Fiction and Other Minds: Contingent Minds: Companions, Proxies and Nobodies in Literary Writing
This term’s Fiction and Other Minds seminar will be hosting Prof Karin Kukkonen to discuss the topic of Contingent Minds: Companions, Proxies and Nobodies in Literary Writing.
Encounters between writers and their characters are often mentioned in remarks on the creative process: characters demand a happy ending for their stories, and voices arise as perspectives multiply. These “other minds” often arise contingently in writing, and knowing when and how to use them appears to be an essential part of the expertise of literary writers. The strategies are as diverse as writers’ works: Elsa Morante deploys one of her characters as a proxy for poetry writing in the manuscripts of La Storia. Anne Weber explores the ethics of providing a novelistic inside-view to the mind of a real person in Annette: Ein Heldinnenepos. Marina Warner creates an empty centre in The Leto Bundle, and Gwenaëlle Aubry engages in a dynamics of personalisation and de-personalisation while composing Personne. In this talk, I will propose a conceptual model for thinking about the different roles that such contingent minds play in the creative process systematically along the terms practice, form and contingency. My discussion draws on interviews with literary writers, creative criticism, as well as the analysis of writers’ manuscripts as traces of their material practice, in order to show how literary writers profoundly remodel psychological phenomena such as imaginary companions and auditory mental imagery in the creative process.
Karin Kukkonen is Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. She is Director of LCE – Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions, and PI for the ERC-funded project JEUX – Literary Games, Poetics and the Early Modern Novel (2024-2028). Kukkonen has published extensively on embodied and extended approaches to literature, including How the Novel Found its Feet (OUP, 2019) and With Bodies: Embodied Cognition and Narrative Theory (with Marco Caracciolo, Ohio UP, 2021). This talk is based on her forthcoming book Creativity and Contingency in Literary Writing (Bloomsbury).
The seminar is convened by Professor Ben Morgan (ben.morgan@worc.ox.ac.uk) and Dr Naomi Rokotnitz (naomi.rokotnitz@worc.ox.ac.uk).
As always, the talk will be followed by drinks for all attendees.
Date:
7 November 2024, 17:15 (Thursday, 4th week, Michaelmas 2024)
Venue:
Worcester College, Walton Street OX1 2HB
Venue Details:
Sultan Nazrin Shah Auditorium
Speaker:
Karin Kukkonen (University of Oslo)
Organising department:
Faculty of English Language and Literature
Organisers:
Dr Naomi Rokotnitz (University of Oxford),
Professor Ben Morgan (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
comparative.criticism@st-annes.ox.ac.uk
Hosts:
Dr Naomi Rokotnitz (University of Oxford),
Professor Ben Morgan (University of Oxford)
Part of:
Fiction and Other Minds seminar
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editors:
Katy Terry,
Mary Newman
