In 1972, after pursuing an ambitious career in a range of other locations, they moved back to Glasgow with their three young children, Kevin, Rachel, and Elspeth, to live in the south side of the ...city. Alastair’s diagnosis in the early 1970s with rheumatoid arthritis led to his specialisation in hand surgery. Pneumonia in 2016 led to the first in a series of hospital admissions, the last of which ended in November 2020.
Based on a wealth of compelling arguments,Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narratoris an important addition to literary studies, eighteenth-century history, and book and print culture.
Reading fiction for pleasure is robustly correlated with improved cognitive attainment and other benefits. It is also in decline among young people in developed nations, in part because of ...competition from moving image fiction. We review existing research on the differences between reading or hearing verbal fiction and watching moving image fiction, as well as looking more broadly at research on image or text interactions and visual versus verbal processing. We conclude that verbal narrative generates more diverse responses than moving image narrative. We note that reading and viewing narrative are different tasks, with different cognitive loads. Viewing moving image narrative mostly involves visual processing with some working memory engagement, whereas reading narrative involves verbal processing, visual imagery, and personal memory (Xu et al., 2005). Attempts to compare the two by creating equivalent stimuli and task demands face a number of challenges. We discuss the difficulties of such comparative approaches. We then investigate the possibility of identifying lower level processing mechanisms that might distinguish cognition of the two media and propose internal scene construction and working memory as foci for future research. Although many of the sources we draw on concentrate on English-speaking participants in European or North American settings, we also cover material relating to speakers of Dutch, German, Hebrew, and Japanese in their respective countries, and studies of a remote Turkish mountain community.
This article aims to show how attention to the history of ignorance can bring to light salient qualities of key texts from the past, and in doing so illuminate not just the history of the book and ...the history of reading. The eighteenth-century saw a substantial increase in availability of printed material, but most full-length printed books were beyond the budget of the poorest. This market was met by chapbook abridgements of the most popular texts, some of which were considered by the higher ranks to be proper reading for the poor (religious classics) and some which were more controversial (fiction). However, readers on each side of this divide were often ignorant not only of how the other side was reading specific texts, but of the fact that they were not in fact reading the same text at all, since the poor were much more likely to rely on abridgements. I compare two abridgements of a key eighteenth-century religious text, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and show how both converge on a more forward looking narrative technique than the original and on a more level representation of social ranks than the original. An “approved” text for the poor, therefore, by means of ignorance, had the potential to encourage a non-approved attitude towards aesthetic innovation and social rank. This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Ignorance,” edited by Lukas M. Verburgt and Peter Burke.
Verbal narratives provide incomplete information and can be very long, yet readers and hearers often effortlessly fill in the gaps and make connections across long stretches of text, sometimes even ...finding this immersive. How is this done? In the last few decades, event-indexing situation modeling and complementary accounts of narrative emotion have suggested answers. Despite this progress, comparisons between real-life perception and narrative experience might underplay the way narrative processing modifies our world model, as well as the role of the emotions that do not relate to characters. I reframe narrative experience in predictive processing and neural networks, capturing continuity between fiction, perception, and states like dreaming and imagination, enabled by the flexible instantiation of concepts. In this framework, narrative experience is more clearly revealed as a creative experience that can share some of the phenomenology of dreams.
Language and literature can stimulate the embodied resources of perception. I argue that there is a puzzle about why we experience sequences of these embodied responses as integrated and coherent, ...even though they are not anchored in space and time by a perceiving body. Some successions of embodied representations would even be impossible in real world experience, yet they can still be experienced as coherent and flowing in response to verbal texts. One possibility is that embodied responses to language are fleeting; they need not be integrated because they do not depend on, or relate to, one another as they would in perception. Yet it is the potential for embodied representations to linger and connect with one another which underlies new and persuasive embodied literary theories of vividness, narrative coherence and metaphor comprehension. Another possibility is that readers anchor their embodied representations in a notional human body, one endowed with superhuman powers, such as omniscience. But this account relies on implausible, post hoc explanations. A third possibility is that integrating embodied representations produced by language need be no more problematic than integrating the deceptively patchy information harvested from the environment by perception, information which gives rise to an experience of the world in rich and continuous detail. Real world perceptual cues, however, sparse though they might be, are still integrated through grounding in specific points in time and space. To explain the integration of embodied effects, I draw on sensorimotor theories of perception, and on Clark’s suggestion (1997,
. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) that language can be understood as an additional modality. In this light, the embodied simulations generated by literary texts can be integrated through patterning in a high dimensional, vector space neural architecture, a patterning which recalls real world experience but is specialised to the sustained experience of language itself. This account can help us understand what makes literary experience distinctive and unique.
How do we come to have a sense of self, and tacit beliefs about our particular selves? In cognitive science, a view has emerged of the self as dynamic and malleable rather than fixed. The philosopher ...Daniel Dennett has characterised the self as ‘a centre of narrative gravity’, comparing selves to the physical centre of gravity, ‘a purely abstract object’, ‘if you like, a theorist’s fiction’, but with the potential for a ‘well delineated and well behaved role within physics’ (Dennett 1992: 104–5). In this formulation, the self is subject to constraints, but not the clearly identifiable and comparatively
Eighteenth-century readers received copious advice on how to improve their oral reading. Private lecturers and instructors, often called 'elocutionists', disparaged old-fashioned methods of teaching. ...These older methods encouraged readers to use a sing-song tone and chanting rhythm when they read. These qualities were useful in earlier periods because they aided memorisation and helped readers to project into large social spaces. In the eighteenth century, however, the well-off had less need to memorise and were more likely to read aloud in domestic settings. The elocutionists therefore encouraged a 'natural' or 'conversational' style, and implied that by following their advice, readers would be able to acquire this. Yet at the same time, many eighteenth-century authorities suggested that good oral reading required the innate quality of taste. As a result, learners experienced a tension between the suggestion that anyone could learn to read in the new style through instruction, and the suggestion that only those genteel readers with taste could be good oral readers.
11 essays by international specialists open up the research field of distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. The third book in an ambitious ...four-volume set looking at distributed cognition in the history of thought. Brings together essays on literature, history, philosophy, art, archaeology, medicine, science and material culture. Includes a general and a period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. For students and scholars in Enlightenment and Romantic studies, cognitive humanities and philosophy of mind . Draws out what was distinctive about Enlightenment and Romantic insights into the cognitive roles of the body and environment. Examines how humanities topics are affected by new insights from the cognitive sciences. This collection explores how Enlightenment and Romantic practices and ideas reveal the diverse ways that cognition was seen as spread over brain, body and world in the long 18th century.Contributors. Miranda Anderson, University of Edinburgh and University of Stirling, UK. Ros Ballaster, Mansfield College, University of Oxford, UK. Renee Harris, Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, USA.Elspeth Jajdelska, University of Strathclyde, UK.Karin Kukkonen, University of Oslo, Norway. Charlotte Lee, University of Cambridge, UK.Jennifer Mensch, Western Sydney University, Australia.Lisa Ann Robertson, University of South Dakota, USA.George Rousseau, University of Oxford, UK. John Savarese, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Richard C. Sha, American University, Washington DC, USA.Helen Slaney, University of Roehampton, UK. Mark Sprevak, University of Edinburgh, UK.Michael Wheeler, University of Stirling, UK.
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