 Abstracts Dominic McIver Lopes: Literary value is a kind of aesthetic value. However, aesthetic value is often thought to be realized by perceptible features and literary value is not realized by such features. This paper sketches an account of aesthetic value that is paradigmatically realized by perceptible features and that naturally extends to non-perceptible features. Peer F. Bundgaard: The role of design structure in the visual experience of pictures has traditionally been defined in two contradictory ways: the Ernst Gombrich way according to which either you see a depicted object in a picture or you pay attention to the way in which (the design in virtue of which) the artist has pulled off the representational stunt - you ca’t have both; or the Richard Wollheim way which defines aesthetic experience as ”twofolded“ by nature: seeing an object in an artwork is seeing it in/through/along with the design that presents it. In this paper, I will follow the path opened by Dominic Lopes in Sight and Sensibility who, roughly stated, shows that pictures come in more or less Gombrichian or Wollheimian ways which in turn entails a richer typology of seeing-in than suggested above. I will try to further refine the ontology of design structure (and its relation to pictorial representation) in two ways: first, I will point to the existence of a type of pictures in which design may present two or more consistent objects (in a non-duck/rabbit manner)-a case which seems to escape existing typologies; next, I will characterize (manipulation with) design structure as a means of meaning making in visual art. The main point here is that pictures are expressive objects upon which meaning has been bestowed, and the level at which this meaning construction is achieved is primarily the design level. Jerrold Levinson Roughly thirty years ago, as part of an exploration of the ontology of art, I suggested that musical works--and implicitly, also literary works--were not pure, abstract structures, like geometrical forms, but instead impure, indicated structures. (See "What a Musical Work is" and "What a Musical Work Is, Again", reprinted in Music, Art, and Metaphysics.) However, what exactly does that mean? In the present paper I revisit that old idea of mine in the hope of clarifying it somewhat, before then using it as a springboard to discussion of artistic indication as a singular psychological act, of the individuation of indicated objects that results from such indication, of the relation between artistic indication and actions of simple indication, and finally, of the indication that musical and literary artworks effect, as opposed to the indication by which they are created. John M Kennedy, Psychology, Toronto In place of Rubin’s figure-ground, let’s describe 6 ways a line can show foreground and background. These are universals, as relevant to the moon and Mars as the Earthly environment. They are as relevant to the touch of blind people as to the vision of the sighted. They are the basis of cave art. Since the line can be dotted, let’s consider how a line with spaces can do the same work as a continuous line - show surface edges. There is an asymmetry here, since continuous lines and surface edges do not stand for dotted lines. Foreground and background implies a vantage point, the core idea in perspective. With lines standing for surface edges, in a fashion governed by perspective, realism is possible. Hence, violations of realism can be appreciated - the tropes of depiction. Cathrine Kietz Analogous to our visual perspective, we also have a temporal perspective that spans beyond the present singular time point (what cognitive psychology refers to as our memory span). In literary narratives, only the characters in the story have a visual perspective on the represented world, but the reader, I will argue, has a temporal perspective on the narrative. Whereas the represented visual perspective can be relevant for the reader’s representation of the story, the reader’s own temporal perspective is relevant for the narrative presentation of the story. My theoretical starting point lies within Roman Ingarden’s phenomenology. First, I argue that there is an ontological difference between what he calls ‘filling-in the indeterminacies of a literary text’ (i.e. imagining that an old man has grey hair, even though it is not explicitly mentioned) and what he calls concretizing a literary text (i.e. making it temporally present). I have tried to further corroborate this difference in two reading time experiments. Second, I argue that concretization is a form of temporal perception. Perception is organization of stimuli in foreground and background structures. The difference between temporal foreground and background is a matter of the phenomenal distance between an event and the temporal point of view. In another reading experiment, I manipulated the distance between temporal point of view and certain boundary events. If events were ‘backgrounded’, they ceased to functions as boundary events. My interest in temporal perception is mainly aesthetic - but imagine that we only investigated the span of visual perspective, how much would that tell us about visual perception? Ole Togeby, Department of Aesthetics and communication, Aarhus University The reading of literary artworks is not a means to a (socially defined) end for the readers, as it is for all other text prototypes, but an end in it self, pastime, play, entertainment, pleasure and change of world view. Artworks are