Cognitive-affective approaches to multimodal narratives

2014

Projections, 2010

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2015

Gestalt Theory, 2019

The study of literature and arts in general has been recently enriched by the changes in the heuristic paradigms regarding the very essence of the cognitive processes implied by the artistic experience. In the frame of the epistemological changes occurred in the past decades, since the so-called "neuro-turn" and the definition of an "epistemology based on the brain" (see Edelman, 2007), the linkage of humanities, cognitive studies and neuroscience has put at stake the need of inquiring about arts and literature in a transdisciplinary perspective, in order to get new insights into how our mindbrain fulfils the mysterious process of imagining a fictional world, constructing new meanings out of this experience, and to develop a methodology to newly interpret arts and the literary text. In this perspective, the main focus of literature is human nature and the involved relationship among the human mind, the cognitive processes of the brain and the world. As Turner (1996) claimed years ago, literary criticism needs to take into account new results in the field of cognitive science and neurosciences, since only through the intertwining of art and cognitive neuroscientific research it will be possible to acquire innovative perspectives in the study of the human mind and arts. Narration-particularly literary narration-is the oldest and one of the most sophisticated products of the human mind; it therefore mirrors many of its more relevant processes. The brain processes that normally underlie the interaction of the human being with the world are reflected forcefully and in condensed manner especially in art and literature. Cognitive acts make use of narrative and creative processes, as reaffirmed in the past decades by several scholars, among them by Gibbs (1994), overcoming the classical distinction between usual thought, referred to action in the world, and the narrative literary one, referred to counterfactual worlds (Turner, 1996). Therefore, it seems inadequate to deal with a specific aesthetic phenomenon without considering the complexity in which it is rooted, that is to say the connection between the brain and its activity, and what such activity has produced and is nourished by-body, environment,

In this paper, I consider the implications of engaging narratives with as many of one’s senses as is possible, what I call ‘reading polyaesthesially.’ Starting from the notion that narrative representations are not unlike viewed images, I apply Helene Intraub’s experimentally supported ideas of ‘boundary extension’ in recollected and recreated images to the act of engaging with narratives, whether reading, hearing, or viewing. This approach to the affective aspects of ‘reading’—in the expanded sense of that term—is augmented and supported by Sven Birkerts’ concept of ‘depth of field in reading’ by which he concludes that in reading we ‘hear’ but do so without aural stimulation. A logical and not unreasonable extension of Birkerts’ ideas suggests that we also ‘see’ without visual stimulation, ‘smell’ without olfactory stimulation, and so on. Consequently, it is not unexpected that when we engage narratives with all of our senses in play our recollections are somehow larger than the actual narratives, as ‘texts.’ After considering readers’ (en)vision(ing) in response to narrative description, I move on to considerations of temporal depth and symbolic depth, in which the abundance of narrative signage may induce a particular experience. I end by suggesting that the richness of our experience of narrative is a function of ‘boundary’ extension, which varies directly with the senses engaged by and with a narrative. This paper is supported by and extends earlier work on ‘narrative focus’ and ‘narrative depth of field.’ Examples from the works of Conrad, Hemingway, and Woolf support my discussion.

International Research in Higher Education, 2016

2015

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xiv + 324. ISBN 9781107017566 (hbk). Reviewed by: Louise Nuttall, University of Nottingham, UK

Poetics Today, 2002

The cognitive turn in the humanities is an aspect of a more general cognitive turn taking place in the contemporary study of human beings. Because it interacts with cognitive neuroscience, it can seem unfamiliar to students of the humanities, but in fact it draws much of its content, many of its central research questions, and many of its methods from traditions of the humanities as old as classical rhetoric. Its purpose in combining old and new, the humanities and the sciences, poetics and cognitive neurobiology is not to create an academic hybrid but instead to invent a practical, sustainable, intelligible, intellectually coherent paradigm for answering basic and recurring questions about the cognitive instruments of art, language, and literature.