OnFiction

Proust and Ruskin on Reading

2012-05-28T08:31:00.000-04:00

I've been reading Marcel Proust and John Ruskin on reading. Proust began to read Ruskin in 1897, when he gave up work on his novel, Jean Santeuil. After this, it would be ten years before he began making notes for À la recherche du temps perdu. During these years, reading Ruskin and then translating Ruskin from English into French became his major literary activity. He made the translation not because his English was good. He said, "I do not claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin." Later, in the final book of À la recherche, Proust was to say that the task of the writer was not to invent in the ordinary sense of the term, but to translate that which is within every one of us.

I had previously read Proust's piece called "On reading" which he had published in 1905 as the preface to his translation of Ruskin's Sesame and lilies. It is a lovely, thoughtful essay, which I have discussed before in OnFiction (click here). It has now been republished by Hesperus, along with a lecture by Ruskin entitled, "Sesame: Of kings' treasuries" (part of Sesame and Lilies) together with Proust's erudite and thoughtful footnotes on it that he added to his translation.

Not far into his lecture, Ruskin says, on the subject of friends of the ordinary kind, that circumstances restrict our choice, and at this point Proust remarks in one of his footnotes, that "the idea seems very beautiful in truth because we can feel the spiritual use to which Ruskin is about to put it." This use is what the lecture is about, the friends we can choose, "the main characters of the lecture: books." Books-as-friends is the idea, too, that Proust made the centre of his essay, "On reading."

A few pages into his lecture, after introducing his idea of choice, Ruskin distinguishes books of the hour—which can be useful, or pleasant, or both—and books for all time. Then, as he begins (on pp. 55 -56 of the Hesperus edition) to talk of books for all time, he says this, which I think is the part of Ruskin's lecture with which Proust would have fallen in love:

A book is essentially not a talking thing, but a written thing; and written, not with a view of mere communication, but of permanence … The author has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful … this, the piece of true knowledge, or sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to seize. He would fain set it down for ever; engrave it on rock, if he could; saying "This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like another; my life was as the vapour, and is not; but this I saw and knew: this if anything of mine, is worth your memory."

This became, I think, part of Proust's theory of art, and of what he would aspire to do for us, his readers.

Proust, M. (1913-1927). À la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time). London: Penguin (Current edition 2003).

Proust, M. & Ruskin, J. (2011) Marcel Proust and John Ruskin: On reading. (Ed & trans, D. Searls). London: Hesperus Press.

Fourth Anniversary, and Experience-taking

2012-05-21T09:16:00.000-04:00

This month, OnFiction began its fifth year of publication. I don't know how long most blogs run for, or even how long most blogs-cum-online-magazines run for, but we feel we have become a presence on the internet with, as you can see opposite, more than 200 members, with more than 100,000 "unique" visitors in our first four years, as well as a large number of people who take OnFiction by RSS and e-mail.

We would like to thank all our readers, the people who make comments, and the people who write to us personally. Thank you!

All this persuades us that although the psychology of fiction is a minority interest, the minority is a substantial one. We are very happy to continue what we have been doing. I hope over the next month or two, to go through our archives, book reviews and film reviews, and bring them a bit more up to date. Please, also, if there is something you think we might do, that would be useful to you and other readers, please let me know. You can find my e-mail address in my Profile.

And, to show that the psychology of fiction is reaching maturity, here's a research bulletin on a new article, published on-line in the American Psychological Association's principal journal of social psychology. It's by Geoff Kaufman and Lisa Libby (2012), and it draws on the theory of fiction-as-simulation, that we at OnFiction have been exploring.

Kaufman and Libby start their article with the following epigraph from Hayakawa (1990):

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to lead; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Kaufman and Libby report six experiments in which they asked student participants to read short pieces of narrative, in which the protagonist was a college student, and in which information was given about the protagonist's thoughts, actions, and feelings. Their purpose was to investigate what they call experience-taking: entry into the experience of a fictional character, which is often called identification. They say that in experience-taking:

readers simulate the events of a narrative as though they were a particular character in the story world, adopting the character’s mindset and perspective as the story progresses rather than orienting themselves as an observer or evaluator of the character (p. 2 of the pre-publication paper.)

The researchers measured experience-taking from people's responses to a nine-item questionnaire that includes such items as "I could empathize with the situation of the character in the story," and "I understood the events of the story as though I were the character in the story."

Kaufman and Libby chose the term experience-taking to mean a merging with the character, a loss of the self-other distinction. It is to be compared with perspective-taking, in which one keeps one's identity and at the same time understands what another person is thinking and feeling.

In their first three experiments, Kaufman and Libby looked at the relationship between people's awareness of their own self and their level of experience-taking while reading the piece of narrative they were given. In Experiment 1, the researchers found that the higher people's scores were on a measure of consciousness of their own individual experience, the lower were their scores on experience-taking as they read the story. In Experiment 2, readers who were asked to think of themselves generically, as average students, independently of what they were studying, as compared with thinking of themselves as individuals, had higher scores on experience-taking when reading. In Experiment 3, participants who read the story in a cubicle with a mirror in it, as compared to reading in a cubicle without a mirror, had lower scores on experience-taking.

In their second group of studies, Kaufman and Libby manipulated the experimental conditions. In Experiment 4, they found that narratives told in first-person voice induced more experience-taking in readers than narratives told in third-person voice. In Experiments 5 and 6, they found that later as compared with earlier introduction into a narrative of information that indicated that a protagonist was a member of a group (respectively homosexual or African-American) of which the reader was not a member, increased experience-taking.

This paper is an important step in understanding conditions of narratives that encourage identification in terms of entering lives other than just the ones given to us by chance and circumstance.

Samuel Hayakawa (1990). Language in thought and action. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Geoff Kaufman & Lisa Libby (2012). Changing beliefs and behavior through experience-taking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0027525

Travelogue: Limerick

2012-05-14T06:12:00.001-04:00

On a visit for a conference at the University of Limerick, in Ireland, I was charmed by the Aer Lingus cabin crew on the flight from Heathrow to Shannon Airport. Even their announcements about what to do in an emergency seemed to be made with a kind of concern for us passengers that was different from the recitations one generally hears on aeroplanes.

Ireland was strongly affected by the visit of the Celtic Tiger, an economic boom that began around 1995 and ended abruptly with the world economic recession of 2008. Speaking with feeling about the Tiger's departure, a taxi-driver who took me from Limerick to the University pointed out, as we passed it, a curious archeological site of concrete walls and half-erected buildings that had been intended, he said, to be the largest shopping mall in Ireland. Whereas Limerick had become well-off, now there is a sense of sadness and anxiety. The city advertises with large electronic signs the spaces in its many new car parks. A lot of car-parking space was available; this is a place without enough cars.

The University of Limerick is very large, and it's beautiful, in a park on both sides of the River Shannon. People who worked there were fond of it, which I could understand. But with the economic recession a question hovers: how to move forward? I didn't mention it to anyone but my thoughts about the place issued in this limerick on Limerick.

An itinerant chap from Toronto
Wondered wherever he'd gone to;
Some was old, some was new,
Didn't once have to queue,
What next should the folks here get on to?

As a group talked together on the conference's last evening, several of us admitted that we had vowed not to mention limericks. At that moment, evidently no longer able to contain the inner emotional pressure to express oneself in verse, which Chinese poets of the Tang period called huai (click here), a fellow conference attender let slip:

A young law professor from Nashville
Said, "Now I'm not going to be bashful;
It's just blurting out,
I might even shout …"

This limerickateur said she would think of the last line the next day, but see how much more interesting this fragment is than my feeble effort. Her ancestors came from this part of the world, so it's clear she was drawing on some inherited ability. I didn't see her next day, so we may never know what she would have found to rhyme with "Nashville" and "bashful."

