Podcast: "Literature, Cognition and Emotions"

In this episode Thomas Schubert, Professor of Social Psychology at University of Oslo talks to Karin Kukkonen about the emotion of "being moved". Learn more about natural and cultural situations of social bonding, and why crying should be considered "normal" as an emotional expression in todays’ society.

Thomas's reading recommendations

Kim Stanley Robinson, The ministry for the future

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

Post-production: Bård Ingebrigtsen & Vera Syrovatskaya.

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Silvio Bär, Professor of Classics at the University of Oslo, speaks to Karin Kukkonen about Ancient Greek literature and its heroes. Learn how the “epic memory” works, why cognitive dissonance can help us understand ancient texts better, and the major difference between us and the ancient Greeks as an audience for tales about heroes.

Silvio's reading recommendation Homer's Iliad and The Odyssey (Silvio's favourite translations are by Richmond Lattimore)

Post-production: Bård Ingebrigtsen & Vera Syrovatskaya.

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In this episode, you can listen to a conversation between Stefka Eriksen, Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, and Karin Kukkonen about the emotional world of Vikings, Old Norse manuscripts, and international book culture in the 1200–1300s, and how an environmental crisis – the little ice age – may have impacted the (re)production of the sagas.

Stefka's reading recommendation

Njal’s saga, (ed.) Leifur Eiricksson, Robert Cook, trans. Robert Cook. Penguin Books, 2006.

Egil’s Saga, trans. Bernard Scudder, edited with and introduction and notes by Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, Penguin Books, 2004.

Post-production: Bård Ingebrigtsen & Vera Syrovatskaya.

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In this episode, Karin Kukkonen interviews Tone Selboe, Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo, about her research on feelings in the "big" 19th-century novels, such as Anna Karenina. They adress so-called 'situations of sympathy', how these novels relate to our socially contingent everyday emotions, how they explore the possibility of sympathy — and in which way the legacy from the 19th-century novel is carried on today.

Tone's reading recommendations

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)

Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet: Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), and Summer (2020)

Post-production: Bård Ingebrigtsen & Vera Syrovatskaya.

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Hugo Lundhaug, Professor of Biblical Reception and Early Christian Literature, joins Karin Kukkonen in conversation about Coptic Apocrypha and their relationship with the canonical Bible. Learn more about the way the “Biblical storyworld” has evolved, how cognitive approaches help us navigate the historical distance to late antiquity, and how all of the above is connected to the universe of Harry Potter.

Hugo's reading recommendations David Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind

Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner, The Way We Think

Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory

Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds

The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson

More New Testament Apocrypha, ed. Tony Burke

Post-production: Bård Ingebrigtsen & Vera Syrovatskaya.

NB: We apologise for the mismatched level of the tracks in the beginning of this episode. The sound is back to normal after 6.24.

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The ideal reader is usually presented as someone engrossed in a book, sitting still and not turning their gaze from the page. But how does this image correspond to modern cognitive science, and why do we actually lose the joy of reading?

In this podcast episode, Sarah Bro Trasmundi, LCE researcher and Associate Professor of Cognitive Ethnography at University of Southern Denmark, talks to Karin Kukkonen about the embodied perspective on reading, short attention spans and the necessity of finding new ways of teaching literature.

Sarah's reading recommendation

Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement

Post-production: Bård Ingebrigtsen & Vera Syrovatskaya.

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How do readers respond to, experience, and make sense of a literary text? In this podcast, Karin Kukkonen, professor in comparative literature at the University of Oslo, speaks to Stijn Vervaet about how a text's probability design ties in with the reading process. She explains how literary texts provide cues and triggers that not only lure readers into having certain expectations but also constantly invite them to readjust these expectations. How do we as readers, then, navigate a literary text on the level of plot, style, and genre? Listen as Karin Kukkonen discusses how readers involve their bodies when reading and how the reading process is in essence a non-linear activity. As readers, we move back and forth between periods of profound immersion and moments of absent-mindedness that allow us to "watch ourselves thinking." They also talk about how the literary text works to extend cognitive processes happening in our brain.

Karin’s reading recommendation: Anne Weber, Annette, ein Heldinnenepos. Berlin: Matthes und Seitz.

Post-production: Eivind Rutle

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Can reading fiction change us? In this podcast, Olivia Fialho, postdoctoral researcher at the Huyghens-ING/KNAW, Lecturer of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, and Affiliated Researcher at LCE, explains the concept of transformative reading, from its roots in Aristotle through Russian Formalism, Phenomenology, and Reader Response theories. In conversation with Stijn Vervaet, she discusses how empirical methods can be used to study the interactions between reader and text. She addresses what devices literary texts use to attract and direct readers' attention, and what neurocognitive studies can tell us about how we read and how reading can affect us. Listen as Olivia uncovers how transformative reading has resulted in applications well beyond the field of literary studies and could potentially lead to radically different ways of teaching literature.

Olivia’s reading recommendation: Voltaire: Candide, or the Optimist. ( Candide, ou l’optimisme.)

Post-production: Eivind Rutle

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Life writing continues to be popular, both judging by the titles sold in bookshops and the books that receive literary awards. With many recent life-writing texts, bookshops arguably have a hard time, if they want to shelve them within distinct categories of fiction and non-fiction. Alexandra Effe, a postdoctoral research fellow at LCE (UiO), investigates how, and to which effects, literary narratives combine fictional and factual modes. Listen to her discussing the concept of autofiction in conversation with Stijn Vervaet. In particular, they talk about how the concept allows us to develop new perspectives on life-writing experiments throughout literary history.

