Description of the talk:
Although many forms of knowledge and expertise are currently under attack, literary studies has long struggled to render its value intelligible to the public, to students, and to members of other disciplines. This cross-disciplinary talk draws on contemporary learning research and feminist philosophy to clarify how literature and literary study structure our perception and guide our attention, preparing us to approach new challenges and experiences in increasingly discriminating and flexible ways. Besides highlighting the centrality of perceptual transformation to literary study, this talk will offer suggestions for how we might continue to democratize the literature classroom and resist exclusionary hierarchies of value that prevent us from doing justice to the arts.
Elaine Auyoung is an associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota and faculty member of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies and the Center for Cognitive Sciences. Her multidisciplinary interests include nineteenth-century British literature and culture, the experience of reading, psychological approaches to the arts, feminist epistemology, and learning in the humanities. Her scholarship seeks to recover forms of knowledge and experience that disciplinary norms and institutional structures systematically exclude or discount.
She is the author of When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind (OUP, 2021), which provides conceptual tools for examining reading experiences that literary critics have long dismissed as naïve and undisciplined. This book draws on psychological research on reading and cognition to account for how writers such as Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy bring readers into intimate relation with fictional characters and worlds by engaging their embodied knowledge and their readiness to form social impressions.
Recommended articles:
What We Mean by Reading." New Literary History 51 (2020): 93-114: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/753316
"Becoming Sensitive: Literary Study and Learning to Notice." PMLA 138 (2023): 158–64: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/becoming-sensitive-literary-study-and-learning-to-notice/C14A980B05B210E2CEF499EE0403BAC3
"A Language for Literary Expertise: Epistemic Resources and Perceptual Transformation," New Literary History, Vol. 55, Nr 3-4, 2024 pp. 515-542, 10.1353/nlh.2024.a953938
Welcome all, this is an open seminar!
Annika Mörte Alling
Associate Professor
French literature
annika.m.alling@hiof.no