Showing papers by "Marco Caracciolo published in 2015"

Changed by Literature? A Critical Review of Psychological Research on the Effects of Reading Fiction

Abstract: Our article reviews empirical work that claims to provide evidence for the psychological benefits and effects of engaging with literature. Psychological research has considerable potential for addressing the limitations of traditional reader-response theories, especially if such research is conducted in an interdisciplinary context where literary scholars can actively shape the experimental setup. In the first part of the article we consider the work carried out in this connection by psychologist Keith Oatley and literary scholar Frank Hakemulder, calling attention to a number of important issues that, in our view, haven’t been adequately addressed in their empirical studies. In the second part we turn to our more positive arguments, suggesting that the investigation of the psychological effects of reading cannot abstract from phenomenological data based on readers’ own self-reports. Building on philosophical and psychological views of the self as a narrative construction, we argue that the analysis of readers’ life stories may offer important insights into how literary reading can have an impact on readers. The descriptive, qualitative, phenomenological route is less fraught with presuppositions and normative assumptions than Oatley’s and Hakemulder’s approaches, and deserves being taken into serious consideration.

Playing Home: Videogame Experiences between Narrative and Ludic Interests

Abstract: You wake up in a deserted house, wondering how you ended up there, and soon stumble on a dead body lying on the floor. As you explore the house, you discover a gun, newspaper clippings, a list of names—all clues pointing to a serial killer’s scheme to murder several women in the neighboring town. You find out that your wife’s name, Rachel, is on the list too. As you rush home to protect her, you run into a number of clues—a credit card, a driver’s license—suggesting that you have been there before, but you still don’t remember anything. Somehow you manage to find your way through a dark forest and an abandoned factory. When, finally, you reach home, you can choose whether your wife has already left for an unknown destination, or whether she’s dead, her corpse hidden behind a thin divider wall in the basement. You can also choose whether you are the murderer, or whether someone else killed your wife. Finally, you can choose whether the previous events were just a figment of your imagination, or whether they actually happened. No matter what you decide, the story won’t make much sense. This is a brief and somewhat partial summary of Benjamin Rivers’s 2012 adventure videogame Home.2 A one-man creation in a medium where most projects involve dozens of developers, Rivers’s game is as technically simple as it is effective in creating a disturbing atmosphere while challenging the player’s expectations

Bones in Outer Space: Narrative and the Cosmos in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Its Remediations

Abstract: Several million years ago, one of our ape-like ancestors throws a bone into the air; as it falls down, the bone turns into an artificial satellite orbiting around the Earth. In this essay, I argue that this celebrated match cut from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) tackles a major problem for any narrative dealing with cosmic realities: namely, capturing in narrative form a temporal and spatial scale that far exceeds what human beings can normally experience. Using as case study Kubrick’s film and two of its remediations (Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 novel—written in collaboration with Kubrick—and Jack Kirby’s 1976 comic book adaptation), this essay seeks to theorize how the representation of cosmic phenomena may pose a formal challenge to narrative across different media. I build on contemporary approaches to the study of metaphor and embodiment to argue that metaphorical blends and the involvement of audiences’ bodily experience may be used by storytellers to bridge the imaginative gap between the human-scale world and the cosmos. Further, I explore how in my tutor texts the authors’ narrative strategies may become entangled with interpretive meanings concerning humanity’s position in the universe.