Do you think you would read differently depending on whether you take a text to be a short story or a newspaper article? Do you believe that texts can challenge and change what feels true?

Post-production: Eivind Rutle

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What is a multimodal novel? And why is the genre on its return in our digital age? How should we understand the notion of the embodied reader? And why bother about rhythm and rhyme in the 21st century?

Books are more than just neutral containers of narratives; they are material, palpable objects, often multimodal in nature. In this podcast, Natalia Igl, associate researcher at LCE and Marie Skłodowska-Curie recent postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, discusses how and why the material and multimodal aspects of a book, literary journal, or poem affect our readerly experience perhaps more than we suspect. In a conversation with Stijn Vervaet, she explains how a literary work’s multimodality and materiality operates, and how we read with our bodies.

This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No 794549.

Post-production: Eivind Rutle

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The Gothic novel calls to mind abandoned castles, ghosts and vampires. But perhaps it is time to look beyond these familiar tropes. Often taking their inspiration from Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), there exists an interesting and understudied corpus of late eighteenth-century popular gothic fiction written by women authors. Writing against the increasing conservatism in British politics in the wake of the French Revolution, these authors often chose female protagonists fond of composing poems. These poems appear to be marginal, but they in fact suggest a profound rethinking of female agency and emotions. Listen to how Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu, senior lecturer in English at NTNU and associate researcher with LCE, in conversation with Stijn Vervaet, discusses writing as a form of extended cognition and as a method of constructing radically unconventional feelings and decisions. Follow their journey from eighteenth-century England all the way to post-Napoleonic Russia.

Post-production: HF:Studio – Baoxin Long & Bernt Brundtland

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Rolf Reber, Professor in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Oslo, speaks to Karin Kukkonen about reading and emotional engagement, and the ways in which readers find pleasure in literature through “critical feeling.” Listen as Rolf Reber describes how “the artful mind” appreciates literature on multiple levels, and why knowledge about a book’s composition and the time and place when it was written can make reading more enjoyable. They also discuss whether stories need to be true in order to affect readers emotionally and what psychology can learn from literature about emotions.

The reading recommendation from Rolf Reber:

Adalbert Stifter, Indian Summer (external link). Translated from German by Wendell Frye.

Rolf Reber, Critical Feeling: How to use Feelings Strategically (external link)

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Stephan Guth, Professor of Middle East Studies, talks to Karin Kukkonen about the Arab novel in the context of social and political reform in Middle East countries. He explains how reading novels could “teach” people how to feel in modern society, why historical romance novels were considered useful entertainment in the 19th century, and discusses the function of emotional storytelling in the Middle East’s confrontation with Europe.

The reading recommendation from Stephan Guth:

Jurji Zaydan, 1914. Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt. Translated by Samah Selim.

Tayeb Salih, 1966. Season of Migration to the North. Translated by Denys Johnson Davies.

Stephan Guth is editor of Literary Visions of the Middle East.

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Stijn Vervaet is Associate Professor in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Balkan Studies at the University of Oslo. In this episode, he joins Karin Kukkonen in a conversation about constructions of cultural memory and visions of the past in the Balkan literary tradition. They talk about witnessing, counter-memory, testimony and survival accounts, and discuss how authors make use of the imaginative and symbolic dimensions of literature in order to reconstruct alternative narratives of the past.

The reading recommendation from Stijn Vervaet:

Danilo Kiš, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. Translation: Et gravmæle for Boris Davidovitsj.

Daša Drndić, Trieste. Translation: Trieste - dokumentarisk roman

Stijn Vervaet’s book Holocaust, War and Transnational Memory

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We often express the feeling of ‘being moved’ in everyday language ­– but what does it mean? Beate Seibt, Professor in Social Psychology at The University of Oslo, has developed a scientific framework for the study of ‘kama muta’ or, the experience of being moved. In a conversation with Karin Kukkonen, she discusses how kama muta relates to both literature and our everyday lives. Can social media make us feel closer to others, and are we really ‘moved’ by cat videos? Why does reading fiction evoke such strong emotions?

The reading recommendation from Beate Seibt:

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (external link)

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Halvor Eifring, Professor of Chinese studies at the University of Oslo, joins Karin Kukkonen in a conversation about what mind-wandering and non-directive meditation have in common with literary reading. Learn more about the meditative dimension of long Chinese novels, and find out how to resist «weapons of mass distraction» in the modern world.

The reading recommendation from Halvor Eifring:

Cao Xueqin and Gao E, The Story of the Stone (external link)

Learn more about Nondirective Meditation and mind wandering in Halvor Eifring's book: The Power of the Wandering Mind (external link).

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Does one feel differently in Japanese novels? When Western novels came to Japan, they brought with them new ways for telling about the self and new models of feeling. Reiko Abe Auestad, Professor of Japanese Studies, talks to Karin Kukkonen about this culture clash of emotions and affect.

Reading recommendations:

Natsume Soseki, Kokoro (trans. Ika Kaminka). Solum Bokvennen, 2004.

Natsume Soseki, The Three-Cornered World (trans. Alan Turney). Peter Owen Publishers, 2011.

Kaori Ekuni, Twinkle, Twinkle (trans. Emi Shimokawa). Vertical Inc., 2003

Ryunosuke Akutagawa, "In a Bamboo Grove," in Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (trans. Jay Rubin). Penguin Books, 2009.

Haruki Murakami, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (trans. Jay Rubin). SD Books, 2012.

Reiko Abe Auestad, "The Affect that Disorients Kokoro". U of Hawai'i P, 2019.

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