Workshops

The LCE workshops serve as a venue to work together on concepts, texts and theories across different disciplines.

An old typewriter, close-up, mechanical details.

Upcoming


 

2023

Corpus Group Workshop

12 December 2023, University of Oslo (UiO)

In the first part, group members shared progress reports on the continuous efforts with parallel corpora, followed by a guest lecture delivered by Amel Fraissé (Univ. of Lille/France). The subsequent part involved group discussions on the potential applications and modifications of the affect coding system employed in psychotherapy to analyze literary texts.

The conversation revolved around the following contributions:

Participants:  Stephan Guth, Jon T. Monsen, Beate Seibt and res.ass., Ole André Solbakken, Ljiljana Šarić, Gunvald Axner Ims, Karl Jonathan Jonsson, Åsne Lønne, Amel Fraissé (via Zoom)

Here you can read more about the Corpus Group.

Text and Image in Manuscript Cultures: Cognitive Approaches

 – , University of Oslo (UiO)

This workshop will explore the relationship between image and text in manuscripts from various periods and cultures, in connection to production and cognitive engineering, and meaning-making and interpretation.

The material turn in the philologies has made us aware that a main characteristic of manuscript culture is the book’s materiality and visuality. Such material and visual aspects may range from illuminations and drawings to colored, decorated or illuminated initials, from titles and rubrics to marginal annotations, remarks, doodles and scribbles, from various fonts, sizes and colors of the writing, to abbreviation signs and punctuation, among others. The relationship between image and text varies in manuscripts produced in different cultures and periods, but this interplay is always central and illustrative of both the production process and meaning-making reception of the text.

For more info on this Workshop, please see the full event.

Friendship and Intimacy in the Digital Age: An Optimistic Perspective

29 November 2023, Niels Treschows hus, HF-12

Stephen Asma will talk about friendship in the digital age, followed by a discussion. The workshop is organised in collaboration with the research group "Sense of Community".

Loneliness was on the rise well before COVID-19 increased isolation for many people. A decade ago, people reported that they had three or four strong friendships, but in more recent surveys it has dropped to two. And many now report that they have no close friends. Depression among 14–17-year-olds has gone up dramatically since 2009 suggesting a causal relation with the rise of social media culture. The promise of online life was greater connection, but the reality seems otherwise.

There is a rising “doom and gloom” narrative emerging about the future of human social bonds and there is indeed reason to worry. Now that AI chatbots and social robots are integrating into our daily lives, many people despair about the future of friendship and love.

In this workshop Dr. Stephen Asma will discuss the dangers of digital life for human social connection, but also assess the many underappreciated values of online friendship. He will include discussion of some of the latest social psychology and emotional neuroscience of human bonding.

For more info on this Workshop, please see the full event.

LCE Workshop Imagination and Memory in Comics: Cognitive Approaches

14 September 2023, 9:00 AM - 5:30 PM, Room 300, Niels Henrik Abels hus

Our imagination, memory, and the ways in which we perceive, experience, and interact with the world are profoundly connected. Visual images are often perceived as central to imaginative processes and have been singled out as one of the reasons why memory and imagination are so densely entangled. Our thinking rarely stays on one track or in the confines of one modality, but memory and imagination, as well as verbal, visual, spatial, haptic, and bodily cognition constantly complement each other.

Since comics also involve the interplay of realistic and fantastical expressions, as well as visual and verbal elements, they offer an excellent entry point into examining these issues. Moreover, understanding cognition not as a computational, but as an embodied process offers new avenues to explore comics artists’ and readers’ bodily engagement with the material, experiential, and narrative aspects of graphic storytelling. We are interested in understanding both how the artists’ creative processes work and how the readers’ embodied cognition is involved in their engagement with comics.

For more info and the full programme, please see the full event.

LCE Salon — Boccaccio and Mansfield

5 September 2023, 2:15 – 6:00 PM, PAM 389 

Can literary texts facilitate dialogue between the disciplines? In this LCE Salon, we discuss two short stories to reflect on disciplinary knowledge structures and methods.

The LCE salon explores methods, knowledge structures and research objects between disciplines in a novel way. Literary texts serve as the basis for this interdisciplinary exchange, provoking reflections on the limits of disciplinary knowledge and facilitating dialogues across these boundaries.

