Thinking in Images: Visualization, Imagination, and Empathy in Reading (American Comparative Literature Association)
Houston, Texas
Event: American Comparative Literature Association
Visualization and imagination have long been recognized as vital to the act of reading. While Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky may have denounced the maxim "Art is thinking in images" in his seminal essay "Art as Device" (1917), in favor of strategies of defamiliarization, mental images and imagery are some of the most important ways we engage with a text. In Dreaming by the Book, Elaine Scarry describes the function of poetry and novels as "instructions for mental composition" (244). That is, a text encourages readers to fill in the blanks; to reconstruct for themselves certain sensations, emotions, etc. These blanks, according to Wolfgang Iser in The Implied Reader, require readers to draw upon imagination, whereby meaning is created. Ultimately, literature encourages us to envision realities and modalities outside of our own. It is for this reason that reading fiction is considered to be an exercise in empathy––which Marco Caracciolo and Karin Kukkonen conceptualize to be a form of feeling with; of "imagining what we take him or her to be experiencing at a given moment" (With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition, 76).
This seminar invites papers which attend to the function of visualization, imagination, and/or empathy in reading. In particular, participants are asked to consider how texts across a variety of genres, languages, time periods, cultural contexts, and subject positions, encourage similar or convergent ways of visualization, imagination, and empathy. Can we say reading is "thinking in images"? To what degree do texts encourage the generation of mental imagery and does this necessarily lead us to empathize? How does reading differ phenomenologically from engagement with other arts and mediums? What are the implications of cultivating an embodied and empathetic reading experience, particularly in an era of increasing polarization and automatization? How do certain texts reflect historical and cultural variations in bodily experience? We welcome interdisciplinary approaches drawing from affect theory, narratology, reader-response theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, cognitive literary studies, and other related fields.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Theories of mind (ToM) and cognitive approaches to reading; embodied models of reading.
- The impact of genre and form(at): fiction vs. non-fiction, literary vs. genre fiction, nonstandard/"non-literary" texts.
- Differences across bodies: gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and/or ability of readers, authors, narrators, and/or characters.
- Reading in translation or in different languages and effects on the ways we visualize, imagine, and empathize.
- Theories of imagination, literary imagination, and limits to imagination in reading.
- Narratological inquiries; impact of perspective and focalization impact on how we visualize and empathize.
- Reading in the age of Artificial Intelligence. How do AI/LLMs read and how do we read works produced by them?
https://www.acla.org/seminar/ba686732-ae11-442d-ad20-e7af3591be41
Sasha McDowell