Since March 2023 I have had the privilege and pleasure to lead with Jan Rüggemeier an exciting collaborative research project on Narrative Space and Possible Worlds: Encountering Ancient Narratives from a Cognitive Science Perspective. The project, funded by the St Andrews-Bonn Collaborative Research Grant Programme, aims to bring together researchers based at the University of St Andrews and the University of Bonn from a variety of disciplines (Classics, Biblical Studies, Art History, Classical Archaeology) and various traditions (Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist studies), enabling a cross-disciplinary and trans-cultural exchange of ideas and perspectives.
Our project seeks to investigate how people understand and use the stories depicted in texts and art and what gives them a sense of ‘being there’; how do stories encourage a way of seeing and taking our place in the world? We aim to answer such questions by investigating the possibilities and limitations of using of cognitive (‘mind’) science, which illuminates how people think, to advance the study of stories that appear in ancient texts and artefacts. To frame our project, we have decided to focus specifically on peoples’ perceptions and responses to the depiction of narrative space (setting). Spatial references play an important role in the narrative. Space has traditionally been viewed as a backdrop to a plot, but scholars such as Marie-Laure Ryan have advanced the argument that space serves other narrative roles: it can be a focus of attention, a bearer of symbolic meaning, an object of emotional investment etc. (Ryan 2012; Ryan, Foote & Azaryahu 2016). We believe that focusing on narrative space provides us with a productive avenue to explore how ‘setting’ is received by different disciplines and traditions.
Our interdisciplinary project participates in the current dynamics of postmodern narratology (Herman 2013; Fludernik 1996) which pervades virtually all academic disciplines from literary studies (Kukkonen 2020; Dancygier 2011) to ancient history and classical studies (Grethlein 2009) to cultural and media studies (Nünning 2000). While interdisciplinary narratologies often still fall back on traditional structuralist concepts, we are bringing together researchers in an attempt place narratological studies on a new footing. Together, we use cognitive science as a starting point for moving from textual analysis alone to acts of interpretation and reception in various media. While the project builds on the work of structuralist narratologists who have already shown some interest in spatial and textual structures (Lotman 1977), spatial semantics (Hoffmann 1978) and spatial metaphors (Lefebvre 1974), we explore new avenues emerging in the wake of the cognitive turn. ‘Mind’ science opens novel ways to approach narrative space and allows for consideration of new, original dimensions, such as the role of emotions, empathy, and embodiment.
Since this is a collaborative project, we have planned a series of dialogical events consisting of workshops in St Andrews and Bonn between spring 2023 and 2024 and a two-day conference in St Andrews scheduled for April 2024. The first hybrid workshop took place in St Andrews in June 2023 and brought together a team of eleven participants who introduced their respective sub-projects and discussed their research interests with each other. We worked in small groups and considered key questions and common themes in our current research; a round-table discussion at the end helped us to set the research agenda and focus for the future. Together we identified five specific aspects of the project that we found relevant to our individual research interests: (1) Space and the transgression of boundaries, (2) Possible Worlds, (3) Space and Time, (4) Space, Movement, and Transformation, and (5) Fictional Worlds (and how the audience grasps them).
Following this fruitful initial meeting, in September I travelled to Bonn to participate in the second hybrid workshop. Building on the questions raised at the first meeting, we aimed at laying a strong theoretical understanding and basis for our methodology. We worked collaboratively focusing on the five identified facets of our project selecting relevant literature that forefronts the field of narratology and cognitive science. My contribution was a summary of the key issues, possibilities and challenges in using cognitive linguistics to analyse narrative space from the perspective of visual arts. As an archaeologist and art historian, I am particularly interested in how we can apply concepts and methodology from narratology and cognitive theories to approach works of art. My own research interests centre around the reception of antiquity during the late medieval period and especially the depiction of ancient narratives and classical heroes. As a scholar of classical reception, I seek to explore how later audiences interacted with ancient materials and subjects. How and why, for example, images of Herakles/Hercules were incorporated in the urban setting of late medieval cities? What narrative or narratives did these images create for contemporary medieval audiences? What values did they project to the citizens of these medieval cities? And more importantly, to what extent were these communities acquainted with ancient narratives? Can the growing interest in the cognitive sciences inspire new approaches to the study of classical reception and visual art?
I think we would all agree that stories are not limited to verbal language. In terms of pictures, no one would doubt that they can tell stories. In fact, pictures are often described as narratives or istorie. In his treatise On Painting, Leon Battista Alberti examined in detail the means by which a painting of an ‘historia’ could ‘move the minds of those who see it’ (Alberti 1991). Alberti regarded the characters of these istorie as not only being able to convey actions, but also express states of mind and thus enhance empathy. Modelling his discussion of pictorial composition on Quintilian’s description of the type of sentence that has several meanings, Alberti demonstrated how artistic form invested a narrative painting with the multilevel significance of historia (Greenstein 1990). However, the ability of visual art to represent actions and to narrate stories seems to have received much less attention in art theory and narratology contexts. This is partly because visual works present certain challenges with the representation of the inner world of thoughts and the narrative element of time. A visual narrative, such as a panel painting, a fresco cycle, or a sculpture, shows selected actions and settings, and we as viewers have to imagine what happened between, before or after the scenes.
