“The Psychology of Literary Experience”
Elaine Auyoung
University of Minnesota

In an 1859 letter to George Eliot, Charles Dickens declared that Adam Bede had taken its place “among the actual experiences and endurances” of his life. A few years earlier, Eliot herself had written to a friend, “I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette.” How do novels enable readers to feel as though they have come to know a “world” of unreal persons, places, and incidents in unexpectedly intimate and durable ways? This fundamental effect of reading fiction has remained remarkably resistant to critical examination. Using examples from Eliot’s Middlemarch, however, Elaine Auyoung will show how psychological research on reading and cognition can help us understand how novels evoke a world in the reader’s mind. This cross-disciplinary approach offers new perspectives on realism, fictionality, mimesis, and how literary language works.

Biography: Elaine Auyoung (pronounced O-Young) is McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota, Associate Professor of English, and Affiliate Faculty of the Center for Cognitive Sciences. She received a BA in English from Stanford University and a PhD in English from Harvard University. She is the author of When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind, published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Her essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from New Literary History, Poetics Today, Victorian Studies, and Nineteenth-Century Literature.

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The talk will take place at 4.30 pm in the Large SCR at Oriel College (the porters will be able to direct you). The talk will be followed by a Q&A and wine reception. All are welcome!