semantic Scholar to access the abstract and list of references) by Peter Harvey has been published that builds on my difficulty checklist, adapting it and expanding it to account for challenging fictional prose (exemplified by Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison). Unsurprisingly, the most significant additions to my model concern the various techniques of speech and thought presentation (e.g., free indirect style, embedded viewpoints) that feature much more prominently in prose fiction than in poetry.

It’s hard to convey the extent of the fulfillment I felt in seeing my academic work treated as the main framework and theoretical basis for the first time, and even more so considering that almost a decade has elapsed since my 2017 article (on which this 2026 article largely builds) appeared. Academic vanity aside, this means that if a work is rigorous and innovative enough, if you really put your heart into it (and not just your brain!), then its life is not necessarily constrained by its immediate (in)visibility. Quite the opposite: as many late bloomers, it acquires new intellectual life once the passing of time has allowed its contribution to be fully appreciated by others (and I say this despite there are things I’d now criticise of my past work – especially its attempt at being so fine-grained that the forest is often missed for the trees).