For more on this LCE Salon, please see the full event.

Corpus group workshop

28-29 August 2023, University of Oslo (UiO)

In this workshop, group members shared updates on the parallel corpus work. On day one, Diana Santos joined us as a guest, sharing insights into her research on emotions in language. She delved into the categories employed in Anna Wierzbicka's exploration of emotions across various languages and cultures.

The second part of the workshop covered discussions on topic modeling, examining emotions in older literary texts, metaphors, and potential coding systems applicable to our corpus. Ole André Solbakken introduced the methodology he and his colleagues utilize for coding affect in patient interviews.

Participants:  Stephan Guth, Ole André Solbakken, Ljiljana Šarić, Gunvald Axner Ims, Karl Jonathan Jonsson, Diana Santos

Here you can read more about the Corpus group.

Affordances and Constraints of Imagination — Day I & II

28 August, 2:00–6:00 PM ; 29 August, 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM

This two-day workshop explores how different kinds of cognitive and textual resources and restrictions enable and extend imagination.

“The only limitation is your imagination!” is a cliché – a phrase for advertising environments, services and products that offer possibilities for creative action. Yet, this banality defies many common misconceptions linked to imagination, recognizing that it is not limitless and cannot create anything from nothing. Just like any other kind of cognition, imagining cannot escape everyday experience but is, in fact, deeply embedded in it – feeding from it and into it. Similarly, fictions and art forms can coax imagination to expand into different directions, but they also restrain it through the modes and habits of expression as well as the myths, tropes and clichés they make available or salient. In this two-day workshop, we explore the affordances – the action potentials and constraints – that literature and narrative provide for imagining.

Overall, the workshop is designed to encourage interdisciplinary discourse on the embodied, extended, embedded and enactive nature of imagination as well as to make the participants more aware of the imaginary strategies employed in research and literary discourse. How could we work past harmful limitations of imagination and expand our scopes of speculation? On the other hand: how could we encourage creativity and find new affordances by constraining imagination in more purposeful ways?

Please find the programme and further details on the event pages for day one and day two

Literature as a way of knowing (I + II)

18 April 2023, 1:00 – 5:00 PM, HF-12, Niels Treschows hus – 19 April 2023, 9:15 AM – 12:00 PM, PAM 14, P.A. Munchs hus

A two-day workshop on literature, language, cognition, and ecology

This first day of the workshop will feature a lecture series. During this, the lecturers will present their current research into literature in its capacity as a mode of knowing and in its capacity as a modal ontology (the contested boundaries of fiction). Literature is a not just a set of texts but an embodied practice, an institution, an access to the real and medium for the production, dissemination and critique of ways of knowing, and indeed for the imaginative creation of reality itself.

We will consider literature from the point of view of modal ontology, in other words not-yet-being, from the point of view of cognitive ecology and ecological linguistics and from the point of view of knowing reality through reading. We claim that “literature” as a cultural practice is diversifying and democratising in an unparalleled way today, which upends familiar distinctions such as that between writer and reader, text and enjoyment, writing and speaking/listening. Which conceptualities are available to guide us through these changing parameters?
 
For the second day of the workshop, we conduct a small experiment: we will, as a group, close-read and interpret a story. We will film the process and conduct an analysis of the video material. What did we observe? Where are traces to be found of the ideas that we have presented? What does the process tell us about the place of literature in the contemporary sensorium?

For more details, please visit the individual events. Here you find day I and day II.

Manuscripts, Creativity, and Cognition

28 February 2023, 9:15 AM – 5:00 PM, HF-12, Niels Treschows hus

How do we approach the fluidity of manuscripts with cognitive theories? In this workshop, a range of speakers present new perspectives on variance and creativity in manuscripts.

The material turn in the philologies has made us aware that a main characteristic in manuscript cultures is variance in almost any aspect of a text, spanning from language and orthography to structure and content, as well as production and reception processes. Both in historically oriented disciplines (new philology) and in literary studies (genetic criticism), these insights have led to a reevaluation of the manuscript as a fluid text. Cognitive theory, on the other hand, reminds us that the mind is embedded, embodied, enactive and extended (4E cognition), giving us conceptual tools to link the materiality of a manuscript to the creative minds of the agents engaging in various types of writing and reading processes. In this workshop, we invite speakers to discuss textual and material variations in manuscripts, in connection to creativity and cognition.