The limerick is a populist, sometimes improvised, form and of course poetry-written-by-poets isn't improvised. Ireland's greatest poet, W.B. Yeats, said it would take him many days to write even the shortest poem. On the first day no rhymes would come at all, then, he said: “when at last the rhymes begin to come, the first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes a whole day" (Parkinson, 1964, p. 76).

Parkinson, T. (1964). W.B. Yeats: The later poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Image: A modern bronze statue of this one-time port city's dockworkers, on the quayside in Limerick

Traits of Character

2012-05-08T13:06:00.001-04:00

Here at OnFiction.ca we’ve often discussed how empathy helps us to understand the minds of fictional characters. But readers don’t just work to understand the momentary thoughts of feelings of characters, they also form rich models or representations of what characters are like. Just as we can think of a close friend and predict how he or she might respond in a certain situation (e.g., a loud party) based on his or her personality, we similarly form expectations for story characters based on past behavior (either earlier in the story, or in a previous book). David Rapp and Richard Gerrig conducted research on this topic and published it in a paper that is now a classic of the field (Rapp & Gerrig, 2001). In their first study, readers read a series of stories in which characters behaved in ways consistent with one trait or another and then judged the plausibility of different story endings. An example story follows below:

Suzy planned on meeting her family at the park. They were having a huge family reunion that had been in the planning for months. The park was almost 40 minutes away. She knew she needed to leave soon if she wanted to get there on time. Along the way, Suzy came to a stop to let a baby squirrel cross the road. When she arrived at the barbecue Suzy saw a few family members she was looking forward to talking to. Pretty soon they were laughing and reminiscing about things they did when they were younger. Suzy was having a wonderful time talking about old memories, and she didn’t want the day to end. Her 8-year-old nephew William ran over and interrupted the conversation by tugging on Suzy’s dress. William asked Suzy if she would take him to play on the park’s swings.

After reading this story, they judged one of two possible outcomes:

Suzy took William to play on the swings. [trait-consistent outcome]
Suzy didn’t take William to play on the swings. [trait-inconsistent outcome]

Reader who read about Suzy being caring responded quicker to the story ending that was consistent with this model or representation of Suzy’s personality. A follow up, Study 2, found that readers applied trait-based models of characters in a specific rather than general way, indicating that they were judging individual characters based on particular traits rather than simply bad or good. In two additional studies, Studies 3 and 4, the researchers demonstrated that readers apply these models of characters during normal reading (as evidenced by their reading times) and that they are able to quickly update their models of characters as they learn new information. These studies demonstrate once again that many of the social processes that take place in the real world can also be applied to the fictional one.

Rapp, D. N. & Gerrig, R. J. (2001). Readers’ trait-based models of characters in narrative comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 737–750.

* For a copy of this article, please contact Raymond Mar (e-mail address in profile). Apologies for the late posting.

Photo Credit.

I wonder

2012-04-30T02:17:00.000-04:00

I wonder about Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaestion - haughty half-godly heroes and their noble companions. Why such quick deaths for the companions, vanishing like raindrops beneath the scorching suns? Even more I wonder at the heroes, at last human in their grief, broken by their love. What kind of mystery, what strange law, would make a raindrop extinguish a sun?

How it Came to Me by Jonathan Gottschall

2012-04-23T07:20:00.003-04:00

The initial idea for The Storytelling Animal came to me not from research but from a song. A few years ago, I was driving down the road on a beautiful day, cheerfully spinning the FM dial. A country music song filled the cab: Chuck Wick’s “Stealing Cinderella.” My usual response to this kind of catastrophe is to flail at the radio until the noise stops. But there was something heartfelt in the singer’s voice, so I leaned back and listened to Wicks sing a story about a little girl growing up to leave her father behind. Before I knew it I was blind from tears, and veering off the road to mourn the time—still more than a decade off—when my own little girls would fly the nest. I sat there for a long time feeling sheepish and wondering, “What just happened?”

Who hasn’t had a similar experience? When we submit to fiction--whether in novels, songs, or films—we allow ourselves to be invaded by the teller. Chuck Wicks was in my head, squatting there in the dark, milking glands and kindling neurons.

I wrote The Storytelling Animal in an effort to understand how fiction—the fake struggles of fake people—can have such tremendous power over us. The book is about the way explorers from the sciences and humanities are using new tools, new ways of thinking, to open up the vast terra incognita of the storytelling mind. It’s about the way that stories--from TV commercials to daydreams to religious myths—saturate our lives. It’s about deep patterns in the happy mayhem of children’s make-believe, and what they tell us about story’s prehistoric origins. It’s about the hidden ways that fiction shapes our beliefs, behaviors, ethics—how it powerfully modifies culture and history. It’s about the ancient riddle of the psychotically creative night stories we call dreams. It’s about a set of brain circuits--usually brilliant, sometimes buffoonish—that force narrative structure on the chaos of our lives. It’s also about fiction’s uncertain present and hopeful future. Above all, it’s about the deep mysteriousness of story. Why are humans addicted to stories? How did we become the storytelling animal?

Jonathan Gottschall (2012) The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

David Deutsch on Objective Beauty

2012-04-16T07:57:00.004-04:00

It occurred to me, after having listened to k.d. lang’s 2004 album Hymns of the 49^th Parallel a number of times, that if I were a songwriter, I would never, but never, let k.d. lang sing a song I had written if I ever again wanted to perform it myself. Apparently, lang picked some of her favourite songs of Canadian songwriters for that album, including those of some of the best singer/songwriters of the past fifty years. To my ear, lang’s covers are better (in some cases way, way better) than many of the original recordings. And I’m not the only artist who would have felt daunted and envious of a creative peer, based on an aesthetic judgment.

Leonard Bernstein is said to have been preparing for a recording of Mahler’s Symphony Number One when Bruno Walter’s preliminary recording of the same work crossed his desk. After listening to the tapes, Bernstein was said to have immediately abandoned his plan to record, noting something to the effect that he simply could not do it any better. (He nevertheless did eventually record his own version.) Another example comes from Alain de Botton’s (1997) book How Proust Can Change Your Life. He quotes from Virginia Woolf’s diaries in which, upon reading Proust, she exclaims, “Oh, if I could write like that!” and later, “How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped -- and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp." De Botton claims, “Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf.” These anecdotes suggest that some consumers of art have staked a lot on their judgment of beauty. Indeed, Bernstein and Woolf in their astonishment at the accomplishment of another in their fields were willing to stifle their own creative aspirations, at least for a time.

But, if there is no such thing as objective beauty, these choices make no sense. For anyone doubting that something can be objectively beautiful, David Deutsch’s short chapter on the subject (from his latest book, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World) is an eye-opener. Deutsch is a quantum physicist and one of the founders of quantum computation, and as is richly evident in this book, a great admirer of Karl Popper’s ideas concerning how knowledge grows. Deutsch’s chapter, entitled “Why are Flowers Beautiful?”, addresses the question of why flowers are quite reliably found to be beautiful by humans. It makes evolutionary sense that flowers should be attractive to bees, whose job it is to pollinate particular flowers, but there’s no common knowledge between insect species and homo sapiens that could account for this reliable finding. Nor, he argues, is it due to inborn preferences for particular types of colors, contrasts, or shapes. In fact, there are two kinds of beauty: the one that explains the bees’ attraction to the flower and humans’ attraction to certain kinds of art: parochial beauty which is “local to a species, to a culture, or to an individual” (p. 364) , and the other, that is “universal, and as objective as the laws of physics.” The parochial kind of beauty is primarily for signaling information, while the universal kind seeks, like good science, to create “good explanations” (p. 365). “Elegance” is the goal in both science and aesthetic deep inquiry. As throughout the book, we see here Deutsch’s philosophy of knowledge-seeking as the Popperian process of conjecture (a product of the “creative imagination” [p.26]), followed by criticism, followed by new conjecture. He singles fiction out as being most obviously capable of seeking such good explanations, since “a good story has a good explanation of the fictional events that it portrays” (p. 365). Art that seeks objective truth is expected to progress infinitely, as is the Popperian type of scientific inquiry, while parochial art is expected to progress toward a finite state. “Deep truth” in both science and art “is often beautiful” (p. 355).