not addressed messages exchanged in an interaction, but permanent works exposed to the general public. Beauty is according to Kant not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead a consciousness of the pleasure which attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. If artworks is seen as play, it presupposes metacommunication about the rhetorical situation with a certain double consciousness. Narrative judgements are, according to Phelan, the point of intersection for narrative form, narrative ethics, and narrative aesthetics. Michael Ranta, Research fellow at SOL/ CCS (Centre for Cognitive Semiotics), Lund University, Sweden During the last few decades, the view that any attempt to define art by referring to necessary and sufficient conditions must fail has gained relatively wide acceptance in academic circles theorizing about the arts. If essentialist views on art put forward before the 20th century must be regarded as untenable, the development of contemporary art has made such views even more problematic. Within cognitive psychology, considerable attention has been given to the capacity of humans and other organisms to categorize objects and events. Numerous studies, beginning with the pioneer work by Eleanor Rosch and her associates, seem to have given empirical confirmation that categories generally speaking have a graded structure, i.e. categories form around best or prototypical category members from which other members successively deviate. Moreover, narrative-historical structures seem sometimes to play a crucial linking role in this respect (cf. Carroll). In this paper I intend to show how these approaches may have a bearing on understanding the nature of the category "art", not least by taking contemporary art into consideration. Recent research within cognitive psychology, schema theory, and narratology will here be taken into account. Some concrete works of art will be discussed in some detail. Karin Kukkonen, St John’s College, Oxford Lawrence Barsalou’s notion of ”situated conceptualisation“ suggests that we process concepts not as abstract generalisations, but rather as a set of instructions which cue us to simulate the experience of the concept in an embodied fashion. A ”situated conceptualisation“ places the person who runs the simulation into the situation; it gives the experience of ”being there“. For literary artworks, this means that the experience of immersion is closely connected to the conceptual issues they raise. On this account, the meaningful experience of artworks is based on a particular set of cues for ”situated conceptualisation“ which are designed to make salient their attendant concepts. This paper outlines different ”situated conceptualisations“ of social space in the eighteenth-century novel, and works towards an account of how different notions of the social world are thereby inscribed into the experience of an artwork. I will then draw some more general conclusions on how the meaningful experience of an artwork is connected to the ”situated conceptualisations“ it elicits, how this understanding of art connects the aesthetic and the social, and how it can be combined with more traditional notions of aesthetics and intentionality, such as Cassirer’s ”symbolic forms“. Oleg Sobchuk, University of Tartu I will discuss certain peculiarities concerning the functioning of memory during the processing of narratives. I will argue the following points: 1) To have the possibility of apprehending narrative, a person actively uses working memory. But the retention of all the received information is impossible. Therefore, I claim that the apprehension of narratives is selective, although this selectiveness is not arbitrary. 2) In every narrative there is a certain structure that may be called accentuation structure, the aim of which is to mark the elements that have to be retained in mind of the perceiver. Due to this accentuation, the narrative is hierarchical from the mnemonic perspective. 3) Accentuation may be explicit (e.g. the phrase "Pay attention to this event, because...") or implicit, i.e. a less obvious indication of the importance of a narrative element (repetition, focalization, specific additional events, etc). 4) The existence of the accentuation structure helps to explain functioning of narrative equivalence. When a narrative has two events, A and X, linked semantically, the former usually is accentuated, although the second is not. This structural feature may be explained by L. Vygotsky's theory of higher mental functions. Svend Østergaard The main claim of this paper is that the aesthetic effect of paintings is mostly a derived effect of the human perceptual system. According to the loop model of perception the ”meaning“ of incoming visual stimuli is determined by top-down modulated expectations. Normally this happens in a dynamic flow between the individual and the environment, but in the case of a painting the expectations and thereby the visual effects are decoupled from reality which is one of the sources for the aesthetic experience. One general outcome of this is that there might be interplay between the predictions, i.e. the rules of perception, and the content of the painting. This interplay can support the motive in a non-overt manner. This will be illustrated with examples where the painting evokes expectations of dynamic propagation and by examples where the painting presents lines in a non-generic position that implicitly directs observer’s attention. Or the interplay