| |
Current research
(See
Writing and Publications for details of my
doctoral thesis)
I am
currently investigating how cognitive science can enrich literary criticism, investigating
different forms of ‘cognitive realism’ in a selection of French and German texts
from the Realist and Modernist periods. I am exploring how the fictional texts
evoke areas of cognition such as memory, attention, agency, and emotion, and how
these evocations determine the connections which are established with the
reader’s own cognitive faculties, through correspondence with or deviation
from how these faculties actually operate. Brief and extended outlines of my
post-doctoral research can be found below.
In
tandem with my primary research, I am collaborating with Dr Karin Kukkonen
and Professor Kate Nation on a project entitled
Eye Movements in
Literary Reading, in which we use eye-tracking measures to
investigate readers’ responses to certain common devices in literary texts
by Virginia Woolf and Ian Fleming.
1. Brief
research outline:
How do
words on a page trigger our imaginations? Does a more ‘realistic’ text do so
more effectively? My research into the ‘Kafkaesque’ reading experience has
yielded an approach to literary criticism that seeks to provide precise and generalisable answers to these questions. In particular, my research has
yielded the insight that whereas traditional nineteenth-century literary Realism
assumes we build up detailed mental ‘pictures’ of the world around us, and hence
that texts which evoke fictional worlds can best do so by means of verbally
painted pictures, cognitive science has shown that this is not so. Texts that
do not provide such pictorial detail, such as Kafka’s, are therefore more
‘cognitively realistic’ in a perceptual sense. The term ‘cognitive realism’ can
be broadened to denote how a text directly engages any number of specific
cognitive processes of the reader, and provides a framework within which to
explore aspects of cognition as evoked in the fiction and engaged in the
reader. These include vision and imagination, memory, attention, agency, and
emotion. I will study the connections between text and cognition in a selection
of French and German literary texts, each of which is generally categorised
within one or other of the contrastive and chronologically juxtaposed
‘movements’ of Realism and Modernism. I will seek to establish what forms of
cognitive realism are manifested by Realist and by Modernist prose fiction. I
will also carry out complementary empirical work to deepen our understanding of
how real readers respond to ‘Realist’ and ‘Modernist’ works of fiction, as they
exemplify different sorts of cognitive realism. I propose thus to apply our
most advanced understanding of perception and cognition directly to great
examples of literary fiction, taking the fundaments of science and literature
and building them into a new discipline that employs and enriches both.
2.
Extended research description:
What makes a text ‘realistic’? We tend to
think that the most realistic narratives are those which most accurately and
comprehensively imitate the fluid linearity of our experience of the external
world, causing us vividly to imagine, and powerfully to feel, the fictional
world. But perceptual experience is not linear, cumulative, more or less
complete. There is no single ‘stream of consciousness’ (Blackmore, 2003;
Dennett, 1991; James, 1890). Seeing is not a process of constructing internal
representations of the world, any more than imagining is a process of
constructing pictures in the head (Pylyshyn, 2003). Seeing and imagining are
fundamentally enactive processes (O’Regan and Noë, 2001; Thomas, 1999); neither
consists in linear, cumulative progress towards a representational endpoint.
Realism, then, should not be about painting
maximally detailed verbal pictures of a perceptible fictional world, although
this is the basic principle by which the literary tradition of Realism
generally operates (Bucher et al., 1975; Plumpe, 2003). A more cognitively
orientated realism is achieved by texts that challenge the illusions of
narrative linearity which we retrospectively impose on experience (Jaynes,
1976), and which instead tap into the fundamental processes by which we see and
imagine: enactive, non-pictorial processes of ongoing skilful exploration (Noë,
2006). When a fictional world is evoked through the perceptual enaction of it (Noë,
2004) the character sees, and we fluidly imagine, a world that is never given
all at once, but always emerges when looked for, just in time (Rensink, 2000).
A scientifically informed exploration of how
vision, imagination, and consciousness are involved in the reading process
therefore yields a new way of discussing the ‘realism’ of fictional texts.
In my thesis I focused on the enactive continuum between vision and imagination,
touching on questions of consciousness; I will now expand my investigation of
consciousness studies and cognitive science to find what sorts of ‘cognitive
realism’ are manifested by texts in the ‘Realist’ tradition (approximately
1830-1900) and from the period generally characterised as ‘Modernist’
(approximately 1900-1940).
