NARRATIVE 2009

Received this evening: "Your proposal to the Narrative Conference 2009 has been accepted. Congratulations!" The conference is in Birmingham, UK, the first week of June; essentially it is a 57th birthday present for me.

For the record, here is what I proposed (long form):

Reading Polyaesthetically: Extending Observed Pictorial Boundary Extension Effects to Engagement with Narrative Texts

Recent experimental work by psychologist Helen Intraub and her research teams have confirmed a phenomenon which may be extensible to the reading of narrative texts. Experimental evidence suggests boundary extension of visual memory occurs in the time period between briefly viewing images and a subsequent request to recall and draw those images. That is, the viewer reproduces an image which includes peripheral information not in the originally viewed image. This phenomenon is more pronounced for images with a narrower field of view than for those with a wide-angle view. It also appears to be time dependent in that the amount of extension decays with time after viewing. Yet, it always manifests as extension, never compression. Intraub suggests boundary extension is grounded more in the perceptual schemata of the viewers than in other memory-related functions. Working from the idea that readers’ representations of texts are not unlike viewed images, I map Intraub’s notion of boundary extension onto the mental images constructed from the text(s) as we read—visual images being the most prevalent, but aural, tactile, and olfactory images occur as well. This notion is supported by Sven Birkerts’ writing on the concept of depth of field in reading where he raises the idea that as we read we “hear” but do so without aural stimulation. From this point it is a logical and not unreasonable extension to suggest that we also “see” without visual stimulation (that is, the eyes are not seeing anything but words on a sheet of paper yet the mind “sees” the images evoked by the text), “smell” without olfactory stimulation, and so on. Consequently, it is not uncommon that recollections of texts are somehow greater than the texts themselves. In this paper, I suggest that—just as with viewed physical images—a created mental image produced as a consequence of engaging with a narrative text is also grounded in and enlarged by our perceptual schemata. I also suggest that the more senses engaged by a text the greater the opportunity for boundary extension: this is what I mean by “reading polyaesthetically.” Perceptual schemata are not merely visual; they involve all of the senses such that from a single stimulus—e.g., the act of reading—textual depth is developed by the consequent response of manifold senses. This paper extends earlier work on my project on Depth of Field in Narrative, as presented at the Narrative Conferences in 2005, 2007, and 2008. Examples from the works of Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Virginia Woolf support the discussion. Critical foils will include aspects of Emma Kafalenos’ recent book on causality in narrative and H. Porter Abbott’s discussion of under- and over-reading of texts.