Deutsch argues that it is easy to be misled by the empiricist view that there can be no objective philosophical or artistic knowledge. Empiricism is wrong in that it purports that we somehow derive knowledge from observation, when in fact all observation is theory-laden. Deutsch concedes that we never deduce moral maxims or aesthetic values from scientific theories, precisely because we don’t really deduce something from something else in building good explanations of anything. In reality, we conjecture and must seek to criticize our own conjecture, and seek out the criticism of others, thereby creating a new and better conjecture. This is the only route to good explanations that are “hard to vary,” (in which “changing the details would ruin the explanation” [p.32]), and therefore approximate reality better than explanations in which elements can be tweaked with little detriment to its elegance or reach. Indeed, the main reason that humans were able to escape from the dictates of biological evolution, parochialism, and the “static” societies these entail, Deutsch argues, is that the process of conjecture does not require our having first systematically refuted all of the intermediate theories that might logically thrive between the emergence of any two conjectures (p. 114). On the contrary, organisms that are evolving must be viable in all intermediate stages to survive to the next generation. Humans can freely go wherever the imagination takes them.

And yet, Deutsch emphasizes, “…we should really understand all our predictions as implicitly including the proviso ‘unless the creation of new knowledge intervenes’ ” (p. 457). What this means for the notion of the objectivity of beauty is that the ultimate in beauty recognized today by the best in aesthetic fields not only may, but will, be superseded in future by better artistic conjectures, better criticism, better subsequent conjectures. In this larger context, perhaps Bernstein, Woolf, and my counterfactual chanteuse self should never have been quite so concerned by the successes of contemporaries in their respective fields.

De Botton, Alain. (1998). How Proust can change your life. New York: Vintage.

Deutsch, David. (2011). The beginning of infinity: Explanations that transform the world. London: Penguin Books.

lang, k. d. (2004). Hymns of the 49^th parallel. Nonesuch Records Inc. Warner Music Canada.

Toronto Comic Arts Festival paean: the Fantastic

2012-04-09T21:54:00.004-04:00

For those readers in Toronto, or able to get there, I will simultaneously express my envy and draw your attention to the upcoming quite-salient-to-fiction-and-psychology Toronto Comic Arts Festival kick-off event (May 4th at 7pm at the Toronto Reference Library -- free but ticketed): a three way conversation between Jeff Smith, Gabriel Bá, and Fábio Moon on Noir and the Fantastic in Comics and Graphic Novels.

I am a long-time appreciator of the storytelling potential of both graphic novels and the fantastic and, coincidentally, have just finished Daytripper, Bá and Moon's fantastic exploration of (minor spoiler warning: skip to the next paragraph if you wish to leave the narrative structure of Daytripper intact) an obituary writer's multiple possible deaths. Daytripper presents a focused meditation on, in the authors' words, "a story about quiet moments ... about what you can tell from somebody's eyes," via both a story and images that epitomize the fantastic.

Similarly, Jeff Smith's graphic epid Bone tells a story that is so overtly fantastical that it often satirizes fantasy -- and yet is, at the same time, filled with feeling and characters the reader cannot help animating. All three of these authors play with forms of storytelling that toy with our expectations about the way a story is told, almost picking those expectations up while we are reading and turning them over so that we can see them more clearly in the story -- a rare art, especially while we are held entranced, wondering what is happening with the characters, with the plot, with the setting. As I have written about comics before, the comics form can enable surplus space for narrative metacognition: room to see the relationship between these components of our experience of fiction in a way that we usually look past as we read through stories.

Transparency

2012-04-02T08:54:00.002-04:00

In a paper published in the second issue of Scientific Study of Literature, Maria Kotovych, Peter Dixon, Marisa Bortolussi, and Mark Holden have taken a big step in understanding identification in literature. They build on Bortolussi's and Dixon's (2003) idea of conversation between narrator and reader, and on some of their previous studies. Their idea is that just as when in conversation we make inferences about what the other person is thinking and feeling, so we do in coming to understand a character in a book. When we need to make such inferences we come to understand the character better, and can identify with that character more strongly.

Bortolussi and Dixon's theory is that that in conversation we make a mental model of the other person as we come to understand that person. I am not sure whether this might be pushing their theory further than they would like, but it seems to me that we construct models of others rather gradually, over a number of meetings, during which we come to understand what they really mean when they talk, come to experience whether they do what they say they will do, and so on. In the very process of making the inferences that go into our mental models of others, then, we also gradually construct our relationships with them, and critical aspects of these models are our degree of affection for these people, and the extent to which we can trust them. It seems we may be doing something of the same when we make mental models of characters in short stories and novels: by inference and gradual understanding we form warm or cool relationships with them, we come to trust them or distrust them.

Kotovych, Dixon, Bortolussi, and Holden report three experiments in their paper. In the first they used the short story "The office," by Alice Munro. It's a first-person story about a woman who wants to be a writer, who has little support from her family and friends. She rents an office in which she can do her writing. Alice Munro's story has what Kotovych et al. call an implicit preamble which includes this.

But here comes the disclosure which is not easy for me. I am a writer. That does not sound right. Too presumptuous, phony, or at least unconvincing. Try again …

It's as if the narrator were talking to the reader and the reader has to make inferences about the narrator. The ingenious idea of the experiment was, for some participants, to substitute for this implicit preamble what the authors call an explicit preamble which starts like this:

I'm embarrassed telling people that I am a writer …

No inferences are necessary; in the explicit preamble the conclusion that the narrator is embarrassed is already drawn. Kotovych and her colleagues argue that the literary idea of identification is not well defined, and they concentrate on just one aspect of it, which they call "transparency:" the extent to which readers understand a character. In this first experiment the researchers found that the transparency of the narrator was greater for readers who read the story with the implicit preamble than for those who read the story with the explicit preamble.

In a second experiment the researchers replicated their finding with Alice Munro's story, and at the same time ruled out the idea that the effect might have been due to the explicit preamble being written in a somewhat different style than the rest of the story. In a third experiment the authors used stories by different writers, and compared versions that used free-indirect speech and directly quoted speech. Free-indirect speech requires more inferences than directly quoted speech. Again they found more transparency of characters was achieved in the versions that required more inference.

It's an important new trend in the research literature, I think, to use sound experimental designs with real literary stories and plausible manipulations of the text. The idea that in coming to know a literary character we need to make inferences as we would with a real person, not just be told about the character, is a critical insight.

Bortolussi, M., & Dixon, P. (2003). Psychonarratology: Foundations for the empirical study of literary response. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kotovych, M., Dixon, P., Bortolussi, M., & Holden, M. (2011). Textual determinants of a component of literary identification. Scientific Study of Literature, 1, 260-291.

Image: Alice Munro. Addendum: I felt privileged a few years ago to have been in the same room as Alice Munro, whom I regard as one of the world's all-time great short-story writers. She was making a very rare public appearance and during it she announced her retirement from writing. I'm delighted that she hasn't taken her announcement seriously.

The Passionate Muse

2012-03-26T08:04:00.001-04:00

Published now, or about now, is my new book The passionate muse: Exploring emotion in stories. It's a hybrid book made up of a piece of my fiction in the form of longish short-story of seven parts, with each part accompanied by a nonfiction psychological discussion of the emotions you may experience while reading. The short story is called "One another." The challenge in writing it was to move across a variety of emotions so that the psychological discussions could range widely. It starts in the mode of a story of smuggling a prohibited manuscript out of the Soviet Union in 1988. Then it changes to a love story, then through a period of anger and sadness to a different kind of love story. And, although these emotions become centres for the story's characters, the most important emotions are the readers own. If we didn't hope to feel moved by a novel or short story we wouldn't read it. If we didn't expect to experience our own emotions at a film or play, we wouldn't go.

