Reading Mutant Narratives : The Bodily Experientiality of Contemporary Ecological Science Fiction
21 Feb 2020-
TL;DR: The work in this paper explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-than-human modes of embodied experience, and traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction, and synthesizes these approaches into a method of close reading, performative enactivism, that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and morethanhuman aspects of readerly engagement.
Abstract: Reading Mutant Narratives explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-thanhuman modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of mutant narratives. Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction. The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied. As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of embodied estrangement. Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, performative enactivism, that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-thanhuman aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose that the brain produces an internal representation of the world, and the activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing, but it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness.
Abstract: Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical, and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The outside world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the governing laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Several lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual \"filling in,\" visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception.
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TL;DR: In this area the world as discussed by the authors, we find the money for why we read fiction theory of mind and the novel lisa zunshine and numerous ebook collections from fictions to scientific research in any way.
Abstract: As recognized, adventure as skillfully as experience about lesson, amusement, as without difficulty as concord can be gotten by just checking out a book why we read fiction theory of mind and the novel lisa zunshine along with it is not directly done, you could tolerate even more not far off from this life, in this area the world. We find the money for you this proper as without difficulty as simple artifice to acquire those all. We manage to pay for why we read fiction theory of mind and the novel lisa zunshine and numerous ebook collections from fictions to scientific research in any way. in the course of them is this why we read fiction theory of mind and the novel lisa zunshine that can be your partner. Page Url
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"Reading Mutant Narratives : The Bod..." refers background in this paper
...…Sheehan 2003) and interdisciplinary work in fields, such as ecocriticism, posthumanism (see Wolfe 2010, Nayar 2014), cognitive literary studies (see Zunshine 2006, Cave 2016, Kukkonen 2019), Darwinist literary studies (see Carroll 2004, Boyd 2009), human animal studies (see Wolfe 2010), and…...
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...In literary studies focusing on cognition and affect, such responses are often discussed in terms of empathy, sympathy, or mind-reading, that is, the mental activity of making sense of the hypothetical minds of others (see Zunshine 2006, Keen 2007, Vermeule 2010)....
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Book•
18 Aug 2015
596 citations
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