Tell us what you are working on in Oslo, Merja.
I'm here preparing a monograph manuscript on cognitive approaches to self-reflection in fiction. I have the whole year of 2019-2020 off from teaching duties, and will be spending most of it at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, but I wanted to take this opportunity to get my research off the ground by sharing it with people who have a specialist interest in cognition and literature.
I'm interested in metafiction and self-reflection because I feel that the issues of literary form, fictionality and artefactuality have not received enough attention in cognitive literary studies, and that by looking at works where those issues are encountered head-on gives us an opportunity to discuss many other areas central also to the LCE, like readerly engagement and the role of literary texts in social cognition.
And can we read about this already somewhere?
I have a few articles out on this topic, for example in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol, in Cognitive Literary Science edited by Michael Burke and Emily Troscianko for OUP, and in The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture edited by Peter Garratt for Palgrave.
What is your favourite kind of reading experience? What books do you recommend for this?
I tend to enjoy reading works which blow my mind. And I mean that metaphor not in the sense of explosion that leaves just fragments behind, but more in the sense of a balloon being given an extra breath, which expands it that little bit more – that feeling when you know that your head has just become a little bit fuller, and stretches to accommodate, but you would not be able to say exactly what you have just learned - you just know that there is something more in you than before.
For that kind of experience I tend to go for either very formally playful, self-reflective works, or to speculative fiction, which both do the same kind of work, I think. They do not aim for an illusion of real life, but front-load their inventiveness and ability to manipulate the conventions of storytelling. My recommendations would include authors like John Barth (e.g. Tidewater Tales) or Ali Smith (e.g. There but for the) for mainstream self-reflection, or China Miéville (Embassytown) and Catherynne Valente (Radiance) for SF.
LCE offers a study exchange for BA and MA students with the University of Helsinki.