The kind blurb-writers of the book's publisher, Oxford University Press, have said:

Oatley … provides insight not only into how people engage with this particular story, but into how people respond to fiction in general. Equally important, he highlights the value of emotion and the importance of stories for our psychological well-being. He explains why people who read a great deal of fiction have a better understanding of others than those who tend to read nonfiction. Humans are intensely social, and fiction transports us to imagined social worlds, enabling us to meet more people and feel for them in many more situations than we could if we lived to be a hundred.

The Passionate Muse offers readers a fresh and exhilarating perspective on the importance of emotion to our appreciation of fiction—and to the vital contribution that fiction makes in our emotional lives.

I'm very grateful to Patrick Colm Hogan, Mary Beth Oliver, Suzanne Keen, and Peter Vorderer for having written complimentary recommendations for the back cover.

The first review, from Library Journal, says this: "This book will appeal to anyone curious about how and why literature (and art in general) can have a significant therapeutic impact."

You can get the book from Oxford University Press (click here) or from Amazon.com (click here) or Amazon.ca (click here).

'Your Brain on Fiction': Raymond Mar, Keith Oatley, and colleagues in the New York Times this weekend!

2012-03-19T15:28:00.008-04:00

Annie Murphy Paul has written a lovely piece this weekend on 'Your Brain on Fiction' on page SR6 of the New York edition of the New York Times.

You may read it there, but I have provided the references described (but not cited) in her essay.

Boulenger, V., Hauk, O., & Pulvermüller, F. (2009). Grasping ideas with the motor system: Semantic somototopy in idiom comprehension. Cerebral Cortex 19: 1905-1914.

González, J., Barros-Loscertales, A., Pulvermüller, F., Meseguer, V., Sanjuán, A., Belloch, V., & Ávila, C. (2006). Reading cinnamon activates olfactory brain regions. Neuroimage, 32(2), 906–912.

Mar, R. A. (2011). The neural bases of social cognition and story comprehension. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 103–134.

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., & Peterson, J. B. (2009). Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: Ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes. Communications, 34, 407–428.

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 694–712.

Research Bulletin: Fact based on Fiction

2012-03-12T06:30:00.001-04:00

The world of publishing has been rocked by numerous examples of writers passing off fictional accounts as fact. Perhaps the most memorable transgression of recent memory is when James Frey’s autobiography, A Million Little Pieces, was found to contain a number of elements that were completely fabricated. Another recent example is Greg Mortensen’s autobiography Three Cups of Tea, the details of which have come under serious question. In both cases, this deception on the part of the author has greatly upset readers and often evoked profound anger. Oprah Winfrey, for example, angrily confronted Frey on her show and accused him of betraying his readers. Jon Krakauer, a renowned author himself, went so far as to write a short book describing in detail the falsehoods put forth by Mortensen (all proceeds of which went to charity). Although authors have clearly been subject to derogation and mistrust following these incidents of deception, what isn’t clear is how this new information affects readers who have already read these books. That is, if someone changes their attitudes or opinions toward drug addiction after reading A Million Little Pieces, do they then correct this attitude after learning that the events described were fabricated? Dr. Melanie Green (UNC—Chapel Hill) and John Donahue examined this precise question, by presenting readers with an article labeled as either fact or fiction (Green & Donahue, in press). (As it turns out, the text used was a Pulitzer-prize winning Washington Post article by Janet Cooke that was later found to be a fabrication.) For some of the people who read the article labeled as fact, they were later told that the article contained inaccuracies: it was actually a piece of fiction. All of the articles resulted in changes in belief, in that regardless of whether something was labeled as fact or fiction, readers changed their opinions based upon what they read. Fascinatingly, although readers who were informed that the previously factual piece was actually fictional developed a negative opinion of the author, they did not change their opinions regarding the content of the story. That is, attitudes and opinions that were changed as a result of reading a supposedly factual piece were not altered when that piece was revealed to be fictional. This article demonstrates the power of fiction, in that understanding a story often entails incorporating that information into our own beliefs and this process can be difficult to reverse. More broadly, this study is a great example of how interesting real-world phenomena with respect to media consumption can be put to empirical test.

(As always, for a copy of the original article, please contact me.)

Green, M. C., & Donahue, J. K. (in press). Persistence of belief change in the face of deception: The effect of factual stories revealed to be false. Media Psychology.

Beholden

2012-03-05T14:21:00.003-05:00

Angelina Jolie’s screenwriting and directorial debut In the Land of Blood and Honey shares more than the obvious with Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo. Yes, both narratives are about genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In both narratives the Western writer speaks through voices of Bosnians. But there is another, uncanny similarity.

It is easy to imagine why Westerners, as they become intimately familiar with horrors of war, feel the stories they hear, all of them, become equally important to tell. Watching Jolie’s movie, one is struck by the thought that she couldn’t bring herself to omit a single awful thing that had happened in Bosnia. The realistic portrayals of mass rape, murder, humiliation, mass killing, torture, concentration camps, snipers, all follow one another vertiginously. It seems that Jolie felt responsibility to tell the story of all the horrors she had heard about and that she was beholden, responsible, to those whose stories she had shared. It ends up feeling too much, so much, that one ends up anesthetized by the shock.

Galloway, through helped artistically by choosing a narrower slice of the story - sniping in Sarajevo - seems also, at times, unable to omit. He takes us through the deadly intersections of Sarajevo with what can at times border on geographical monomania. He wants us to make sure we know every single corner, every single deadly stretch of the street. And so the tight string of his story occasionally slackens.

Yet, how is one to pick – between the responsibility to those whose stories you tell and the quality of the art you create? Is this trade-off even necessary? We can say no, yet still understand the pressure of feeling beholden to those in whose suffering the story was conceived. It seems that it was the very sensitivity of Jolie that cornered her to tell more than a viewer can possibly handle. And it seems that, while implicitly choosing whether to awe the Western film reviewers, or the Bosnian survivors, she chose the latter. And who can blame her.

Jolie, A. (2011). In the Land of Blood and Honey.

Galloway, S. (2008). The Cellist of Sarajevo. Knopf Canada

Making the invisible visible; keeping the invisible invisible

2012-02-28T00:36:00.004-05:00

Thanks to a wonderful collective of artists and geographers*, I have just had the opportunity to think in a new way about the relationship between the truth and the poetic, the known and the unseeable, and the functions of the kinds of stories that people tell each other in trying to make the world better.

In the context of the larger conversation about 'Intervention and Embeddedness, Art Practice and Environmental Discourse' at the American Association of Geographers conference going on in New York, David Haley, Christine Baeumler, and Simon Read shared thoughts on art as a process, and more, as Haley put it, an 'act of making a process manifest, making things possible,' and also of crafting maps for behavioral procedures that might help us deal with uncertain challenges -- and environmental prompts for them. Read showed his understated process for 'mapping issues that may need questioning,' to feel his way into it, and to document, for his own understanding -- and then for others' -- what that path into challenging questions is like, and how to embark on it, knowing where he came from, but explicitly not determining where to go.

The core theme that impressed me was this dialogue between telling strong directive stories that habits need to be relearned -- public processes need to be highlighted, and made equitable -- and creating spaces that prompt others' creation of exploratory stories. As Baeumler so brilliantly summed it up, as much as we are following that irresistible compulsion to make the invisible visible, we should also embrace a willingness to keep some invisibles invisible. The socially motivated and impeccably structured interventions they discussed highlight compelling parallels to the recurrent theme in OnFiction of the open supportive framework provided by fiction, and art -- poieses -- for creative exploration.

