Literature The Human Experience

Reading Mutant Narratives, 2020

'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.

2021

To engage in critical readings of literary texts, in ways that are also ethical and compassionate, requires readers to enter emotionally and imaginatively into the complex, textual worlds of others as they are portrayed in stories. Such stories have the potential to create new worlds that make visible our collective being in ways that allow us to enter into democracy with more empathetic and just lenses. In this regard, we discuss both past and recent work of scholars whose insights we believe are useful for rethinking and deepening what it means to read and respond to creative narratives with "one's heart as well as with one's mind." Given the popularity in recent years of teaching literary theory, and embracing the power of "critical" reading in English classrooms, the value of affective and imaginative ways of reading has been increasingly understated. We thus call for an engaged humanities reform we believe is ultimately crucial to creating reader-citizens who can successfully engage in community practices and decisions rooted in a general concern for the value of the lives of others.

in Grenzen der Literatur: Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen, edited by Fotis Jannidis, Gerhard Lauer, and Simone Winko (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009): 142-60.

The practice of making and consuming imaginative verbal artifacts appears in all known cultures. People all over the world, in all ecological and social conditions, play with the sounds and meanings of words, create imaginary worlds with intentional agents, goals, and symbolic images, and produce fantasy structures in which characters and events are linked in thematically significant ways to produce tonally modulated outcomes. All forms of cultural imagination—religious, ideological, artistic, and literary—are imbued with the passions derived from the evolved and adapted dispositions of human nature. Human action depends on the human sense of value and meaning. Literature and the other arts provide a means for making the value and meaning of experience available to the imagination.

Kare Journal, 2023

With its magical geographies, enchanting elements, and characters, fantasy literature has discussed and presented many issues including nature. The writers employ nature to reinforce their magical plots. Even, nature sometimes appears as a character whose agency may direct the course of events. Besides, in fantasy literature, the writers create new myths where the beginning of life and the meaning of existence are questioned, re-imagined and recreated within the context of an extraordinary environment. Mythologies are closely concerned with nature and regarded as an attempt to make sense of the natural world humans belong to. In that sense, fantasy literature becomes much more significant for ecological studies. When we think of characters' psychological states and emotional responses to natural elements and occurrences, the genre offers a remarkably suitable frame for us to analyse character-nature relations from an ecopsychological perspective. Ecopsychology, the common ground of ecology and psychology, underlines the strong interconnection between human psyche and nature. By putting emphasis on the significant role nature plays in fantastic literature, this article aims to offer a theoretical framework to display how fantastic literature can provide a fertile ground for ecopsychological literary analysis and understanding. Since ecopsychology is a broad field, the focus will be specifically placed on Jungian ecopsychology.

Garry L. Hagberg (ed.), Narrative and Self-Understanding, 2019

What can literary fictions do for us apart from providing practical knowledge of social situations, helping us grow emotionally by enlarging our affective stock, and sharpening our wit and skills of figurative thinking, as critics have suggested? Fictions can also be transformative. That is to say, fictions enable a level of reflection that can establish a new kind of self-awareness, and thus a new relation to ourselves – specifically, one that adheres to and actively partakes in Foucault’s conception of the care of the self. Caring for ourselves by way of an extended reflection on the lives of others as encountered in fictional texts is transformative because it focuses our attention onto an overall movement of existence, which thereby makes the process of our own change over time a deliberate object of self-fashioning.

Narrative, 2016

Traditional and recent claims that literature enables readers to develop more satisfying ways of being in the world overlook the phenomenon of readers— especially adolescent readers—feeling bereft when their engagement with a fictional world ends and dissatisfied with the ordinary life to which they must return. Looking at cases of actual readers' experiences with such immersive fictions as the Harry Potter novels and The Hunger Games trilogy, this essay draws attention to the role that readers themselves play in negotiating the disparity between the alternative worlds and alternative selves they encounter or inhabit in fiction and the often disappointing strictures of external, shared reality. Bridging the gap between the fictional world and ordinary living, the essay contends, requires a double response from readers: (1) exploring ways to enact in their own lives elements of what they love in the imagined world, and (2) anticipating and evaluating the consequences of such enactments so that they can choose between healthy and unhealthy ones. IN RECENT YEARS there has been a renewed interest in the benefits of literary reading with new examinations of why readers read literature and to what effect. However, an often-overlooked phenomenon of fiction-reading presents a problem for claims

Transstellar Journals, 2020

Therapeutic Literary Novels: A Step Back from Mental Agony Psychological fiction offers a unique kind of therapy to its readers. Proposed paper intends to reflect upon few exemplary characters from English literature around the world. This particular genre of writing tries to delve into circumstances that force characters to behave in an abnormal manner. Internal observation is stressed upon in order to understand the character; motivation behind actions is more important than the actions of psychological characters. Society, at large, talks about taking care of sick. In reality, mentally disturbed people are considered to be outcasts. Enough time is not given by family and friends to get normalcy back into the life of such people. Literature is valued for bringing out all that troubles man in a lighter tone through stream of consciousness writing style, interior dialogues and monologues and other literary devices. Troubled youth of present age easily identifies with these characters. Catharsis helps to cleanse minds of troubled readers. When a reader identifies himself with certain traits found in characters from these stories, it gives him a sense of being part of their world; his sense of alienation is replaced by feelings that make him want to reach out to the character to console and to be consoled. Reader finds a purpose to his meaningless existence. Readers having to deal with the sick in their lives also learn to live a better life through all that touches upon the lives of characters, who have a mental case amidst them.

Narrative Culture

The Cultural Sociology of Reading: , 2022

This essay gathers from diverse individuals personal accounts of their engagements with a wide range of fictional narratives. All of them encounter works of fiction having experienced loss, lack, or other hardship, whether personal or societal, that has induced a diminished sense of self. Their accounts show that fictional worlds have the capacity to meet an individual’s need, whatever its origin, providing models of a more robust agency in choosing a response to hardship and loss, the relief of resonant tangible expressions of inner emotional pain, or more capacious worlds making it possible to imagine a more empowered self. And thus these aesthetic engagements prove powerfully and invaluably self-focused, fiction reading that enlarges one’s self.