Among art historians, the narrative aspects of visual art have constituted an established focus of interest, though mainly from a descriptive, interpretative and historical point of view. Wendy Steiner in her Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature critically remarked that the typical art-historical usage of the term ‘narrative painting’ is very loose (Steiner 1988). Werner Wolf (2005) has argued that reading a picture narratively necessitates a far more elaborate gap-filling activity than reading a language-based story. However, visual arts can also have narrative strengths when compared to language: they can provide us with more vivid and palpable impressions of spatial settings, and they can directly display the characters’ emotional expressions and their body language, as well as their visual appearance in general. The pictorial space houses active bodies with their own attitudes, gestures, movements and positions. Taking research into cognitive science into account, we can consider how and in what ways pictures may have narrative implications and give rise to the emergence of narrative mental representations in beholders.
The discussion and exchange of ideas in the workshops so far have made me consider ways in which the tools and insights of cognitive science have the potential to support novel interpretations; I have been thinking, in particular, how Marco Caracciolo’s recent work on the phenomenology of narrative space can be applied in visual arts. Caracciolo uses a phenomenological approach that emphasises people’s lived experience of situations and suggests that we should focus on how characters and space are coupled. He argues that readers’ imaginative engagement with storyworlds is best captured through the concept of place, as it has been theorised in the field of human geography (for example, Caracciolo 2011). Can we look at narrative frescoes and panel paintings in a similar way? They are certainly similar to real life situations in the way that they are inhabited by acting humans, are surrounded by objects, and positioned in space -architectural or other. Pictorial space allows the artist to symbolically reorganise and remake visual reality itself. At the same time, visual works appeal directly to the viewer at a sensory level. ‘Reading’ an image is a dynamic process during which viewers see the work in its entirety, while they can also focus on individual objects, figures, gestures. They are not expected to read the story linearly, from left to right, as one reads a text, but they are free to choose their own visual path. In fact, eye-tracking experiments show that different viewers tend to look frequently at the same elements, but they do not do so in the same order.
‘Reading’ a visual story (similarly to a literary one) is a physical activity that involves the entire human body. Since engagement with stories relies on our memory system and activates sensory and cognitive abilities, Lars-Christer Hydén (2013) calls storytelling an embodied activity. Over the last decades, approaches that emphasize the significance of embodiment have become increasingly influential within the fields of cognitive science. A few members of our project are investigating this aspect, considering particularly 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) cognition.
So far, it has been exciting and thought-provoking to be part of this project and to enter into dialogue with colleagues from different disciplines. The two workshops have provided me with ample ideas, have introduced me to new methodologies and have raised even more questions to address in my research. I am looking forward to the upcoming conference in April 2024, that will bring our network together once again, this time to present our research as it has been formed by our discussions and exchange of ideas throughout this project.
_________
Bibliography
Alberti, Leon Battista. 1991. On Painting, trans. by Cecil Grayson, intr. by Martin Kemp. London: Penguin Classics.
Caracciolo, Marco. 2011. ‘The Reader’s Virtual Body: Narrative Space and Its Reconstruction’, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 3, 117-38.
Dancygier, Barbara. 2011. The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London and New York: Routledge.
Greenstein, Jack M. 1990. ‘Alberti on “Historia”: A Renaissance View of the Structure of Significance in Narrative Painting’, Viator 21: 273-99.
Grethlein, Jonas et al. 2009. Narratology and Interpretation. The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature, Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volume 4. Berlin et al.: De Gruyter.
Herman, David. 2013. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hoffmann, Gerhard. 1978. Raum, Situation, erzählte Wirklichkeit. Poetologische und historische Studien zum englischen und amerikanischen Roman. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Hydén, Lars-Christer. 2013. ‘Towards an Embodied Theory of Narrative and Storytelling’, in Matti Hyvärinen, Mari Hatavara and Lars-Christer Hydén (eds), The Travelling Concepts of Narrative. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 227–44.
Kukkonen, Karin. 2020. Probability Designs: Literature and Predictive Processing. Oxford: OUP.
Lefebvre, Henrie. 1974. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lotman, Jurij M. 1977. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Nünning, Ansgar. 2000. ‘Towards a Cultural and Historical Narratology: A Survey of Diachronic Approaches, Concepts, and Research Projects’, in Bernhard Reitz and Sigrid Rieuwerts (eds), Anglistentag 1999, Mainz: Proceedings. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 345–73.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2012. ‘Space’, in: Peter Hühn et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University, http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/space.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, Kenneth Foote & Maoz Azaryahu. 2016. Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Steiner, Wendy. 1988. Pictures of Romance: Form Against Context in Painting and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wolf, Werner. 2005. ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, in David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London/New York, Routledge, 431-35.
