Temporality of sense-making in narrative interactions
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Yanna Popova
Yanna B. Popova (D. Phil. in Language and Literature, University of Oxford, 2001) has taught at the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham. She was a founding member of the Department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, where she worked between 2006 and 2014. Her education has been in linguistics, literary studies, and philosophy, and her main areas of research are in the fields of cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory, narratology, and the applications of enactive cognitive science to understanding of works or art and aesthetic reception. She has published articles in Frontiers in Psychology, Language and Literature, Modern Drama, Style, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. She has also contributed to edited volumes on image schemas in cognitive linguistics, post-cognitivist psychology, cognitive poetics, cognitive narratology, and creativity, among others. Her book Stories, Meaning, and Experience: Narrativity and Enaction (Routledge, 2015) has been recently re-issued in paperback format (Routledge, 2018).
and
Elena Cuffari
Elena Cuffari is an assistant professor of philosophy and program area chair in women’s studies at Worcester State University, where she has worked since 2014. From 2012 to 2014, she was a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher Postdoctoral Fellow in the international network TESIS (Towards an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity); for this project, she was based at the University of the Basque Country in Donostia/San Sebastian and spent time at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. Elena completed her doctoral dissertation in philosophy, “Co-speech Gestures in Communication and Cognition,” in 2011 at the University of Oregon, advised by Mark Johnson. She has published articles on gesture, metaphor, embodiment, social interaction, meaning, and habits, and on the twentieth century French philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in peer-reviewed journals including Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Hypatia, Metaphor and Symbol, and Frontiers in Psychology. Elena has contributed to edited volumes, most recently including a chapter on hand gesture analysis in Intercorporeality: Emerging Socialities in Interaction (Oxford University Press, 2017) and one on the science of monogamy in New Philosophies of Sex and Love: Thinking Through Desire (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). She serves on editorial boards for Language Sciences and Frontiers in Psychology. Her current project is a monograph co-authored with Ezequiel Di Paolo and Hanne De Jaegher (of the University of the Basque Country) and expected to appear in the fall of 2018 entitled Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language.
Abstract
Human experience is inherently temporal and involves placing events, symbols, and actions in a temporal scheme. This article deals with a specific aspect of temporal experience as it relates to reading and experiencing narrative fiction. Within an enactive understanding of human cognition, we propose a view of literary reading as a process of participatory sense-making between a reader and a storyteller. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making maintains that agents, by enacting their own sense-making, directly and partially constitute the sense-making of other agents. Sense-makers in interaction navigate two orders of normativity: their own and that of the interaction itself. Linguistic sense-making (languaging) opens up further possibilities for understanding complex spatially and temporally distributed forms of social interactions such as narrative interactions. Reading a narrative is one such example of mutually constituted navigation between an interaction dynamic and interactors’ sense-making. The reader completes and co-authors emergent textual meaning and a textually emerging storyteller guides and anticipates the multiple temporal displacements, realized linguistically, that a reader has to experience in the process of reading. We explore the participatory structure of a narrative through its temporal unfolding and the specific, non-linear nature of the temporal dynamics of interacting with a storytelling agency. In particular, narrative interactions are seen as modulations in the pacing of a given narrative’s unfolding. It is suggested that the reader’s enactment of such temporally realized pacings constitutes a better description of narrative immersion than its traditional understanding as a simulation of spatial situatedness.
About the authors
Yanna B. Popova (D. Phil. in Language and Literature, University of Oxford, 2001) has taught at the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham. She was a founding member of the Department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, where she worked between 2006 and 2014. Her education has been in linguistics, literary studies, and philosophy, and her main areas of research are in the fields of cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory, narratology, and the applications of enactive cognitive science to understanding of works or art and aesthetic reception. She has published articles in Frontiers in Psychology, Language and Literature, Modern Drama, Style, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. She has also contributed to edited volumes on image schemas in cognitive linguistics, post-cognitivist psychology, cognitive poetics, cognitive narratology, and creativity, among others. Her book Stories, Meaning, and Experience: Narrativity and Enaction (Routledge, 2015) has been recently re-issued in paperback format (Routledge, 2018).
Elena Cuffari is an assistant professor of philosophy and program area chair in women’s studies at Worcester State University, where she has worked since 2014. From 2012 to 2014, she was a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher Postdoctoral Fellow in the international network TESIS (Towards an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity); for this project, she was based at the University of the Basque Country in Donostia/San Sebastian and spent time at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. Elena completed her doctoral dissertation in philosophy, “Co-speech Gestures in Communication and Cognition,” in 2011 at the University of Oregon, advised by Mark Johnson. She has published articles on gesture, metaphor, embodiment, social interaction, meaning, and habits, and on the twentieth century French philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in peer-reviewed journals including Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Hypatia, Metaphor and Symbol, and Frontiers in Psychology. Elena has contributed to edited volumes, most recently including a chapter on hand gesture analysis in Intercorporeality: Emerging Socialities in Interaction (Oxford University Press, 2017) and one on the science of monogamy in New Philosophies of Sex and Love: Thinking Through Desire (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). She serves on editorial boards for Language Sciences and Frontiers in Psychology. Her current project is a monograph co-authored with Ezequiel Di Paolo and Hanne De Jaegher (of the University of the Basque Country) and expected to appear in the fall of 2018 entitled Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Corrigendum to: Line Brandt. 2016. The rhetorics of fictive interaction in advertising: The case for imagined direct speech in argumentation
- Introduction
- Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity
- Gestures as image schemas and force gestalts: A dynamic systems approach augmented with motion-capture data analyses
- Contrasting attention to mutual knowledge in English and Mopan Mayan conversation: Schooling, orality, and cultural cosmology
- Upright posture and the meaning of meronymy: A synthesis of metaphoric and analytic accounts
- Temporality of sense-making in narrative interactions
- Meaning making from life to language: The Semiotic Hierarchy and phenomenology
- Retraction of: The rhetorics of fictiveinteraction in advertising: The case for imagined direct speech in argumentation
Articles in the same Issue
- Corrigendum to: Line Brandt. 2016. The rhetorics of fictive interaction in advertising: The case for imagined direct speech in argumentation
- Introduction
- Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity
- Gestures as image schemas and force gestalts: A dynamic systems approach augmented with motion-capture data analyses
- Contrasting attention to mutual knowledge in English and Mopan Mayan conversation: Schooling, orality, and cultural cosmology
- Upright posture and the meaning of meronymy: A synthesis of metaphoric and analytic accounts
- Temporality of sense-making in narrative interactions
- Meaning making from life to language: The Semiotic Hierarchy and phenomenology
- Retraction of: The rhetorics of fictiveinteraction in advertising: The case for imagined direct speech in argumentation