can have the form of a tension between the motive and the expectations. This will be illustrated by examples where the evoked dynamics contradicts the content and also by an example where there is a conflict between the source of light and the shading. Reference Kendall Walton ABSTRACT: Works of art sometimes help us understand people or attitudes or situations or experiences different from any we have encountered in real life; they expand our conceptual horizons. On the other hand, our ability to appreciate art is limited by the extent of our past real life experiences: You can’t understand or appreciate a love poem, it is said, if you have never been in love. I will explore when, how, and to what extent each of these observations applies to our experiences of various kinds of art — the fascinatingly various kinds of illumination artworks provide, and the mechanisms by which they do so. Wolfgang Wildgen, Universität Bremen Joseph Beuys developed new views and practices in his artwork. The aim of this paper is not to interpret this artwork (Beuys thought that interpretations are superfluous), but to reflect the restrictions of traditional artwork in the space of possible signs and the elaborations and specifications introduced by Beuys. This allows a judgement about the difference between art and other sign production (if a difference exists). In his teaching and political controversies Beuys used graphical /diagrammatic signs and the question is: Is this meta-art or art? In this context the controversial reactions to Beuys artwork during his lifetime and later may be used to evaluate the specifics and delimitations of his art and possible answers to the question: What is art? Contents: Context and development of Beuys’ art Jean Petitot Paul J. Locher, Montclair State University Abstract Anjan Chatterjee Neurosychology has played a critical role in advancing our understanding of large-scale human behavioral systems, like perception, language, emotions and attention. Its role in aesthetics is still being defined as the appropriate methods and proper frameworks are being established. Qualitatively, aesthetics is one area where brain damage can paradoxically facilitate artists’ production. I will discuss different ways that neurological disease can change and sometimes ”improve“ art production. However, to advance, the field needs to develop quantitative methods that allow formal statistical tests and invite replication. I will discuss our attempts to quantify formal-perceptual, content-conceptual and evaluative parameters of artwork. We use these quantitative methods to characterize the effects of brain damage on the production and perception of artwork. Eduardo Abrantes, New University of Lisbon | Center for Subjectivity What is a ”sound object“? More acutely so, in what way does the adding of ”sound“ describe, question or challenge the notion - the multiple notions, actually - of what an object is? Can a voice be an example of a sound object? If so, how to describe it? And more importantly, what do we gain (and/or loose) in our understanding of what a voice is and means, if we experience it as a sound object? This cluster of questions departs from concerns taken up in my PhD research project, where I question the experience of the voice as presence in the context of phenomenology of sound. In other words, I start by supposing that the voice can be questioned from a philosophical perspective, as a worthy philosophical ”problem“. I assume also that this perspective, informed by phenomenology, should aim for an holistic description that does not fall so easily into the trap of the traditional dual-divide of voice as speech - therefore, thought or meaningful language - and voice as acoustic event - physical/physiological sonorous manifestation, or simply put, a sound. Lastly, this method of questioning although departing from a philosophical background, is interdisciplinary both by nature and necessity, dealing with artistic experimentation in the fields of sound art, performance and field recording. Nikolaj Zeuthen In the movie Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino, Harvey Keitel plays the role of 'The Wolf', a man who "solves problems". He is brought in at a late point where the two protagonists, Vincent and Jules, find themselves in a truly messy situation, having by accident killed an associate in their car by shooting him in the head. Also in this paper, we must face a messy situation; not one, however, involving blood and brain mass, but one that concerns the semiotics of the sentences we find in narrative fiction. How should we regard the utterance act behind them and how should we regard their meaning? The roles of Jules and Vincent are played by the narratologists Dorrit Cohn and Gerard Genette. The accident in the car is John R. Searle's pretense-theory of fiction, which Cohn and Genette do not really know how to approach. Actually they disagree fundamentally as to the correct understanding thereof. As there are indeed some areas in Searle's theory that are not easily cleaned up, we find ourselves in the need of a real problem solver. In a late entry, Roman Ingarden is cast in the role of The Wolf. Irene Mittelberg, RWTH Aachen University Based on a comparative semiotic analysis of static abstract works of art and dynamic gestural images, this paper explores the role of embodied conceptual structures as driving forces in the constitution and interpretation of visual signs. One of the underlying assumptions is that despite