Dr Jeremy Scott, Senior Lecturer in English Language and Literature from the Department of English Language & Linguistics, will be presenting a paper at the forthcoming conference ‘Thinking Through Fiction’, hosted at the University of Kent on 21-22 June 2016.
The conference offers a rich programme exploring the relations between fiction, language, writing and thought, including panel discussions, round tables and an evening of readings in Canterbury.
Jeremy’s paper, entitled ‘Worlds from Words: Cognitive Poetics and Creative Practice’ will be presented on the second day of the conference. The paper sits on the critical-creative boundary, and draws upon aspects of the field of cognitive poetics to explore what happens when readers read, and asks how an understanding of these processes can benefit the creative writer.
There is a remarkable facility in the mind of the reader which enables her or him to be transported to fictional worlds which may or may not bear relation to his or her ‘actual world’, for example to modern Bangkok, ancient Greece, Victorian London, the mountains of Tolkien’s Middle Earth or the surface of Mars. Traditionally referred to as a process of ‘suspension of disbelief’, this remarkable facility is something which creative writers should understand thoroughly and aim to exploit – and, crucially, should also be wary of disrupting unnecessarily (or, at least, be ware of what happens when it is disrupted). It is in providing a principled and rigorous account of the way readers read that cognitive poetics has much to offer the writer. Indeed, Jeremy will argue that writing and reading, rather than being separate activities, should be seen as interrelated positions along a cline.
Using terminology drawn from narratology, cognitive linguistics, Text-World Theory and Possible Worlds Theory, Jeremy will explore how writers build and manipulate worlds and, second, how an understanding of this theoretical infrastructure can invigorate creative practice.
For further details of the conference, including a full programme, please see the conference webpage here: www.kent.ac.uk/english/research/conferences/thinkingthroughfiction.html