*Particular thanks to the organizers Karen Till and Simon Read
The image above is from Marcus Young's project, Don't You Feel it Too?, discussed in the panel by Christine Baeumler; the project is organized around the premise of 'dancing your inner life in public places.'

Research Bulletin: Developing a focused mind for reading

2012-02-20T08:12:00.000-05:00

There has been a growing interest in the neural correlates of narrative comprehension, but so far relatively little of this work has examined developmental issues. Part of the reason why this type of research has been slow to arrive is the difficulty of finding reading tasks that are equivalent (in difficulty, among other things) for both children and adults. A recent paper by Koyama and colleagues (2011) took a novel approach to circumventing this problem, by examining how reading competence relates to a different type of MRI measurement: resting state functional connectivity. Resting state functional connectivity examines the intrinsic associations between regions of the brain, as identified by associations in activity while the brain is at “rest,” or not engaged in any particular task. These associations are thought to reveal the strength of different networks of regions, with some brain areas more tightly coupled than others. This coupling, or association, between areas might represent the result of experience, with brain areas that are commonly co-activated during specific tasks (e.g., reading) becoming more and more “in sync” even when we are not performing that task. Koyama and his fellow researchers looked at the strength of associations for reading brain regions across individuals who varied in their reading ability, for both a group of children (8–14 years) and a group of adults (21–46 years). What they found was that better readers had a stronger coupling between language/speech areas of the brain (e.g., Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area) and more strongly connected motor regions in the brain. They also observed a difference between the two age groups. One such difference was a stronger negative association between a word-recognition area and what’s known as the “default network,” a set of brain regions often linked to mind-wandering (Mason et al., 2007). The same was not found for children, however. One interpretation of this finding is that highly automatized reading, such as that achieved by adult expert readers, involves less mind-wandering whereas this might not be true of proficient child readers. A particular strength of this research is that it acknowledges the importance of examining differences across individuals (in this case, of reading ability) and how these differences might relate to neural measures.

Koyama, M. S., Martino, A., Zuo, X.-N., Kelly, C., Mennes, M., Jutagir, D. R., Castellanos, F. X., & Milham, M. P. (2011). Resting-state functional connectivity indexes reading

competence in children and adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 31, 8617–8624.

Mason, M. F., Norton, M. I., Van Horn, J. D., Wegner, D. M., Grafton, S. T. & Macrae, C. N. (2007). Wandering Minds: The Default Network and Stimulus-Independent Thought.

Science, 315, 393–395.

Principles of Poetry

2012-02-13T09:54:00.000-05:00

Maja and I have a project: to try and glimpse the inner core of poetry. So this is a follow-up to my recent post on Chinese poetry (click here) and Maja's recent post on short lines (click here). What are the psychological principles of poetry?

A first principle seems to depend on what Andy Clark pointed out, that the mind has a deliberative verbal processor and an associative intuitive processor which have utterly different properties. So the mind is a hybrid; we have to negotiate between the different modes. The verbal processor can enable thoughts themselves to be objects of thought. The associative processor is perhaps responsible for concepts and intuitions. A verbal utterance, received by the verbal processor can be purely semantic and syntactic. I can write: "There's a leafless tree outside my window." In these words I can communicate both to myself and you. Perhaps you can think of a tree of this kind. This isn't poetic: you know the sort of thing I mean by drawing on your experience of winter-time deciduous trees. A poetic utterance does this but adds something beyond the semantic and syntactic. It makes connections between and among the words themselves by means such as metres, metaphors, metonyms, multiple interpretations. The psychological effect of an evocative poem is to invite a certain density of reflective thought, which brings a thought feelingfully to mental presence, by its several links with the associative processor. (On this idea of reflectiveness, see Sikora, Miall & Kuiken click here.) If I read, in William Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 the line: "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," the words seem to become poetic by inviting links from the verbal to the intuitive processor that go beyond the semantic and syntactic because they are multiple and simultaneous. Rather than intuitions one-at-a-time, they invite concurrent intuitions. In this line, I enjoy the iambic pentameter because it's like a heartbeat; I think somewhat poignantly of my own aging as of ruined churches I have visited along the English-Scottish border, picturesque but sad, no longer of much use except as memories of a sort; I connect the singing of birds and the singing of choirs; I wonder what birds were doing, flying about in the churches before they were ruined. All in ten syllables: the span of a single conscious verbal thought. If I had merely written such thoughts (as I have just done), you'd read them one at a time, they'd not be linked, and they'd not be of much interest.

A second principle, as John Keats said in a letter of 27 February 1818, is that: "Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity." (In North American usage: it should be unusual but not weird.) The principle was later proposed by Victor Shklovsky: defamiliarization. It was one of the first aspects of literature to be studied empirically, by Willie van Peer. Rachel Giora has shown that brain activation spreads beyond the language hemisphere not in response to metaphoricity, but to unusualness.

A third principle derives from Indic poetics, in which Abhinavagupta said that dhvani, suggestiveness, is the heart of poetry. Suggestiveness implies an intimate partnership: the poet suggests and the hearer or reader creates a shared meaning.

And, as Coleridge said, real "poetry brings the whole soul … into activity." How it does so is what we're trying to understand: trying, but not there yet.

Clark, A. (2006). Material symbols. Philosophical Psychology, 19, 291-307.
Coleridge, S. T. (1817). Biographia literaria, Ed J. Shawcross. Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition 1907).
Giora, R. (2007). Is metaphor special? Brain and Language, 100, 111-114.
Ingalls, D. H. H., Masson, J. M., & Patwardhan, M. V. (1990). The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Keats, J. (1816-20). Selected poems and letters of Keats (Ed. D. Bush). New York: Houghton Mifflin (current edition 1959).
Shklovsky, V. (1919). On the connection between devices of Syuzhet construction and general stylistic devices. In S. Bann & J. E. Bowlt (Eds.), Russian formalism: A collection of articles and texts in translation (pp. 48-71). Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press (this edition 1973).
Sikora, S., Kuiken, D., & Miall, D. S. (2011). Expressive reading: A phenomenological study of readers’ experience of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Journal of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 5, 258-268.
Van Peer, W. (1986). Sylistics and psychology: Investigations of foregrounding. London: Croom Helm.
Vendler, H. (1997). The art of Shakespeare's sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Image: The ruined Jedburgh Abbey

Emotion in stories

2012-02-06T08:32:00.000-05:00

The prolific Patrick Colm Hogan published two books last year, both of great interest to readers of OnFiction.

The first of these is What literature teaches us about emotion. Hogan has an especial knowledge of Shakespeare as well as an extraordinary familiarity with world literature, and this expertise enables him to bridge between psychology and literary theory, by offering examples in which people interested in the emotions can discover important understandings of specific emotions such as romantic love, grief, and guilt. Such emotions are different from those usually studied in the laboratory; literary studies are thereby complementary to laboratory studies. One might say that literature has allowed a search over a much wider space of experience, and with a far deeper thoughtfulness, than is usual in psychology. The book is also a study of particular works, but with a perspective that is different from that of the usual kinds of literary analysis; it's a study of how these works function specifically to explore and throw light on emotion.

The second book is Affective narratology, the emotional structure of stories, in which Hogan shows that the structure of stories is a product of human emotion systems. In one analysis, Hogan focuses on time, and shows that it doesn't spread forward evenly like clock time. It's jagged, with times of intensity and times when nothing much happens. The intense times are the times of emotion. Stories are told in a way that follows this pattern, with a concentration on the moments of emotional significance, and omission of the rest. Although he doesn't discuss it in this book, I was reminded of Frank Kermode's The sense of an ending, in which he depicts the ticks and tocks of clock time as both inexorable and meaningless, so that stories which usually have the sense of an ending can offer us meaning which acts as a consolation. Though I find Kermode one of the most worthwhile of literary scholars, consolation seems such thin gruel. Hogan's idea is better, and closer to the truth. It's our emotional structures that give meaning to life in our loves, our strivings, our disappointments. Stories reflect such structures, and enable us to reflect on them.

