18. Images in Narrative Literature: Cognitive Experience and Iconic Moments

Abstract

The present contribution seeks to open up a new approach to intermediality by addressing its cognitive effects and functions. For this purpose it discusses current understandings of cognitive processing during reading, focusing especially on visualization in the reading experience and investigating what textual elements intensify the visual imagination. Intermedial reference is such a textual strategy for eliciting highlighted visualization. The article tests its claims in discussion of literary texts by Michel Houellebecq (The Map and the Territory, 2011) and Robert Coover (A Night at the Movies, 1987). It concludes that both the description of another medium in notional ekphrasis as well as the structural imitation of another medium can serve to unsettle conventional schemata of representation. As a trigger for cognitive participation, intermedial reference influences reception in important ways. On the level of the individual reading process it aids comprehension, memory and emotional response. These individual benefits can also have larger socio-cultural repercussion when they impact the formation of cultural memory. For the purpose of analyzing reception, cognitive models of 'visualization' for the study of narrative texts are a valuable complement to a more traditional hermeneutic understanding of the reader's 'imagination.'

Reading and analysing short story collections: An empirical study of readers' interpretation process of Benni's Il bar sotto il mare

“…Although previous approaches to SSCs have laid bare some crucial mechanisms to deal with the unity-problem, their concepts seem more fit to describe the process of literary analysis than the reading and interpretation process of flesh-and-blood readers, which is a claim more recently advanced by Brosch with regard to literary studies in general (Brosch, 2015: 344–345). Nevertheless, it must be admitted that more complex reader-oriented approaches to literature exist, such as the Anglo-American tradition of reader-response criticism (e.g.…”

Mediaalisuudet ja modaalisuudet

“…Tutkimus voi tällöin olla multimodaalinen analyysi, joka selvittää, miten intermediaaliset esitykset välittävät merkityssisältöjä erilaisin semioottisin keinoin (Elleström 2014;Kress 2009). Toisaalta tarkastelun lähtökohta voi olla kognitiivinen, jolloin huomio keskittyy siihen, millaisin mentaalisin ja kehollisin ärsykkein esitys aktivoi lukijansa tai yleisönsä (Pettersson 2016;Brosch 2015). Molemmissa tapauksissa tulkinta ja mielikuvitus heräävät ja johtavat analyyttisiin havaintoihin esityksen äärellä syntyneestä kokemuksesta.…”