'Emotion'

Computational and Cognitive Approaches to Narratology, 2000

The new generation Narratology shows a renewed heuristic scenario, involving an intense dialogue among Humanities, Cognitive Neuroscience and Computer Technology. The case of suspense is emblematic: the pleasure that suspense exercises on the human mind can be precisely explained by identifying the mechanisms of reward provided by neurological and imaging studies. At the same time, patterns of automatic generation of narrations highlight the profound implications of a heated debate between Narratology and Computer Technology, in order to understand the processes of reception and inference during the narrative immersion in storyworlds. At the end of their overview on of a cross-disciplinary approach to suspense analysis, the authors report a case study considered of interest, by a group of researched, called Liquid Narrative

2011

Recent investigations into emotion and discourse processing using the Text World Theory framework (Werth, 1999) regard psychological projection as a key factor in readers’ emotional responses to discourse (Gavins, 2007; Lahey, 2005; Stockwell, 2009). The present article examines psychological projection in relation to an extract from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and the comments made by a group of readers discussing the novel. As a result, a more nuanced account of psychological projection is proposed, which highlights the multiple perspectives which readers are able to monitor and adopt during text-world construction. Whilst previous work in Text World Theory has focused upon psychological projection in relation to a single text-world role (such as the addressee, for example), here it is argued that multiple projections in relation to a range of text-world enactors are of fundamental significance in our emotional responses to narrative. Such multiple projections, it is proposed, should receive greater consideration in accounts of our emotional experience of literary discourse.

2009

Suspense and surprise, as common and crucial elements of interest realised in literary fiction, are analysed closely in a sample of short stories, so as to develop a detailed explanation of how these forms of interest are created in literary texts, and to propose models for them. Creating suspense involves more conditions, necessary and optional, and more complication than surprise: the several optional conditions mainly serve to intensify the feeling of suspense the reader experiences. Surprise requires two necessary and sufficient conditions, with only a couple of optional conditions to maintain or ensure coherence in the text. The differences are considered attributable to a more fundamental difference between suspense and surprise as emotions. Suspense can be regarded as a progressive emotion, whereas surprise is a perfective emotion. As such, suspense as an interest is considered as a process-oriented interest, while surprise is an effect-oriented one. Suspense is mostly experienced while reading and has the reader involved with the story. Surprise drives the reader to reassess the story in the new light it throws on events and to look for some further message; this is often a main aim of the literary fiction which ends in surprise.

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2010

In this article it is argued that feelings are all important to the function of literature. In contradiction to music that is concerned with the inwardness of humankind, literature has, because of language, the capacity to create fictional worlds that in many respects are similar to and related to the life world within which we live. One of the most important reasons for our emotional engagement in literature is our empathy with others and our constant imagining and hypothesizing on possible developments in our interactions with them. Hence, we understand and engage ourselves in fictional worlds. It is further claimed and exemplified, how poetic texts are very good at rhetorically engage and manipulate our feelings. Finally, with reference to the important work of Ellen Dissanayake, it is pointed out that the first kind of communication in which we engage, that between mother and infant, is a kind of speech that positively engages the infant in a dialogue with the mother by means of poetic devices.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022

His research mainly focuses on (Cognitive) Narratology and Anglo-American fiction. He has published two books and various papers in peerreviewed journals. Chen Rupeng is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses mainly on Virginia Woolf and theories of affect. Specifically, Rupeng examines how the emotion of fear in the Woolfian oeuvre entails a re-conception of knowledge which shapes her literary forms, political engagement and idea of human history.

Japanese language and literature, 2024

Why is it that we respond emotionally to plays, movies, and novels and feel moved by characters and situations that we know do not exist? This question, which constitutes the kernel of the debate on »the paradox of fiction«, speaks to the perennial themes of philosophy, and remains of interest to this day. But does this question entail a paradox? A significant group of analytic philosophers have indeed thought so. Since the publication of Colin Radford's celebrated paper »How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?« (1975), the number of proposals to solve, explain, reformulate, dismiss or even revitalize this apparent paradox has continued to proliferate. In line with recent developments in the philosophy of emotion, in this paper I will argue against the sustainability of the paradox, claiming that the only reasonable way to continue our discussions about it consists in using it as a heuristic tool to shed light on problems regarding our involvement with fiction. Against this background, I will then focus on one of the problems related to how our emotional responses to fiction contribute to our appreciation of it. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first section shows the parallel evolution of the paradox of fiction and the analytic philosophy of emotion. Here I claim that, although the paradox is epistemically flawed, since one of its premises is rooted in a limited view on the emotions typical of early cognitiv-ism, the discussions it provokes are still epistemically useful. As Robert Stecker (2011, 295), among others, has pointed out, the paradox was formulated during the heyday of cognitive theories of the emotions in which emotion necessarily requires belief. Today, however, only few authors would endorse this premise. If emotion does not always require belief (as the majority of authors in the contemporary debate admit), let alone belief about the existence of the object towards which it is directed, then there is no reason to speak of a paradox. From this first conclusion, however, it does not follow that the paradox is completely without use from the epistemic point of view. A glimpse at the topics touched on during the discussions about how to solve, reformulate, or negate the paradox reveals their value in shedding light on the interrelation between emotion and fiction. The second section elaborates a phenomenologically inspired cognitive account of the emotions by focusing on their cognitive bases, their influence on Emotion in the Appreciation of Fiction 205 cognitions, and their cognitive function. In this model, emotions are responsible for indicating values, for showing what matters to us, and for being appropriate to their objects. My claim is that this view applies not only to reality, but also to our involvement with fiction. In the final section I draw on this account to focus on one kind of appreciation of fiction which necessarily requires our emotional involvement. Following an idea put forward by Susan Feagin (1996, 1), I employ the concept of »appre-ciation« to refer to a set of abilities exercised with the aim of extracting value from the work. There is a long tradition in aesthetics that condemns any focus on the emotions in the appreciation of art and fiction, and defends the necessity of aesthetic appreciation without emotional influence. To refer to this negative attitude towards the emotions, I will borrow an expression coined by Susan Feagin (2013, 636), who refers to »the intellectualized view of appreciation«. Against this widespread view, I will argue that some aspects of the fiction can only be appreciated with the help of our emotions. The cognitive approach developed in the previous section can explain how the emotions might in fact play a significant role in the appreciation of art and fiction. Attention will be paid to three activities involved in appreciation, for all of which emotion is crucial: processing relevant information about the fictional world, understanding aspects of it, and becoming acquainted with the values it presents. My aim here is to argue that there are particular aspects of the fictional world that can only be appreciated if recipients have the appropriate emotions.