In a further kind of analysis in his narratology book, Hogan recounts how life has periods of normalcy, which are interrupted by emotions. Story structure too, follows this pattern, tending to move from a normal period, or an implied normal period at the beginning, to a disruption, and then towards an ending in which a new normalcy is established. Hogan discusses how three emotional story themes are universal and occur throughout the world. He calls these stories of suffering, of the heroic, and of the romantic. He discusses, too, some themes that are less prevalent worldwide: interruption of attachment, the progress of sexual desire, trajectories of revenge, and criminal investigations, each of which is also a development of an emotional theme, starting from a state of normalcy which is disrupted. Hogan ends his book by suggesting stories help us understand and develop the structure of our own emotional lives.

No one has done more than Patrick Hogan to bring literary theory and cognitive science together. It's significant that the interface of this bringing together is emotion.

Hogan, P. C. (2011). What literature teaches us about emotion. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hogan, P. C. (2011). Affective narratology: The emotional structure of stories. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Kermode, F. (1966). The sense of an ending: Studies in the theory of fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Metacognition in the practice of narrating psychological scholarship

2012-01-30T21:32:00.008-05:00

* Having just spent most of the past week as a disciplinary outsider at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, I have just had a fascinating chance to observe the workings of the social life of psychological stories as they are produced and shared in their native terrain. This experience has made me appreciate narrative scholarship and science studies, particularly the sociological study of the development of scientific knowledge. In the The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Max Weber identifies social scientists as distinctive amongst scientists for taking into account the self-understanding of the actors they study. As a geographer who studies the way that people understand relationships between society and environment, I was attending this scientific meeting to gain a better understanding of the way that psychologists understand their ways of studying society-environment relations. I learned a great deal about constructs developed by social psychologists that may be very useful for addressing environmental management challenges; as an outsider, I also gleaned some insights about the ways that accounts of scholarship were being constructed and narrated that may be of interest both to those concerned with the way narration works and also to people working in society-environment domains, particularly those that deal with the challenges of building communicative action amongst diverse groups.

Such scientists!
Overwhelmingly, the strongest impression one may take away from a meeting such as this is the degree to which psychologists identify themselves as scientists who use empirical methods--and consequently frame their narrations as legitimate to the degree that they are properly scientific. Not only in the sessions, but also (and perhaps particularly) in the hallways, restaurants, and bars across town, the most common--and emphatic--story I heard went something like this: "Now I respect a lot of different kinds of research, as long as it's empirically supported, but X--- doesn't really respect his data!" Perhaps of particular interest from a social psychology perspective, this invocation of scientific identity was rarely accompanied by acknowledgement of intergroup biases, or "in-group / out-group" effects, that might be particularly helpful for understanding the mechanisms of contest between different modes of knowledge production. Instead, especially as a social scientist from a considerably more post-normal discipline, I glimpsed many performative practices that appear to help mark the presentation of valid research (and that are obviously often lacking in the messier social sciences where neither correlation nor experimentation are most often used to support claims, but instead interpretive analysis).

What warrant!
Emphasizing good science seems to (further) reduce the motivation to explain why a particular approach is a good way to explore a particular question--the "warrant". I know this exposition of alignment between motive and methods is not many people's favorite part of science--for one thing, it often opens up broad arenas for conflict. However, contests over why a particular way to understand a particular question is better than another are also productive, and can be the heart of improvement in the progressive approximation that is the production of science. This explicitness is particularly important in fields that require collaboration or cross-over between different fields (as almost all questions of society-environment do), where multiple expertises have required different and often incommensurate background preparation and knowledge cultures. Disciplinary culture often cultivate implied warrants, since highly coherent disciplines may use similar methods. However, my observations suggest that this culture of implicit warrant encourages over-hasty focus on the calculations and analyses, and less investigation of starting premises and assumptions than is often warranted. It may be that people are discouraged from asking questions about foundational premises by not wanting to appear ignorant of the basics, but it is particularly important to be able to ask when these basics may well exhibit a fundamentally different point of reference (for example, as Michael Burawoy asserts in a recent review of global sociology, "Just as economics takes the standpoint of the economy and the expansion of the market, and politics takes the standpoint of the state and political order, sociology takes the standpoint of civil society and the defense of communicative action." We might add psychology as taking the standpoint of the individual person).

Systemic spillover
How people understand their situation within complex systems is one of the central questions that has compelled me to turn to the behavioral sciences. Given the orders of magnitude in differential impact of behaviors on environments between Euroamericans and others, the question of whether nudging individual consumers to reduce their impacts in minor ways (e.g. through prompting water or energy conservation measures) can scale up to more significant effects has tremendous implications for the future direction of both society-environment policy and scholarship. Although some research on these "spillover" effects--how small improvements might spill over into much more systemic transformations--was presented, it was a tiny proportion of the research dedicated to "sustainability psychology," almost insignificant in comparison to the amount of research dedicated to confirming that specific constructs about environment and society can make measurably changes in people's compliance with social and environmental norms in the laboratory. Although I do not want to downplay the remarkable research expanding our understanding of complicity in and possible change frameworks for the enormous challenges presented by climate change and unequal resource distribution, the contrast between the trivial scale of most interventions and the felt urgency of the challenges may illustrate a few of the significant challenges to addressing social problems from the standpoint of individuals, challenges that I suggest might be made somewhat more approachable by narrating them in somewhat more post-normal science terms:

First, the temporal and spatial scale of thinking about society-environment experience from the perspective of individuals makes it considerably difficult to capture the systemic scale of most socio-environmental dynamics. In almost all of the papers I heard, I felt a palpable urge to ask the scientists involved to take a few steps back in the way they set up their questions--particularly to take critical geographic and historical aspects of socio-environmental dynamics into account.

Second, the impetus to tell adequately scientific stories with authority clearly encourages scholars to tell cleaner rather than messier stories. With all respect to Occam's razor, the cleanest and most parsimonious and flashy stories I heard told were often the most radically problematic (especially, interestingly, when the authors claimed that the conclusions were self-evident, for example in the highly problematic equating of "overpopulation" of short-life, large-family countries with highest environmental impact).

Third, shifting the focus of analysis from the individual to the more systemically entrained individual (and including within the frame of that focus, more metacognitively, the understandings of the researchers involved that shape questions such as those about overpopulation and biophilia), may problematically call into question paradigms of both academic work and also the kind of agentic action in the world that activist scholars would like to encourage.

I am keenly aware in expressing these observations of how easy it is to come across as casting aspersions from the shore as intrepid scholars row themselves about in the shifting currents of a developing field of complex knowledge. I share these observations, however, with the hope that the impressionistic view from shore (or perhaps from another boat sailing by, in this metaphor, encumbered by different currents to row against), helps make visible dynamics that are hard to see from within. For me, so often the voice of setting in this land of character and plot, it was fascinating to step into a storied world where setting was (usually) at best an impressionistic stage set (even in concrete form, sometimes actually limited to a short set of amenity-valenced words such as "butterfly," "mountain," and "tree"). This gave me a much clearer sense of the challenges and implications of focusing on persons as a unit of analysis in socio-environmental work, and I will be interested to see whether inserting explicit awareness of these implications helps address any of the challenges I've noted.

Burawoy, Michael. 2011. The Last Positivist. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 40: 396.

Weber, Max. 2010 [1949]. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and edited by Edward Shils and Henry Finch with a new introduction by Robert Antonio and Alan Sica. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

*Thanks to Julian Hermida for the image; searching "metacognition" returned more images of diagrams than anything else I have ever searched. This may explain a lot of my affection for cognitive psychology.

