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BookDOI

The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach

31 Jan 2014-Vol. 43
TL;DR: The authors studied the dynamics underlying readers' responses to narrative through close readings of literary texts and theoretical discussion in ways that shed light on the deep connection between narrative, literary fiction, and human experience.
Abstract: How do readers experience literary narrative? Drawing on narrative theory, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind, this book offers a principled account of the dynamics underlying readers' responses to narrative Through its interdisciplinary approach, this study combines close readings of literary texts and theoretical discussion in ways that shed light on the deep connection between narrative, literary fiction, and human experience
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Journal ArticleDOI
Abstract: By way of imaginative engagements with animal life, literature seems ideally positioned to address the gap between scientific knowledge and “what it is like” (in Thomas Nagel’s phrase) to be an animal. Yet my article argues that the differences between literary representations of animal experience and scientific methods for studying nonhuman consciousness should not be overlooked. No matter how plausible they are, literature’s animal phenomenologies play by hermeneutic—not scientific—rules. A 1927 short story by Italo Svevo, “Argo and His Master,” helps me interrogate the power as well as the limitations of literary figurations of nonhuman experience.

10 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Home as discussed by the authors is a one-man game where players wake up in a deserted house, wondering how they ended up there, and soon stumble on a dead body lying on the floor.
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

9 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
10 Sep 2020
TL;DR: This article argued that previous research on the experience of reading literary journalism has predominantly been focused on the ideal, implied and/or interpellated reader, and pointed out that the qualitative differences between reading fiction and non-fiction are usually theoretical or based on close readings where the analyses are projected on to a generalised readership.
Abstract: This paper contends that previous research on the experience of reading literary journalism has predominantly been focused on the experience of the ideal, implied and/or interpellated reader. Scholarly discussions about the qualitative differences between reading fiction and non-fiction are usually theoretical or based on close readings where the analyses are projected on to a generalised readership. However, recent developments in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive narratology are opening avenues for qualitative and quantitative research into the experience of reading literary journalism. This article takes some tentative steps towards exploring the nature of “experientiality” for readers by asking questions of emerging research in order to further articulate the “power” of narrative non-fiction.

9 citations


Cites background from "The Experientiality of Narrative: A..."

  • ...Keen does acknowledge “more affectively-charged narrative forms” including histories, but does not acknowledge journalism as a possible site for narrativity or experientiality—“the situated, embodied quality of readers’ engagement with stories” (Caracciolo, 2014, p. 4)....

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  • ...Caracciolo’s approach emphasises interaction over representation as a way of conceptualising narrative, as he argues for a “‘more-than-representationalist’ position when it comes to theorizing story-driven experiences” (Caracciolo, 2014, p. 10)....

    [...]

  • ...Clearly these two domains are interdependent, but the distinction is useful to define “the situated, embodied quality of readers’ engagement with stories” that is this article’s focus (Caracciolo, 2014, p. 4)....

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  • ...is this article’s focus (Caracciolo, 2014, p. 4). Caracciolo’s approach emphasises interaction over representation as a way of conceptualising narrative, as he argues for a “‘more-than-representationalist’ position when it comes to theorizing story-driven experiences” (Caracciolo, 2014, p. 10). Indeed, some of the most promising advances in research on the effects of narrative on the reader are those in cognitive neuroscience which are just beginning to explore a range of effects of narrative elements on readers. But before surveying some interesting recent findings and their possible connection to literary journalism, it is important to take a brief look at some historical scholarship on this topic. The effects of reading literary journalism have been a topic of much scholarly discussion from the 1970s onwards, but scholarship has primarily focused on the experience of the ideal, implied and/or interpellated reader. Scholars such as John Hollowell (1977), John Hellman (1981), Ronald Weber (1974, 1985), Barbara Foley (1986) and Phyllis Frus (1994) all made significant contributions to the theory and practice of literary journalism; each also makes claims about the experience of reading in abstracted and idealized ways....

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Journal ArticleDOI
Marco Bernini1
26 Nov 2018
TL;DR: In this article, an interdisciplinary theory of what it will call "innerscapes" is presented, which are artefactual representations of the mind as a spatially extended world.
Abstract: The essay presents an interdisciplinary theory of what it will call “innerscapes”: artefactual representations of the mind as a spatially extended world. By bringing examples of innerscapes from literature (Kafka’s short story The Bridge), radio plays (Samuel Beckett’s Embers), and a creative documentary about auditory-verbal hallucinations (a voice-hearer’s short film, Adam + 1), it suggests that these spatial renditions of the mind are constructed by transforming the quasi-perceptual elements of inner experience into affording ecologies. In so doing, they enable an enactive exploration of inner worlds as navigable environments. The resulting storyworlds display features that resemble the logic and ontology of dreams. Cognitive research on dreams and cartographical studies of the personal geographies of dreamscapes will thus inform the understanding of what innerscapes are, do and can do if used, as the essay argues they should be, as enhancing devices for what Jesse Butler has called ‘extended introspection” (2013: 95).

8 citations


Cites background from "The Experientiality of Narrative: A..."

  • ...…enactive and situated aspects, the beginning of the story magnifies the experientiality (i. e., the experiencing consciousness; see Fludernik 1996, 15–19; Caracciolo 2014) of these quasiperceptual inner emotions, images and thoughts over their narrativity (i. e., events and causal chains)....

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