Please tell us about your research related to the stay with LCE in Oslo, Barbara.
I am interested, generally, in how figuration participates in the linguistic representation of experience. In recent work, I have looked at viewpoint phenomena, and also at stance expressions, in colloquial discourse and in various media genres. Here in Oslo, I want to bring these questions into the literary context. I see the concept of ‘experience’ as including emotional responses, but also embodied experience, experience of events, and anything else that tells the reader how characters respond to the world around them and other characters’ words and behaviour. I wrote a bit about it in my chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, but the chapter has only managed to raise the issue.
I am finding many examples in contemporary literature and in modernism where experience is represented through intricate embodied and communicative scenarios. Literary examples are more complex and less linguistically restricted than colloquial examples, which suggests to me that studying the representation of experience in literary texts can additionally help me consider the nature of ‘literariness’ from a new perspective. These questions are in the centre of attention at LCE, and I expect to learn much during my stay.
What is your favorite kind of reading experience? What books do you recommend for this?
My favorite books are ones which experiment with language, in order to give a new and original expression to character emotions. My go-to novel in this respect is Virginia Woolf’s pioneering text To the Lighthouse, but I have also learned much from Dave Eggers’ autobiographical novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. More recently, I was really impressed by the power and originality of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose cycle – the novels have been filmed, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing the main character of Patrick, but the film only convinces me further that when it comes to representing experience, creative written narration is much more powerful than film narration.