Philosophical discussion of emotional responses to fiction has been dominated by work on the paradox of fiction, which is often construed as asking whether and how we can experience genuine emotions in reaction to fiction. One may also ask more generally how we ought to respond to fictional works, a question that has to do both with what we should do when reacting to fiction and with what we should and should not let happen to us. Is it possible to delineate any principles regarding the rationality, and more generally, the appropriateness of emotional responses to fiction?

Cognition & Emotion, 1998

This study examined the effects of emotional subject matter and descriptive style in short story excerpts on text (e.g. rich in meaning) and reader response-oriented (e.g. liking) ratings. Forty-eight subjects, including equal numb ers of trained and novice m ale and female students, read two examples of each text twice and either gener ated or received interpretations between readings in a within-subjects design. In general, intellectual challenge slowed the pace of reading, wherea s suspense-based arousal increased it. Em otional subject matter had a m ore powerful effect than descriptive style on both cognitive (challenging, rich in meaning) and affective (expressive, personally relevant) scales and were read more quickly. Generating interpretations fostered subjective reactions to the Emotional excerpts (images), wherea s Descriptive texts were less amenable to subjective respo nses. Consistent effects were also found for backg round and gender. As in everyday life, subject matter had a dom inant effect in engaging a person's involvement. toronto.c a. The authors would like to thank Randy Sollenb erger for writing the software used to present the short storie s and for assistan ce with data analysis. We also appreciate the helpful com ments and concerns raised by the anonym ous reviewers. q 1998 Psychology Press Ltd Receiving interpre tations on the (a) Im ages, (b) Aware of Words, and (c) Richness in M eaning scales.

2015

The story of this research goes back a long way. With the help of a M.Sc in Cognitive Science at Essex University, I had obtained a post of wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (research assistant) for Professor Helmut Schnelle in the Linguistics Department of the Ruhr University at Bochum in Germany. We were working on a translation protocol of an Earley parser into a connectionist network to prove their formal equivalence (see Schnelle and Doust, 1988, 1992). Perhaps not surprisingly, there are some quite striking similarities between that research and the model of suspense I am proposing today... The research was successful and led to a number of publications (Wilkens and Schnelle, 1990, 1994). I am for ever grateful to Prof. Schnelle for my time in his department. We had numerous exchanges on linguistic, philosophical and cognitive issues, and he was a very personable support to me. At that time in my life, however, I needed to attempt to scale the wall to understanding the human brain from another, more artistic side and launched myself not without some regrets into a multilingual, musical and theatrical career based around Strasbourg in France. Many years later, I wanted to find a way to connect the experience of my artistic work to scientific practice and I got back in touch with Prof. Schnelle in Berlin. With his help, I was able to get accepted on this doctoral research program. So my first tremendous thanks go to Helmut Schnelle for his wide-ranging and profoundly menschlich inspiration. Above all, my heartfelt thanks and gratitude go to my main supervisors, Dr. Richard Power and Dr. Paul Piwek, for all their untiring support, subtle guidance, productive silences and numerous thoughtful insights that kept me on my way in the maze of intuitions, formalisms, distractions and breakthroughs that this research has produced over the last six years. I have learnt so much and I am so grateful for all our suspenseful exchanges. I am also very grateful to Dr. Allan Third, who joined the supervision in the last phase, for his support and for accepting to be the third supervisor of this thesis, and to Prof. Donia Scott who was part of the team at the beginnings of this project and whose vision was vital to finding the spark of suspense. I also want to thank Prof. Dr. Marian Petre for her encouragement and inspiring training sessions and to all who organised the graduate conferences: they were absolutely essential to the success of this research. Thanks too go to Prof. Noel Sharkey who remembered my work in Essex University and helped with his glowing references. Friendly thanks also go to Brian Plüss, Eva Banik and all the other Open University postgraduate students who were always ready to help out and answer my questions. Many thanks too to all those who took part in the online experiments. I especially want to thank my parents and my whole wide-ranging family who have followed the ups and downs of this process and whose support I have always felt. This journey has had its difficult moments and taken up a lot of my time and energy. I want to thank with all my love, Isabelle Marx, my partner and my friend throughout, for all she has done to make it possible. This research is part of my answer to a long-held dream of mine to build bridges between the artistic and scientific worlds. I hope to continue this bridge-building for a long time to come.