Interactive Fiction

2012-01-23T07:59:00.001-05:00

At the end of November, I attended the Fourth International Conference on Digital Interactive Storytelling, in Vancouver (ICDIS 2011, click here). My informants tell me that interactivity is the wave of the future. It's not audio-books or the Kindle that publishers should be worrying about, but the new art-form in which one doesn't just listen to, watch, or read a narrative: one participates and helps to create the narrative that unfolds as one interacts with its characters. This is a theme that Janet Murray, who gave a very engaging talk at the conference, foresaw in her lovely book Hamlet on the holodeck (1997).

Where are we with this new genre? The critical instance is Façade, a interactive one-act play which came out in 2005, written by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, based on Edward Albee's Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf. In Façade one is invited into the apartment of a couple, Grace and Trip, who are in the middle of a serious marital quarrel. As with most online games one can walk about in the scene, the perspective of which changes as one moves and—here is the innovative part—in Façade, one can take part in conversations with the characters, and thereby influence what happens. Some of the things one says will result in one's being thrown out of the apartment, others will precipitate one of the apartment's inhabitants leaving, and so on.

Façade took Mateas and Stern three person-years years to write, substantially more than most artistic projects, and it doesn't seem to have been succeeded by anything that builds on it. Yes, the video game industry overtook the movie industry some years ago in its world-wide financial sales. Yes, in video games one can move about, and where one chooses to go affects what one sees and what can happen. That is to say you can go here rather than there. You can face this fierce opponent rather than that one, or find this object you're seeking rather than that one. But, except for engaging in fights, interactivity of person with fictional characters doesn't seem to beckon to the captains of the video game industry. Why not?

Video games engage people in action, often of a violent kind, but also in ways that include problem solving and exploration—you can visit places like virtual Saint Petersburg or virtual Istanbul. Interactivity with fictional characters can be seen as the next big challenge for artificial intelligence. A big accomplishment of artificial intelligence has been to understand how to create visually realistic scenes in which one can move around, scenes that are as detailed and visually convincing as anything one can see in the movies. If you want to see an example, you can look at trailers of the Tolkien-like world of the video-game SkyRim. But I can't run SkyRim on my computer. It requires too much computing power. One of my informants, who enjoys video games, told me he has at home a very fast computer that he uses specially for such games. Secondly, a great deal of the computing power goes into the visuals, and rather little into understanding language or interpersonal interaction.

In Façade, you converse with the characters, Trip and Grace, by typing on the keyboard, but the program only allows input at certain points. What is understood is picked up from keywords in a way that was demonstrated by Weizenbaum (1966) in his program "Eliza." One of the bases of what happens in Façade derives from Games people play (1964) in which Eric Berne showed how some of people's interpersonal interactions are games of power and dominance. With such game-like interactions together with keywords that the program recognizes, the program calculates indices of affinity between the player and each character, and between characters, which then influence characters' facial expressions, and what they say and do.

Façade seems to me to be full of good ideas. When I played it (after some difficulty downloading it, because it wouldn't run on my fairly new Mac), I found it didn't afford me a very convincing experience of the flow of conversation. Putting this another way, although the ICIDS conference I attended had lots of smart people engaged in various kinds of innovation, it seems that artificial intelligence has some way to go to reach the kind of sophistication in the understanding and generation of language that it has achieved in visual processing, and there seems to be some way to go before a workable theory of story generation is developed, that can generate character interactions in response to player contributions. Hamlet hasn't yet appeared on the holodeck. The next steps may be made by people who are both skilled writers of fiction who are also deeply immersed in artificial intelligence.

Albee, E. (1962). Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf. New York: Signet.

Berne, E. (1964). Games people play. New York: Grove Press.

Mateas, M., & Stern, D. (2005). Façade: a one-act interactive drama. Procedural Arts.

Mateas, M., & Stern, D. (2007). Writing Façade: A case study in procedural authorship. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Second person: Role-playing and story in games and playable media (pp. 183-208). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. New York: Free Press.

Weizenbaum, J. (1966). ELIZA—A computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM, 9, 36-45.

Quick Hit

2012-01-18T17:48:00.002-05:00

The Guardian Newspaper hosts this interesting article on using the metaphor of friendship to describe our relationship with books and authors. A thought-provoking read.

Short Lines

2012-01-16T23:28:00.004-05:00

Here is Helen Vendler, an English Professor from Harvard, discussing an anthology of American poetry in the NYRB:

“Printing something in short lines doesn’t make the writer a poet; it only makes him a person with a book of short lines.”*

First I chuckled. Then I blushed. After all I have been writing my own short lines for a few years now, calling them the ‘p’ word. It was like playing violin without any instruction in the instrument, trying to paint without knowing the color circle. Yet it felt right, seductive, as if I were actually writing poetry. After all, the motive wasn’t to express an idea, or even a feeling (I can always cry), but to reach across the transparent barrier to the other side, where Keats’s beauty keeps company with truth. I was reaching for it in short lines with little knowledge, and even less discipline.

I wonder whether I resemble the first pre-historic painters, who tried to reach across such a barrier – ignorant of technique, but trying nonetheless. They felt perhaps a similar impulse move them, and tried scratching an awkward-shaped animal on a cold cave wall. How many centuries did it take from one such impulse to what we now know as ‘cave art’? No one will ever know. I, on the other hand, have it easy. If I want to move from short lines to poetry I should crack-open a book, perhaps even one of Vendler’s own. I hope that’s all it takes - muses make no guarantees.

*Vendler, H. (2011). Are these the poems to remember? The New York Review of Books, Vol.LVIII, 18, 19-22.

Patterns in the World and in the Mind

2012-01-09T08:59:00.003-05:00

I am trying to understand some more about Chinese poetry of the Tang period. I haven't got very far, but what I have picked up is so interesting that I thought I would pass it on to readers of OnFiction. My source is Stephen Owen (1985) in his book on Chinese poetics. Here—with apologies for misunderstandings which I hope knowledgeable readers will correct—is some of what I have gathered so far.

In the West we tend to think of poetry as an act of the imagination and even, as the Romantics urged, an act of extraordinary imagination, inspired by the gods. Tang poetry isn't imagination, but an interpretive perception by a particular person at a particular historical moment in a particular place. It occurs because of an inner emotional pressure (huai) to make conscious with concern and strong feeling what is on his or her mind, to make a communication to another human being. What is written in a poem is a particular kind of pattern in which aesthetic significance and meaning are conjoined. Such a pattern is called wen, which is also the word for writing, and also for literature. It is the "civilizing force of culture" (p. 18). Rather than being based on metre and rhyme (as in the West) poetic patterns of this kind are usually written in couplets, in each of which the second line parallels the first so that the relationship between them draws on, and clarifies, an inner principle.

Owen's first example (p. 12) is a four-couplet poem by Tu Fu (who lived between 712 and 770). Its title is something like: "The poet writes of what he feels, traveling by night." Here is Owen's translation of the first couplet.

Slender grasses, breeze faint on the shore,
Here, the looming mast, the lone night boat.

In the original, each line is written as five Chinese characters, so that the couplet literally is:

fine/thin grass/plants faint wind shore
high/precarious mast alone/lone night boat

Each word is written as a single Chinese character, and there is a parallelism not just between the lines but between the two characters in the first pair, the two in the second pair, and so on, for instance between fine/thin and high/precarious. (The carefully calligraphed Chinese characters, their etymologies, and their specific associations also have relationships with each other.) Not only that, says Owen, but the first and second half of each line need each other: "they act on each other according to the laws of the empirical universe" (p. 17). So in the first line there is a hidden image of the fine grasses swaying in the faint breeze. At the same time, the boat's mast is precarious, seemingly threatening to fall with the rocking of the boat, so that the poet feels anxiety, alone at night, while on the shore people are safe in their houses. I take it that what Owen calls parallelism is what Jakobson (1956) called metonymy: juxtaposition that can be based on similarity, on contrast, on a part suggesting the whole, or on any other kind of mental association.