For more details on talks and speakers, please visit the event page

LCE Salon — Chekhov and Ginzburg

8 February 2023, 2:15–6:00 PM, PAM 389, P.A. Munchs hus

Can literary texts facilitate dialogue between the disciplines? In this LCE Salon, we discuss two short stories to reflect on disciplinary knowledge structures and methods.

The LCE salon explores methods, knowledge structures and research objects between disciplines in a novel way. Literary texts serve as the basis for this interdisciplinary exchange, provoking reflections on the limits of disciplinary knowledge and facilitating dialogues across these boundaries.

For more on this LCE Salon, please see the event.

2022

Embodiment Moving Ahead: The Second Generation in 2022

16 December 2022, 1:30 PM–6:00 PM, HF-12, Niels Treschows hus

Where does an embodied approach to narrative and literature stand today? In this LCE workshop, researchers working on empirical and theoretical aspects of bodies, minds and narrative will present their latest investigations.

In this workshop, LCE sets out to map some of the recent movements within the field of embodied and 4E approaches to literature. What new perspectives have emerged since cognitive literary studies made the move from first-generation computational to second-generation embodied approaches?

Programme

  • 13:30: Presentations (I) – Chair: Marlene Andresen
  • Marco Bernini – "Fictive Presences and Permanence: On Imaginative Permeability"
  • Emily Troscianko – "Is it up to authors to make sure their books do more good than harm?"
  • Discussion moderated by Marlene Andresen
  • 15:30: Coffee Break

16:00: Presentations (II) – Chair: Essi Varis

  • Marco Caracciolo – "Time, Space, and Embodied Complexity in Video Game Narrative"
  • Karin Kukkonen – "Agency, Embodiment and Literary Games"
  • Merja Polvinen – "Reasons to Be Cheerful"
  • Discussion moderated by Essi Varis
  • 17:00–18:00: Final discussion

Participants

Marco Bernini is Associate Professor in Cognitive Literary studies at Durham University

  • Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at the University of Ghent
  • Karin Kukkonen is Professor in Comparative literature and the convener of Literature, Cognition and Emotions at the University of Oslo
  • Merja Polvinen is Senior Lecturer in English Philology at The University of Helsinki
  • Emily Troscianko is Research Associate at TORCH – The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities at the University of Oxford 

Moderators

  • Essi Varis is Researcher at the University of Helsinki and Visiting Researcher at Literature, Cognition and Emotions (UiO)
  • Marlene Andresen is Doctoral Research Fellow in Comparative literature at the University of Oslo

Connected events

Triple Book Launch: New Embodied Approaches to Narrative

15 December 2022, 4:15–6:30 PM

Organizer

Literature, Cognition and Emotions


LCE Writing Workshop: Academic Writing Demystified

29 November 2022, 10:00 AM–2:00 PM, HF-12, Niels Treschows hus

This workshop aims to demystify an essential part of academic study and research: the writing process. The final products of academic writing are apparent in the form of academic papers, books and articles, but the complex processes behind them tend to remain hidden from view. We will discuss different approaches to academic writing, as well as specific techniques that can help make the academic writing process easier and more enjoyable.

The workshop will be led by Julie Hansen, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at the Department of Modern Languages, Uppsala University, and Alexandra Effe, Postdoctoral Fellow at ILOS, UiO. We will also hear from a recent M.A. graduate and engage in concrete writing activities, so bring pen and paper, or a computer, and thoughts about a project you are currently working on.

The workshop will be particularly helpful for M.A. students working on a thesis related to literature.


Concept Workshop: Speculation

What does speculation mean?

25 May 2022, 2:00 – 4:00 PM, Realfagsbibliotekets undervisningsrom 209 & Zoom

Welcome to a speculative concept workshop organized by the editors of Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research!

In this two-hour workshop, we will discuss the concept of 'speculation' and aim to (re)define it in a way that would make it a useful analytical tool for science fiction and fantasy scholars.

This workshop will be held at The University of Oslo in a hybrid format.

What does speculation mean?
Welcome to a speculative concept workshop organized by the editors of Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research!  

