Please tell us about your research at LCE, Ana.
My interest in approaching literature from a cognitive angle is twofold: on the one hand, I’m interested in how an aesthetic text can convey both meaning and mood and engage readers in experiencing emotional states e.g. of anticipation, fear, excitement, or sorrow. How we go from symbols on a page to knowledge and emotional experience, is often less considered than the knowledge hence achieved or the quality of that emotional response, which can be studied on its own. The second broad interest concerns the role of literature for social cognition. If reading literature changes minds (and hearts), what are the consequences of categorizing literary texts in good or bad, as to the impact they may produce in whoever reads them? Adding to these two questions, one challenge: considering the fast changes in our reading ability (e.g. shorter attention spans, shallow perception, permanent shifts, digitalization), what role is still left to literature? What can literature still do that the manifold ways and means by which we acquire knowledge, get entertained, or experience emotion, cannot?
Within this broad frame, I am interested in the phenomenon of empathy as we experience it through reading fiction. If empathy is the experience of feeling with, or even into another self, how is this triggered by a text we read alone, in silence, far from all devices and strategies to guide our emotional experience such as light and shade in photography, or music and movement in film? How is it that a text we know is fictional can nonetheless trigger an actual, very real emotional response? More specifically, I am interested in negative emotional responses, such as empathizing with a morally dubious character, or feeling into a character or narrator whose cognition is dissonant from what we expect, as often happens with narrators of the Nouveau Roman. I think a link to this lies in the narrating voice. This is an established category in literary studies, but the cognitive approach to literature widens the scope: what voice, whose voice do we perceive when we read narrative fiction?
What is your favourite kind of reading experience? Are there any specific literary works that you would like to recommend to us?
I enjoy reading fiction that explores boundaries and helps me seeing life from unexpected angles. These could be, for example, revisiting a historical period from the less familiar perspective of a character: Jackie Thomae's Brüder tells the story of two Afro-German brothers who experience two very different lives, despite sharing a similar beginning, which is related with African presence in former GDR. This topic has recently gained visibility in public discourse and in the arts (e.g. Ines Johnson-Spain, Becoming Black). Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen deals with the issue of taking an improbable perspective to come to terms with the matters of one’s own life: a retired professor encounters by chance a group of asylum seekers in Berlin and in the precariousness of their situation questions his own condition. This novel, as the title suggests, also experiments with language, which is something I very much appreciate in literature, given my background in cognitive linguistics: words are intentional and they carry meaning beyond reference.
I also appreciate books that challenge our categorization: A novel? A drama? Philip Roth’s Deception or more recent texts such as Senthuran Varatharajah: Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen waive a narrator altogether and thus come closer to a play. The extreme opposite of this would be a text like Peter Weiss’ Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers, a narrative devoid of story, where the narrating voice is all there is. All these texts certainly spiked my interest in the issues of empathy and narrating voice I mentioned.
During my stay at LCE I hope to come across Norwegian literary voices (in translation, for now). Jon Fosse’s Morning and Evening has been a good start.