Staffan Thorson, Beata Agrell, Cecilia Alvstad, Andrea Castro, Sonia Lagerwall Göteborg University Naturalization, Desautomatization, and Estrangement: Problems of Literary Reception and Cognition in Academic Teaching Introduction This paper will present the outline of a project that started in Januari 2004 at Göteborg University. The research group of eight persons has its focus on how literary fiction is used in academic teaching situations at the departments of Comparative Literature and Modern Languages. The issue to be investigated is how to teach the art of reading literature as literature—literary artefacts—and not only as information of cultural habits, exposition of ideological themes, or mediation of educating messages. One of our presumptions is the idea of the literary text as a process, rather than an object or a product, hovering between recognition and estrangement or defamiliarization. On the one hand the literary text appeals to the reader’s cultural competence of recognizing well-known literary plot-types, motifs and generic variations within the current culture. If this cultural repertoire is alien, recognition fails, the reader becomes estranged, and the uptake of the text fails. Recognition thus seems necessary for a successful reading. On the other hand this immediate recognition means automatizing the reading process and naturalizing the text to the price of losing the surplus of meaning generated by literary devices. Therefore estrangement is also used as a necessary literary device as Victor Schklovsky (1988) has argued. Literary estrangement means breaking the reader’s horizon of expectations and obstructing the reading, but it also means pointing to a new frame of reference and alternative ways of seeing and understanding the text. Thus, literary estrangement both prevents spontaneous reading and promotes an attentive reading with new dimensions of perceiving and – most important – reflecting on the text and the problematics displayed. In order to explore these processes we want to study not only lingustic texts but also visual texts, that is pictures, and their potential in literary teaching situations. This implies a partly semiotic approach. One of our hypotheses is that verbal and visual texts might elucidate and promote reflection on each other’s way of producing meaning and significance. In our project we will study the reception two-way: partly in a textual perspective, partly in real readers’ perspective. Our main outlook combines reception theory, reader response theory and translation theory. Our paper will discuss five approaches: 1. the interaction between student-reader and the text, 2. the reception-structure of the text and (un)historical ways of reading, and 3. the reception of translated literature. 4. visual texts in literary reception 5. reception through academic practices