Although 'speculative fiction' has recently gained popularity as the new umbrella term for fantastic fiction, 'speculation' itself remains an ambiguous, even obscure concept. Within science fiction studies, 'speculation' is usually defined either in opposition to or as something of a synonym for 'extrapolation' (see Landon 2014). In more general literary and narrative studies, readers' engagement with the possible (and the impossible) has mostly been studied in relation to plot and narration, even though fleshing out storyworlds and characters requires speculative thought as well. All in all, speculation is something that we do in a wide array of contexts when something seems uncertain: It is a cognitive or artistic strategy that functions somewhere beyond knowing and actualization.

In this workshop, we discuss possible ways to pin this nebulous concept down. To guide the discussion, we invite the participants to read some materials in advance. In addition, we have invited colleagues from different theoretical backgrounds to give short presentations on how they (would) approach the concept of speculation. The workshop then culminates in general discussion, which aims to arrive at a comprehensive definition of 'speculation' in the framework of literary and/or SFF scholarship.

The result will be submitted to the Finnish online research dictionary, Tieteen termipankki. In addition, we invite the workshop participants to distill the main points of the discussion into a co-written dialogical essay. This will be published as part of Fafnir 2/2022 in a special theme section called "Speculation Toolkit". The essay will not be peer-reviewed, and participating in the workshop does not obligate anyone to participate in the writing process. 

The workshop is organized at the University of Oslo in a hybrid format, and will therefore be open for digital participation via Zoom (external link).

Programme

14:00 – 14.50: Different perspectives on speculation (10 minutes each)

  • Hanna-Riikka Roine: Speculation as a Strategy
  • Essi Varis: Speculation and Imagination as Cognitive Action 
  • Sarah Bro Trasmundi: Embodied Perspective on Speculation
  • Elise Kraatila: Speculation as a Response to Reality
  • Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay: Speculation and Compossible Futures

14:50 – 15:00: Short break

15:00 – 16:00: General discussion and redefining the definition (30 minutes each)

Materials

We recommend the following texts as preparatory background reading:

  • Landon (2014). "Extrapolation and Speculation." in The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, edited by Rob Latham, pp. 24–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Roine (2020). "On Speculation as a Strategy". Fafnir 7:2, pp. 8–15.
  • Varis (2022). "Strange Tools and Dark Materials: Speculation Beyond Narratives with Philosophical Instruments" in Partial Answers 20:2 (forthcoming) [Pages 254–262 — "Speculative Fiction: What Is It and What Does It Do?"]
  • Chattopadhyay (2020). "The Pandemic That Was Always Here, and Afterward: from Futures to CoFutures" in "Thinking through the Pandemic: A Symposium" in Science Fiction Studies  47:3 (November 2020), pp. 338–340.

The materials can be accessed via Dropbox (external link).

Welcome to the workshop!

If you have any questions, please contact Hanna-Riikka Roine (hanna.roine@tuni.fi) or Essi Varis (essi.varis@helsinki.fi).

Participants

  • Fafnir is an open access, World Fantasy Award winning academic journal published by the Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (Finfar).
  • Hanna-Riikka Roine is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow from Tampere University.
  • Essi Varis is a Postdoctoral Researcher from The University of Helsinki currently visiting The University of Oslo.
  • Sarah Bro Trasmundi is a Researcher from The University of Oslo and lecturer at The University of Southern Denmark.
  • Elise Kraatila is a recent Doctoral Graduate from Tampere University.
  • Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is an Associate Professor at The University of Oslo. 

Organizer

Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research and Literature, Cognition and Emotions (LCE)


Book Hack: Extended reading - extended listening? 

Workshop for MA students with an interest in literature.

22 March 2022, 10:00 am -13:30 pm.

In this workshop, we will look at the embodied nature of the printed book as physical artefact - and at the same time challenge the dominant focus on print reading within literary studies - by addressing the audiobook as crucial contemporary literary medium.

Please sign up by 16 March 2022 through nettskjema

Read more about the workshop

Organizer 

Natalia Igl and Signe Marie Brandsæter

2021

LCE Writing Workshop 

15 November 2021 (10 am – 2 pm) at NT 12th floor.

During a 4-hour workshop, we will explore questions related to writing in an academic context. How important is style and how do I judge it? What is my academic voice? Which tools can help me become a better and more productive writer? How do I overcome writer's block? 

