On Thurs, Oct 10, English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies will be hosting Professor Elaine Auyoung of the UM Twin Cities English Department for a presentation on her research. She is a specialist in 19th century literature, and her work is informed by thought from psychology and cognitive science.
An abstract from Auyoung's research and presentation:
In an 1859 letter to George Eliot, Charles Dickens declared that Adam Bede had taken its place “among the actual experiences and endurances” of his life. A few years earlier, Eliot herself had written to a friend, “I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette.” How do novels enable readers to feel as though they have come to know a “world” of unreal persons, places, and incidents in unexpectedly intimate and durable ways? This fundamental effect of reading fiction has remained remarkably resistant to critical examination. Using examples from Eliot's Middlemarch, however, I will show how psychological research on reading and cognition can help us understand how novels evoke a world in the reader’s mind. This cross-disciplinary approach offers new perspectives on realism, fictionality, mimesis, and how literary language works.