Marco Caracciolo

Cognitive Literary Studies and the Status of Interpretation: An Attempt at Conceptual Mapping

Abstract:What is the role of interpretation—the close reading of individual texts—in cognitive literary studies? In attempting to come to grips with this vexed question, my article focuses on the complex divides that separate the practice of interpretation from cognitive-scientific research. I argue that cognitive literary studies can only fulfill their potential by moving beyond interpretation, and I survey lines of research that have already put into practice this intuition. Secondly, I explore a heuristic use of interpretation, where insights from cognitive science are leveraged—in what I call a “cognitive thematics”—to illuminate a background of metacognitive questions.

“The Bagatelle of Particle Waves”: Facing the Hard Problem of Consciousness in Houellebecq’s Les Particules Élémentaires and Mitchell’s Ghostwritten

ABSTRACT Does consciousness—the subjective texture of our interactions with the world—exist on a separate plane from physical matter (dualism)? Or, on the contrary, does it arise from matter (physicalism)? This article focuses on two contemporary novels that attempt to come to grips with this so-called hard problem of consciousness: Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules Élémentaires (1998) and David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999). The scientific community has espoused physicalism, but dualism is remarkably difficult to eradicate from our everyday understanding of mental processes. My case studies stage this tension through two strategies: first, they use quantum physics as an interim—and largely illusory—solution to the hard problem that opens the door to a posthuman future; second, they employ a variety of metaphors and similes that blend characters’ mental life with nonhuman phenomena. In this way, Houellebecq and Mitchell highlight to the entanglement of consciousness and cosmological concerns, resonating with contemporary theorizations of the nonhuman.

IntroductionUnnatural and Cognitive Perspectives on Narrative (A Theory Crossover)

This special issue presents a “crossover” between two strands of contemporary narrative theory: a second-generation cognitive approach that foregrounds the linkage of stories, mind, and the human body; and an unnatural approach, which focuses on narratives that depart from and challenge everyday cognitive parameters, including those involved in so-called literary realism. In this introduction to the special issue, we take our cue from Franz Kafka’s “Wish to Become a Red Indian” (a paragraph-long short story) to illustrate these ways of theorizing about narrative and to Poetics Today 39:3 (September 2018) DOI 10.1215/03335372-7032676 q 2018 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics The first drafts of the essays in this special issue were presented inNovember 2016 at aworkshop hosted by the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University (Sweden). The editors would like to thank Christer Johansson and Göran Rossholm for making this workshop possible, and the participants for their input on the articles. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/542780/0390429.pdf by guest on 25 November 2018 discuss the conceptual divides that separate them. From an unnatural perspective, the cognitive approach flattens narrative to real-world psychology; from a cognitive perspective, the unnatural approach ignores the way that every narrative, no matter how challenging or innovative, exploits our cognitive makeup. By examining these assumptions and by tracing the history of cognitive and unnatural models of narrative, this special issue seeks to move beyond a conceptual standoff between them. The essays collected in the issue demonstrate that it is possible to combine a cognitive approach with an interest in unnatural stories— or, conversely, an unnatural approach and attention to the cognitive and embodied dynamics of narrative. In addition to previewing the arguments advanced in the articles, this introduction explicates the innovative method of scholarly collaboration through which the articles came about, and the different results it produced in each case.

A virtual roundtable on Iser’s legacy Part III: a conversation with Marco Caracciolo

In this article you find the third part of a roundtable on Wolfgang’s Iser legacy with Gerald Prince, Mark Freeman, Marco Caracciolo and Federico Bertoni. In Part III we discuss with Marco Caracciolo the common grounds of Iser and cognitive literary approaches and the role of interpration in cognitive literary studies.