Karin Kukkonen

Studying Creativity: Interviews and Cognitive Poetics

Interviews with literary writers on their work, from the long-running Paris Review series «The Art of Fiction» to podcast formats, proliferate, along with high-profile books on creative writing (see Saunders 2021). While literary studies has considered the sociological and generic aspects of the increased interest in creativity, and in particular the interview format (see Roach 2018 and Masschelein 2014), cognitive poetics and cognitive literary studies more generally have so far paid relatively little attention to the phenomenon when it comes to the creative work that goes into literary texts. In this lecture, I will sketch how cognitive poetics can contribute to a better understanding of how such interviews can serve as evidence when studying creativity.

Literary writers famously dislike the question «where they get their ideas from». Indeed, it may be the case that when it comes to the creative process of writing, similar to craft activities, it is easier for the practitioner to demonstrate the action rather than explain it in so many words (see Malafouris 2011; Bernini 2013). Literary writers, however, are artists of the word. The ways in which they craft narratives and metaphors of the creative process may not be a 1:1 reproduction of the process itself. However, when analysed with the tools of cognitive poetics, the literary devices used in interviews may enable a more comprehensive and yet context-specific take on creativity in literary writing than an approach which is based on research in empirical psychology alone. Indeed, cognitive poetics may respond in this way to recent calls for more context-sensitive and environmentally valid ways for studying (literary) creativity (Abraham 2022).

Karin Kukkonen is Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. Her main areas of expertise are cognitive poetics, cognitive narratology and the history of the novel. She has published extensively on the links between poetics of the seventeenth and eighteenth century and current modes of theorising fiction and narrative. Her publications include four monographs, among them A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel (OUP, 2017) and Probability Designs: Literature and Predictive Processing (OUP, 2020). Her current research investigates creativity, contingency and literary writing. Kukkonen has received multiple grants, and she is currently leading the interdisciplinary research initiative “Literature, Cognition and Emotions” at the University of Oslo (2019-2023). In 2018/2019, she was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In 2021, she was a visiting professor / researcher at the EHESS in Paris and at La Sapienza, Roma I.

Gerhard Lauer

Little readers and little books. Cognitive Poetics and the role of developmental psychology

Cognitive poetics is focused on adult readers. However, little is known about readers at an early age. Specifically, children and youth readers and their books are not (yet) a topic of research in cognitive poetics. My talk will make the case for the inclusion of children’s book and children as readers into the research agenda of cognitive poetics. Understanding the scaffolding processes by which children learn to make sense out of stories is of pivotal importance to understand main cognitive processes in readers in general (Bruner 1990). By a couple of computational and empirical studies I show how cognitive poetics could be enriched by analysing little readers and little books. Starting point of a research agenda are insights into the alterocentric personality of humans in general (Trevarthen 1980) and the core social cognitive competences of babys (Spelke 2022). Opportunities and limits in the experimental design when working with children will be discussed.

Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Boston: Harvard UP.

Spelke, E. (2022). What Babys know. Oxford: UP.

Trevarthen, C. B. (1980). The foundations of intersubjectivity. Development of interpersonal and cooperative understanding in infants. In Social Foundations of Language and Thoughts. Essays in Honor of Jerome S. Bruner. Ed. D. Olson (316-342). New York: Norton.

Gerhard Lauer was born in Karlsruhe in 1962. He was a lecturer at the universities of Göttingen and Basel, and since 2021 he has been working at the Gutenberg Institute for World Literature at the University of Mainz. He is considered one of the pioneers of the reorientation of literary studies with regard to cognitive and empirical approaches.  His research focuses on reading in the digital age.

Katja Mellmann

Quo vadis, Cognitive Poetics, if not for consilience?