their metonymic spareness, abstract depictions in paintings and ”descriptive gestures, those forerunners of line drawing“ (Arnheim 1969: 117) enable the beholder to relate to the actions represented or performed in front of them based on her or his cognitive, physical and social experiences (cf. Bredekamp 2010; Krois et al. 2007). It will be argued that the ”structure of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 216) as exhibited in selected paintings by Paul Klee and coverbal gestures may be said to be motivated to a certain degree by image and force schemata (Johnson 1987; Talmy 1983). As gesture research has shown, expressive body motion and posture may reflect schemata such as BALANCE, PATH, OBJECT, CONTAINER, CENTER-PERIPHERY, LEFT/RIGHT, SUPPORT, etc. (Cienki 2005; Mittelberg 2010). These structures seem to not only guide processes of experiencing and interpreting the world, but also to underlie gestural instances of ”exbodiment“ of inner images, inclinations and emotions (Mittelberg 2008: 149). This talk aims to offer some glimpses at ‘felt qualities of meaning’ (Johnson 2007), hoping to shed light on some bodily aspects of the understanding of art works and human communicative behavior (Brandt 2006; Johnson 2007; Turner 2006). Emily Troscianko, St John's College, University of Oxford My research draws on literary studies and the sciences of the mind (including psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind) in the exploration of experiences and interpretations prompted by literary artworks. My current work on what I call ‘cognitive realism’ - which denotes the degree of correspondence established between cognitive processes in the reader and their textual evocation in literary artworks - suggests that literature can induce experiences which may either differ significantly from, or bear close resemblance to, experiences of the real world and its objects. In this paper I focus on the cognitive continuum established in all literary works between vision (in the fictional characters) and imagination (in the reader), two faculties which are closely connected in both neural and phenomenological terms. Considering current scientific research on vision and imagination in relation to works of literary Realism and Modernism yields new ways of thinking about ‘representation’ in literature and visual perception, and encourages asceptical stance as regards the explanatory purchase of the ‘neural correlates’ of real-world or aesthetic experience. The sufficiency and necessity of representation (as phenomenological feature and brain state) in accounting for conscious experience is challenged by accounts based on embodied and situated enaction. Mikkel Wallentin This talk presents the results from a study investigating the brain activations accompanying intense emotions evoked by listening to a story. Regions of the brain usually found to be involved in the processing of fear, such as amygdala, were found to exhibit increased activation during intense parts of the story. Additional measures of heart rate variability supports these findings, suggesting that complex narrative emotions are processed in part by the same brain structures that process more simple conditioned emotions. Ulrike Altmann, Freie Universität Berlin, Languages of Emotion Our everyday experience is shaped by alternating contexts of factual events and fictional contents: We watch the TV-news and read newspapers. But we also read fairytales to our children or get captured by the plot of a novel. Children starting from an age of three years are able to differentiate between factual and fictional worlds (Woolley & Wellman, 1990). Surprisingly, despite the extraordinary relevance of fictional contents for our everyday life, learning and likely the development of mentalizing abilities, little is known about its neurobiological basis.
We discuss the effects of familiarity and defamiliarization on the aesthetic perception of literature [1, 2]. To investigate the contribution of fluency and defamiliarization on the aesthetic evaluation of figurative language, an fMRI experiment was conducted. We compared the neural correlates of processing (a) familiar German proverbs, (b) unfamiliar proverbs, (c) defamiliarized versions, in which the original content of the proverb was changed, (d) defamiliarized versions, in which the original content of the proverb was preserved, and (e) non-rhetorical sentences. Defamiliarization was reflected by enhanced activation of brain areas known for affective processing, such as the orbitofrontal cortex, the temporal poles and the medial prefrontal cortex, but only for the versions in which the content was changed. The versions, in which the original content was preserved, activated the frontoparietal attention network. We conclude that defamiliarization can serve as an effective tool to guide attention and to elicit re-evaluation processes. However, the original familiar proverbs - being the condition easiest to process - received the highest scores on beauty, in line with the hedonic fluency hypothesis [3, 4]. When subjective post-test beauty ratings were used as a parametric predictor of the BOLD response, correlations were found in the bilateral ventral striatum, indicating that the more rewarding a sentence was during initial reading, the more beautiful it was judged afterwards. [1] Miall, D.S., Kuiken, D., 1994. Foregrounding, Defamiliarization, and Affect - Response to Literary Stories. Poetics 22, 389-407. [2] Jacobs, A.M., 2011. Neurokognitive Poetik: Elemente eines Modells des literarischen Lesens (Neurocognitive poetics: Elements of a model of literary reading). In R. Schrott & A.M. Jacobs, Gehirn und Gedicht: Wie wir unsere Wirklichkeiten konstruieren. München: Carl Hanser Verlag. [3] Reber, R., Schwarz, N., Winkielman, P., 2004. Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience? Personality and Social Psychological Bulletin 8, 364-382. [4] Winkielman, P., Halberstadt, J., Fazendeiro, T., Catty, S., 2006. Prototypes are attractive because they are easy on the mind. Psychological Science 17, 799-806. Kristian Tylén Sometimes we encounter objects that strike us as affording a particular style of perceptual, semiotic exploration. Rather than bare physical properties, certain meaning potentials come to constitute the foreground of our perceptual experience. The actualization of meaning potentials seems to be guided by orientation to the intentional history of the object. Two cases will be addressed: 1) Particular properties or the contextual arrangement of an object might point to another person’s ostensive intentionality: someone has intended the object as a source of a particular kind of meaning-construction (e.g. aesthetic/artistic), and 2) the object is recognized as imbued with particular semantic significance due to its previous involvement in events and interactions in which the perceiver has taken part. In the paper, I will report from a number of behavioral and fMRI experiments that address the cognitive underpins of our perception of semiotic artifacts. Raymond A. Mar, PhD | Assistant Professor Literary art and our relationship with literary art has been the topic of fascination for some time. As a result, there have been a variety of different approaches taken toward its study. Here I provide an overview of my own work examining the relationship between readers and literary fiction, which relies upon methods from personality psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience (e.g., neuroimaging). One major facet of this work involves investigating how the process of understanding characters in fiction parallels the process of understanding our peers in the real world. In light of this similarity, various possible social outcomes for the frequent engagement with fiction are proposed. Jeff Mitscherling In this paper I try to unravel the various senses of ‘intentionality’ that are at play when we describe the literary work of art as an ‘intentional object’. Reversing the usual conception of intentionality as originating in and belonging to consciousness, we are enabled to locate the intentional structures of the literary work of art in the work of art itself. Further examination reveals the potential in the literary work of art for an enormously complex causal structure, a structure that bears a strong resemblance to that which we find obtaining among the parts of organisms. Arguing by analogy, I claim that the logical, syntactical, formal causality at work in our most basic linguistic expressions is essentially the same as that which is at work in organic entities. Aristotle, having provisionally defined the soul, in De Anima, as the form of a potentially living body, proceeds in his Poetics to describe plot as the soul of tragedy, thereby recognizing tragic poetry as alive. My suggestion is that Aristotle’s description is no mere metaphor. Frederik Stjernfelt A way of framing schemata is to conceive of them in opposition to "full" or "rich" perception with an abundance of detail. This paper argues that such "richness" is a limit category only so that we should rather speak of a continuum of schemata with more or less detail highlighted. Barry Smith Empirical research on human emotions is carried out in a wide variety of disciplines, from brain imaging studies of the effects of depression medications to behavioral studies of the effects of violent video games on aggressive affect. Currently such research is hampered by the lack of a common consensus-based controlled vocabulary that can be used to describe the results of experiments on emotional phenomena in a consistent fashion across different disciplines. We describe our efforts towards developing an Emotion Ontology (EMO) to serve the affective science research community, and show how this ontology might be applied also to the affective phenomena triggered by experiences of works of art. Marisa Bortolussi & Peter Dixon, University of Alberta The appreciation of literary narrative must be mediated by memory for the text. However, contrary to the common presupposition in literary studies, memory for the text is generally fragmentary and distorted. In the present talk, we focus on an important determinant of memory: the variation in readers’ mental states during reading. In particular, we identify two states that have critical implications for memory and literary appreciation: mind wandering, in which the reader gives relatively little priority to processing the text, and engagement, in which the reader constructs elaborate and personally meaningful representations of the story world. We describe how the moment-to-moment variation in these mental states can affect reading processes and determine memory for text and memory for aesthetic reactions. This analysis is supported by the results of two experiments in which readers’ mental states were probed online during reading.
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Updated January 17, 2012 by jpt. © Center for Semiotics. All rights reserved.