Just as principles of the world can be perceived in such patterns (wen), so, says Owen, the conscious human mind can manifest itself in these same patterns, and poetry is one such manifestation. There is nothing here of poetry being mimetic, nothing of the Platonic idea of truths existing only in some ideal, other-worldly, realm. Instead, a particular piece of literature emerges naturally from the conjunction of some aspect of the world with an aspect of human consciousness, so that the writing (wen) is the manifestation of that conjunction. A reader of such poems then, works backwards from the words of the poem to the specific mental state of the poet as he/she is writing the poem, and can then engage, like the poet, in a comparable piece of reflective consciousness.

Four-couplet poems such as "The poet writes of what he feels" have turning points, midway through them, of a kind that in the West would later be embodied in the sonnet form. At the turning point in this poem, the poet moves from his perceptions of the outer world to inside himself, to reflect on how he is getting sick and old, and has to give up his post, so that even with his writing he will be unknown, like a single gull on the sands.

This is just a beginning: I am brooding on Owen's book. Apart from marvelling at the beautiful compression of thought in the structures of these Chinese poems, I have already started to look at the world in ways that are new to me, ways that I find engaging. I have read the book only once. I shall read it again, along with some more Tang poetry.

Note. Ezra Pound became interested in Chinese poetry and made translations of it in ways that were influential in the imagist movement. Owen makes it clear that it's not with such translations that he is concerned. Although the early twentieth century movement of imagism drew on some aspects of Chinese poetry, it is also not with imagism or its ideas that Owen is concerned. Instead he invites us to take a leap of imagination into what it might be like to inhabit the minds of these ancient poets. The closest Western parallel I know is in Proust's depictions of things and people in themselves and at the same time in their inner meanings, meant to be passed on to readers.

Roman Jakobson (1956). Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbance. In R. Jakobson & M. Halle (Eds.), Fundamentals of language (pp. 53-83). 'S-Gravenhage: Mouton.

Stephen Owen (1985). Traditional Chinese poetry and poetics. Madison: WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Failing or not?

2012-01-02T00:02:00.004-05:00

It is day two of the new year and I’m not sure if I’m failing at my resolutions. It’s hard to tell.

Three days ago I told myself a story of another me that I’d approve of more, and likely ways I could become it. You can imagine the list – everyone is tempted by at least one of the following: plans of actions (e.g. exercise, eating vegetables, not yelling at one’s children), deleting unwanted life props (cigarettes, alcohol, debt, belly), and vague feel-good inclinations (trying new things, spending more time with family and friends, enjoying each moment). So, as I was writing this future story of myself and numbering the bullet points, I had a moment of aesthetic disgust. Why should we always be writing the stories of future self in this terrible, pseudo-scientific prose (the hypothesis being that if I exercise, don’t smoke, and enjoy each moment (whatever that means), then I’d be… what? Healthy? Better? Perfect?) Instead, I tried to summon up a feeling, that feeling of perfect that we all sometimes wade into, no matter our smoking, belly, or debt, and then wrote a line to remind me of it. (Do a couplet, if you’d like). Now, the line makes no sense to anyone but me. It is my secret paper-plane that delivers me to the door of that feeling. Sometimes the door is open and sometimes it’s closed. Sometimes I forget I have a line.

I know for some of you this seems unwise. After all, how could you verify whether you are keeping your resolve? How would you know if you failed? You wouldn’t, I’m afraid. If all this makes you itchy for a list, please embrace the bullet points. As for me, I’ll keep my line handy, and do whatever takes me through that door. I’ll see how it goes this year. If it doesn’t work, there’s always next year to fail at being imaginary perfect me.

How do we tell ourselves about the New Year?

2011-12-26T11:59:00.003-05:00

With New Year's resolutions hanging fancifully around this week's corner, it's interesting to return to the recurring question of how we understand and narrate our own goals. New Year's resolutions are a fascinating example of the tricky nature of goals. On one hand, they seem dauntingly simple: we know precisely the sorts of things we think would make our lives better. On the other hand, the trope of resolutions that need to be revisited yearly because they have yet to be successfully achieved reveals a misalignment between the seeming simplicity of setting goals and the complication of achieving them.

When I hear people talk about the difficulties of achieving goals, they're usually lamenting the challenge of living up to their own expectations -- but rarely lamenting what seems to me a perhaps much more obvious problem of how hard it is to figure out what their expectations and aspirations should be. In addition to the (itself highly contested) Wikipedia entry on New Year's Resolutions, the literature on goal setting and received wisdom about resolutions both also suggest that it might be useful to reconsider the seeming obviousness of being easily able to access, understand, and set goals for ourselves.

While much of this literature appears to focus on teaching or reminding people to understand the systemic nature of their goals more analytically (i.e. to recognize that some goals may symbolize other goals, or may be more achievable with intermediate sub-goals), it seems equally useful to also apply this yearly reminder to other domains in which we may over assume the certainty with which we know our own minds. The reflective mode projected onto northern hemisphere year end holidays in part by the darkest days may proffer an opportunity to retell ourselves our goals stories with more patience than we may often have for their complexity and complication.

I, for one, realize that if I can store Christmas stories in my memory in the form of several dozen carols, I could probably indulge in a less reductionist process for considering what form of new year's narration might tell resolve.

Research Bulletin: The Brain's Generation of Creative Stories

2011-12-20T11:02:00.004-05:00

Understanding how the brain operates during highly complex tasks is a daunting prospect. However, along with some interesting developments regarding story comprehension (Mar, 2011), there have some intriguing findings regarding the brain’s behavior during the creation of stories. Howard-Jones and his colleagues (Howard-Jones et al., 2005) asked a small sample of teachers-in-training to generate stories based upon a few key words. Importantly, these individuals were at various times instructed to be creative while generating their story, or uncreative. As well, the words presented to them were at times highly related to one another, or unrelated. For example, a set of unrelated words might be COW, ZIP, and STAR. In response to these words, and an instruction to be creative, one participant created the following story:

This cow got so fed up with people doubting that cows could jump over the moon that it decided to jump over a star. To do this, it wore a special rocket suit. The cow zipped up the space suit, lit the blue touch paper and flew up over the star.

In contrast, a set of related words (BRUSH, TEETH, SHINE) tended to produce a less creative story, particularly when the objective was to be uncreative:

The children were told that they must brush their teeth when they are young in order to make them shine and that they wouldn’t have any friends if their teeth weren’t shiny. So every single night, the children brushed their teeth to make them shine.

When individuals engaged in this story generation task while being scanned with an MRI scanner, it was found that factors related to greater creativity (relatedness of the words, instructions to be creative) were associated with activation in both the left and right hemisphere (i.e., bilateral activations in the prefrontal cortex) in comparison to more left hemisphere activations during uncreative conditions. This finding is consistent with a previous study that employed a slightly different imaging method (i.e., PET), which found that using unrelated words as a foundation for generating creative stories resulted in more bilateral activations compared to related words (Bekhterva et al., 2000). In sum, it appears that while language has traditionally been viewed as the domain of the left hemisphere, creative tasks such as generating a novel story appear to rely on the right hemisphere as well.

Bekhtereva, N. P., Starchenko, M. G., Klyucharev, V. A., Vorob’ev, V. A., Pakhomov, S. V., Medvedev, S. V. (2000). Study of the brain organisation of creativity: II. Positron-emission tomography data. Human Physiology, 26, 516–522.

Howard-Jones, P. A., Blakemore, S.-J., Samuel, E. A., Summers, I. R., & Claxton, G. (2005). Semantic divergence and creative story generation: An fMRI investigation. Cognitive Brain Research, 25, 240–250.

Mar, R. A. (2011). The neural bases of social cognition and story comprehension. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 103–134.

* Apologies for the late posting and for copies of any of these articles, please contact me (e-mail in profile).