In her introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (2015), Lisa Zunshine makes a surprising statement: "cognitive literary critics work not toward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoretical paradigms in literary and cultural studies", because "[t]he division between the sciences and the humanities, far from ideal in many ways, reflects meaningful differences in ways of thinking about the world." (p. 2) While I agree that literary scholars pursue different questions than a scientist from, say, empirical psychology, theoretical biology, or the computer sciences, and that they employ a different set of methods, I disagree with the conclusion that this is an argument against "consilience." For this reason, I will investigate different concepts of "consilience" and "the unity of science" along with their historical development (before they were popularized by E. O. Wilson) and the related concept of "reductionism" in its original meaning. I shall then discuss explicit statements about this issue from Cognitive Poetics (such as by Nancy Easterlin or Jonathan Gottschall) in the light of that reconstruction. In the second part of my paper, I point out that the enormous heterogeneity of Cognitive Poetics stressed by Zunshine is no less true for "the sciences," and that this special argument for the great divide thus fails. Instead, I shall argue that because of this heterogeneity, there are movements "against consilience"--both in the humanities and in the sciences tapped by Cognitive Poetics--that, under the cover of programmatic richness, actually rule out disturbing facets (and are striving for enhanced homogeneity) of the field. I will illustrate this diagnosis with recent attempts at superseding evolutionary perspectives in the psychology of emotions and in Cognitive Poetics.

Katja Mellmann studied German and French language and literature. In 2005, she received her PhD for a dissertation on emotional effects of German eighteenth-century literature. One of her main research interests has been an evolutionary-biological approach to both the psychology of reception and literary theory. She was research fellow (Dilthey fellowship) at the German Department of the University of Göttingen and since 2014 she teaches at the Ludwig-Maximilian Universität München. She currently holds a Heisenberg position at the max Planck Institute for empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, where she develops research in the filds of anthropology of literature, psychology od art reception and emotional response to literature.

Riikka Rossi

A Cognitive Poetics Approach to Literature of ‘Arctic Hysteria’: 

Timo K. Mukka’s Ecstatic-Hypnotic Style

In her introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (2015), Lisa Zunshine makes a surprising statement: "cognitive literary critics work not toward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoretical paradigms in literary and cultural studies", because "[t]he division between the sciences and the humanities, far from ideal in many ways, reflects meaningful differences in ways of thinking about the world." (p. 2) While I agree that literary scholars pursue different questions than a scientist from, say, empirical psychology, theoretical biology, or the computer sciences, and that they employ a different set of methods, I disagree with the conclusion that this is an argument against "consilience." For this reason, I will investigate different concepts of "consilience" and "the unity of science" along with their historical development (before they were popularized by E. O. Wilson) and the related concept of "reductionism" in its original meaning. I shall then discuss explicit statements about this issue from Cognitive Poetics (such as by Nancy Easterlin or Jonathan Gottschall) in the light of that reconstruction. In the second part of my paper, I point out that the enormous heterogeneity of Cognitive Poetics stressed by Zunshine is no less true for "the sciences," and that this special argument for the great divide thus fails. Instead, I shall argue that because of this heterogeneity, there are movements "against consilience"--both in the humanities and in the sciences tapped by Cognitive Poetics--that, under the cover of programmatic richness, actually rule out disturbing facets (and are striving for enhanced homogeneity) of the field. I will illustrate this diagnosis with recent attempts at superseding evolutionary perspectives in the psychology of emotions and in Cognitive Poetics.

Riikka Rossi’s research centers on historical period-styles of Finnish literature, and more recently on literature and emotions from an interdisciplinary perspective. She has published extensively on history and theory of literary naturalism, realism and primitivism, and studied the literature of Decadence in relation to naturalism and early modernism. Her studies on emotions focus on negative and ambivalent emotions in literature, e.g. on the poetics of disgust, melancholia, nostalgia, ecstasy, anxiety and difficult empathy.

Riikka Rossi is currently leading a Kone foundation research project entitled Arctic Hysteria: Strange Northern Emotions, which explores the imaginations of the North and its affective aspects.