Keynote speeches for Narrare’s 7th annual Interdisciplinary Autumn Seminar for PhD Researchers. Keynotes are open to everyone.
10.00 Merja Polvinen: “The Kindness of Literary Houses: Fictional Narrative and Enactive Cognition”
11.00 Eneken Laanes: “Narration as Translation: Diasporic Postmemories of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe”
The event will be streamed. (Zoom link Meeting ID: 629 1123 5564 Passcode: 313514)
Abstracts:
Merja Polvinen: The Kindness of Literary Houses: Fictional Narrative and Enactive Cognition
Research in cognitive literary studies has shown how important embodiment is to our engagement with literary texts. In this talk I will focus on enactive cognition, one specific aspect of that larger project, and on how this theory gives us further conceptual tools for understanding readers’ embodied engagement with narrative fictions. I’ll first introduce the basic tenets of enactive cognitive theory and then outline how this phenomenologically oriented framework could be useful for thinking about both the life-like and the artificial qualities of literature. Enactive theory is offered as a bridge that connects readers’ embodiment and the literary texts as artefacts, and through a reading of Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi (2020) I present both the fictional world and the formal elements of a narrative as action potentials in a single cognitive environment.
Eneken Laanes: Narration as Translation: Diasporic Postmemories of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe
This presentation explores postmemorial documentary, autobiographical, and/or autofictional literary texts that address the memory of familial implication (Rothberg) in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Public remembrance of the Holocaust in this region was restricted and delayed by the Soviet regime until the 1990s. The delayed engagement with this memory following the collapse of the Soviet Union—often at both a generational and geographical remove, the latter produced by migration—has given rise to novel literary forms for addressing trauma and perpetration as eyewitness memory fades. This paper proposes the idea of narrating such memories as a process of cultural translation across generational and geographical divides. Specifically, the paper examines the non-individualistic and non-identitarian forms of these autobiographical narratives, the use of translingualism to convey memories across geographical, cultural, and linguistic divides, and a particular translational transnationalism of memory that emerges from such narration as an “omnidirectional” and disorienting translation (Dickinson). The paper also demonstrates how these narratives challenge both national and transnational memories of WWII in Eastern Europe.
Speaker Bios:
Dr Merja Polvinen is Senior Lecturer in English philology and Docent (associate professor) of Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is a former fellow of Institutes of Advanced Study at both Helsinki and Uppsala, and one of the team PIs in the consortium Instrumental Narratives: Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory (iNARR 2018-2022). Merja’s work has focused on interdisciplinary literary studies, from complex systems dynamics in her PhD (Reading the Texture of Reality, 2008), to her current work in 2nd-generation cognitive approaches to literature. Her book Self-Reflective Fiction and 4E Cognition: An Enactive Approach to Literary Artifice (2023) is out in the new Routledge series on Cognitive Humanities.
Dr Eneken Laanes is Professor of Comparative Literature at Tallinn University and the Project Leader of the ERC project “Translating Memories; The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena”. Her research interest include transnational literature, transnational and Easter European memory cultures, memory studies, historical novel, theories of autobiography and self-writing, multilingualism. She is the co-editor of special issues “Cultural Memorial Forms” (Memory Studies, 2021) and “Perpetrators, Collaborators and Implicated Subject in Central and Eastern Europe” (SEEJ, 2023) and of the edited volume “Novels, Histories and Novel Nations” (SKS, 2015).