'Obnoxious preoccupation with sex organs' : the ethics and aesthetics of representing sex

Drawing upon anthropological and historical studies of constraints governing the depiction of intercourse, Jajdelska explores the ethics and esthetics of Nabokov’s representations of sex. While such ethical constraints survive despite changes in norms which Nabokov both lived through and helped to produce, this chapter claims that aesthetic problems arise from the nature of embodied cognition; a vivid description takes the risk of being an arousing one. Jajdelska argues that Nabokov shows an uncanny intuitive understanding of perceptual processes in his descriptions of sex in Lolita, when it comes to structure and anticipation. Her chapter highlights how Nabokov uses aspects of embodied cognition to create representations which succeed both esthetically, in being vivid, and ethically, in shielding Dolores Haze from the potential for the reader’s arousal

\u27Singing of psalms of which I could never get enough\u27: labouring class religion and poetry in the Cambuslang revival of 1741

Describes and discusses the nature and uses of poetry by Scottish labouring-class participants in the revival at Cambuslang, near Glasgow, in 1741, drawing on the manuscript account of the revival collected by the parish minister, William McCulloch; setting the poems in the context of recent scholarly reconsideration of 17th and 18th century Scottish religious culture; relating the poems to the Scottish use of metrical psalms in kirk services and domestic devotions; and commenting in detail on poems by Alexander Bilsland and George Tassie, and a report on religious poetry reading by Ann Wylie

The flow of narrative in the mind unmoored : an account of narrative processing

Verbal narratives provide incomplete information and can be very long, yet readers and hearers often effortlessly fill in the gaps and make connections across long stretches of text, sometimes even finding this immersive. How is this done? In the last few decades, event-indexing situation modeling and complementary accounts of narrative emotion have suggested answers. Despite this progress, comparisons between real-life perception and narrative experience might underplay the way narrative processing modifies our world model, as well as the role of the emotions that do not relate to characters. I reframe narrative experience in predictive processing and neural networks, capturing continuity between fiction, perception, and states like dreaming and imagination, enabled by the flexible instantiation of concepts. In this framework, narrative experience is more clearly revealed as a creative experience that can share some of the phenomenology of dreams

Comprehension and the silent reader

Dr Elspeth Jajdelska's work on the rise of silent reading in the 18th century has shown that writers who assume a silent reader, as almost all writers do in the present day, construct their texts differently from those who write for readers to speak the text aloud to themselves or an audience, as almost all writers did before the 18th century.Elspeth Jajdelska's work explains in detail exactly which kinds of textual features are likely to be difficult for people (both now and in the past) who have learned the mechanics of reading but find it hard to follow texts written for silent readers. These findings arose in an academic field unconnected to educational studies and this knowledge exchange project was established to explore how the research can be made useful to teachers. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Being there yet not there : why don't embodied responses to literary texts jar with one another?

Language can stimulate simulations of perception. But it is not yet clear how sequences of such perceptions are experienced as integrated, for example in response to sustained discourse, such as literary texts. Why is it that a succession of embodied representations which would be impossible online is not experienced as incoherent? One possibility is that embodied responses to language are fleeting and detached from a fuller embodied context; these need not be integrated because they do not depend or relate to one another as they would in perception. Yet it is precisely the potential for embodied representations to linger and connect with one another which underlies at least some embodied theories of mental imagery, narrative and metaphor. So they must be integrated at some level. One possibility is that readers anchor their embodied representations in a notional human body, one endowed with superhuman powers, such as omniscience. But this account, I suggest, relies on implausible post hoc explanations. A second possibility is that the integration of perceptual simulations offline need be no more problematic than the integration of gappy and incomplete perceptual cues online. But online cues can be integrated through grounding in specific points in time and space; this is not the case with representations stimulated by language. Drawing on sensorimotor theories of perception, I propose that perceptual simulations can be integrated through patterns generated by the sustained experience of language itself, as though language were an additional modalit

‘The very defective and erroneous method’ : reading instruction and social identity in elite eighteenth-century learners

Eighteenth-century readers received copious advice on how to improve their oral reading. Private lecturers and instructors, often called "elocutionists", disparaged old-fashioned methods of teaching. These older methods encouraged readers to use a sing-song tone and chanting rhythm when they read. These qualities were useful in earlier periods because they aided memorisation and helped readers to project into large social spaces. In the eighteenth century, however, the well-off had less need to memorise and were more likely to read aloud in domestic settings. The elocutionists therefore encouraged a "natural" or "conversational" style, and implied that by following their advice, readers would be able to acquire this. Yet at the same time, many eighteenth-century authorities suggested that good oral reading required the innate quality of taste. As a result, learners experienced a tension between the suggestion that anyone could learn to read in the new style through instruction, and the suggestion that only those genteel readers with taste could be good oral readers

Unknown unknowns; ignorance of the Indies among late seventeenth-century Scots

This chapter discusses the ignorance of the Indies among late seventeenth century Scots

From storytellers to narrators : how can the history of reading help with understanding reading comprehension?

This chapter looks at how the history of reading can help with understanding reading comprehensio