In this research project, I will broaden my
focus from the German tradition to include also French literature, using a
selection of modern fictional prose texts by canonical authors. This will
permit my research to make claims about ‘European’ Realism and Modernism that
would not be sustainable on the basis of the idiosyncrasies of the German
tradition alone. Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert in the French tradition, and
Büchner, Storm, and Fontane in the German will represent Realism (including
German ‘Poetic Realism’); Modernism will be represented by Proust, Gide, and
Beckett, and Thomas Mann, Benn, and Hesse. In parallel with close reading of
prose texts by these authors, I will investigate how changing understanding of
imagination and cognition contemporary to these authors’ writing may influence
or correlate with their methods of literary evocation and readers’ reception of
them. I will consider, further, how trends in critical reception of these
authors can be illuminated and complemented by exploration of the texts’ various
forms of cognitive realism. Thus I will seek fuller understanding of the many
factors that combine to determine and vary the perceptual, imaginal, cognitive,
and emotional experience of reading. I will ultimately draw conclusions about
the contrasting or comparable ways in which literature currently classified as
Realist or Modernist cognitively engages its readers.
Vision research and consciousness studies are
currently burgeoning disciplines, in which insights from psychology, cognitive
science, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind are furthering our understanding
of what it means to experience the world around us (Thomas, 1999; 2003). In the
first year, I will investigate specific areas within the discipline of
consciousness studies, such as attention (Pashler, 1998; Wright and Ward, 2008),
memory (Baddeley, 1999 and 2007), and agency (Claxton, 1986; Libet, 1985, 1999;
Wegner, 2002), and including the history of inquiry into these areas. I will
relate these to the processes of reading and imagining induced by specific
elements of the texts in question. This investigation will be informed by
preliminary close reading of a selection of texts by the chosen authors, and
critical reception of them, yielding a checklist of different evocations of
various aspects of perception, cognition, and emotion. The psychology of
mindfulness, as it enriches cognitive science (Austin, 1998; Claxton (ed.),
1986; Pickering, 1997; Varela et al., 1991), will guide further exploration of
the nature of first-person experience, and how sensory and imaginative
experience interact.
Emotional response is fundamental to the
reading experience, but is a notoriously elusive object of theoretical and
empirical investigation. My research will also ask precisely how literary texts
emotionally engage us, basing my inquiry (in the second year) on evidence from
the selected primary texts in conjunction with research into the psychology of
emotion (Frijda, 1986), discourse processing (Hogan, 2003; van den Broek et al.,
1996, 1999), and affective cognition (Burke, 2008). This will help further
illuminate readers’ subjective responses to fictional texts, in particular their
emotional engagement with fictional characters’ experiences. Finally, the
‘psychology of reading’ (Underwood and Batt, 1996), which builds on research
into the visual text-processing aspects of reading to explore wider cognitive
and emotional responses, will help ground reading experiences in the specifics
of text-processing. This could result in revealing and precise conclusions
regarding cause and effect in reading.
Scientifically informed literary criticism
can offer psychologically sensitive interpretations of texts, and also permits
of progress towards experimental corroboration or falsification: it yields
testable hypotheses about how words on the page affect readers’ experiences of
fictional worlds. My revealing preliminary study of readers’ responses to
Kafka’s writing has suggested possibilities for a more ambitious programme of
empirical reader-response research, possibly comparing two authors explored in
theoretical terms, one from each ‘movement’. This detailed inquiry, in the
third year, into how readers really respond to texts, building on empirical work
in the emergent discipline of cognitive literary studies (Gerrig; Goetz and
Sadoski; Miall and Kuiken), will derive from and in turn revise or refine the
theoretical insights. The project lends itself to the publication of journal
articles on each of the connected but self-sufficient areas of inquiry.
My
starting point is that how a text engages a reader’s cognitive processes
determines how the reader experiences the reality evoked by the text. Exploring, defining, and testing the nature and implications of the cognitive
realisms of ‘Realist’ literature in combination and contrast to those of
‘Modernist’ literature will be the goal of my research.
|