Where are you based?
I’m from Queensland, Australia where I work in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at Griffith University. The School and Griffith’s Centre for Social and Cultural research have partly funded this trip and supported my leave from my usual teaching and postgraduate work, which is very exciting.
What are you working on here in Oslo?
I’m here on research leave and this is an opportunity to read and write a little more intensively than usual, so I’m drafting a book chapter. The book examines the intersection of critical posthumanism and (mostly) twenty-first century narrative fiction. I’m interested in this intersection, not simply because narrative is intricately connected to reframing human identities, but because post-Holocene life is returning us with a higher degree of intensity to the question of how humans relate to the environments that sustain all life. These are not new questions, but working through fiction, literary or otherwise, is to invite readers to recognize becoming posthuman involves undercutting human exceptionalism, and that is a contemporary issue. I personally believe we need to manage this shift without becoming anti-human, or dissolving into technologized or cyber subjectivities, and without losing hope in the face of the challenge.
How do you think the perspective from cognitive literary studies can be helpful?
I think cognitive literary studies has a strong interdisciplinary focus. Some more scientifically driven ideas are relevant to thinking about how narrative structures are engaged, through empathy, for example, or through simulation, or through blending schemata and so on. I do think enactivism even more than theory of mind, challenges the separation of mind and body in ways that resonate with reprioritizing environments in which we are embedded. Recognizing those environments differently may help us to rethink human agency, or recruit it to projects other than continuous growth or economic profit. I think cognitive literary studies is useful for thinking about how narratives might posthumanize readers – whether or not readers think of it in those terms.
What are the most interesting novels dealing with this issue?
The most interesting novels are those that challenge that boundary between fiction and ‘life’ in ways that make the reader keep thinking about life on the planet Earth. Canadian, Ruth Ozeki, has some work that does this. I’ve used A Tale for the time Being, for example, to work out some of the ideas expressed here (external link). Climate change fiction is useful, too. I have a paper (external link) coming out in October 2019 that examines some Australian climate change fiction, not from the posthuman perspective so much, but as a genre that engages with our times. The chapter I’ve been working on is using the work by Mexican writer, Serbina Berman, Me, Who Dove Into the Heart of the World.