Bring pen and paper, or a computer, and thoughts about a project you are currently working on. 

The workshop will be particularly helpful for M.A. students working on a thesis related to literature. 

Sign up by 7 November here: https://nettskjema.no/a/220741.

Organizer: Alexandra Effe

2020

POSTPONED Moments and Modes of Self-Reflexivity

Image of old books

 

This workshop explores readerly engagement with self-reflexive texts. Approaching the experience of the reader from an interdisciplinary perspective at the intersection of literary studies and cognitive science, we address the following questions:

  • What are modes of self-reflexivity and how can we measure them?
  • What does (an experience of) self-reflexivity look like?
  • Which kinds of texts constitute such a mode of writing and elicit such modes of reading?
  • Are particular narrative strategies particularly prone to eliciting such modes?
  • How do we experience metanarrative and metafictional texts? How are embodied and conceptual dimensions of reading interlinked?
  • How do texts “write their readers” (Birke 2016) by commenting on production and reception within the text?
  • What is the role of a text’s materiality, and of the medial conditions of its production and reception (from early printing to the digital age)?

Organizer

Alexandra Effe

2019

Becoming Attached – Attachment’s Role in Literary Studies

Time and place: Sep. 17, 2019 10:00 AM–4:00 PM, Georg Sverdrups hus, seminarrom 2

Attachment may be taken as a synonym for love, liking, affiliation, and has recently been launched as a keyword for the humanities and for literary studies (Felski, 2008, 2015). In psychology, however, attachment is a more complex form of human relationship involving both cognitive and emotional development, and physical survival (Bowlby, 1979).

This workshop raises questions about how, and to what extent it makes sense to think of attachment as a form of aesthetic judgment, as a way of thinking how readers and writers engage with literature, and what literature possibly can teach us about the making and breaking of affectional bonds. Against this backdrop, the workshop looks into attachment’s role in literature, and literature’s role in attachment, and encourages inquiries into the meaning of the term attachment, and how it has been and might be used in relation to literary studies.

Everybody is welcome!

Programme

10:15 Welcome & Introduction

Session 1

Moderator: Camilla Chams, Research Fellow in Comparative Literature, University of Oslo

10:30 Kay Young: ”We were together. I forget the rest: Attachment Theory and Literature”

11:00 Christian Refsum: Attachment and Vulnerability in Karl Ove Knausgård’s Spring

11:30 Hans Petter Blad: A Writer’s Attachment to his Own Work

12:00-13:00 Lunch

Session 2

Moderator: Karin Kukkonen, Professor in Comparative Literature, University of Oslo

13:00 Camilla Chams: What’s Writing Got to Do with It?

13:30 Karine Porpino Viana: Development of the Representations of the Mother-Child Attachment Relationship in Western Literature from 1945-2018

14:00 Benjamin Yazdan: Experience and Attachment in Tone Hødnebø’s poetry

14:30-15:00 Coffee

Session 3

Moderator: Kay Young, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara

15:00–16:00 Discussion

This workshop has been organized in conjunction with the midway PhD assessment for Camilla Chams in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS) at the University of Oslo.

Participants

Kay Young is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a founding member and former director of the Literature and Mind Program at UCSB.

Christian Refsum is Professor in Comparative Literature in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS) at the University of Oslo, and a founding member of the research group Travelling Texts.

Hans Petter Blad is a Norwegian novelist, poet and playwright:

Karin Kukkonen is Professor in Comparative Literature in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS) at the University of Oslo, and the convenor of the research and educations initiative, Literature, Cognition and Emotions (LCE).

Camilla Chams is a Research Fellow in Comparative Literature in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS) at the University of Oslo, and a member of the research group Literature, Cognition, and Emotions (LCE).

Karine Porpino Viana is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology at the University of Oslo, and a member of the research group Emotion Understanding in Children across Cultures.

Benjamin Yazdan is a Film- and Literary critic for Klassekampen and BLA, and holds a Master in Comparative Literature from the University of Oslo.

Organizer

Camilla Chams

Published July 13, 2020 11:20 AM - Last modified Mar. 14, 2024 2:42 PM