The Visceral Novel Reader: A Cultural History of Embodied Novel Reading in Britain, 1688-1927

本能的小说读者：英国具身小说阅读的文化史，1688-1927

• 批准号: 422574378
• 负责人: Dr. Monika Class
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Centre for Languages and Literature
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/422574378?language=en
• 关键词: Visceral; Novel; Reader; Cultural; History

Readers can bring to bear on the novels they engage with all their sensory imaginings including their past perceptions in a way that brings the narrated events, figures and settings to life. Based on the phenomenological belief that our five senses constitute our lived body as we subjectively experience it (Merleau-Ponty 2012), the present project calls this kind of novel reading “embodied”. The study examines such embodied novel reading from the Restoration period until literary Modernism. It selects landmark novels in the history of British literature in order to theorize readers’ engagements with these novels in the specific social and historical circumstances of the initial time of publication. The corpus consists of ten novels, ranging from "Oroonoko" to "To the Lighthouse". The main objective is to unfold embodied novel reading at different historical stages since the turn to neuro-centrism in the late seventeenth until the early twentieth centuries. The hypothesis is that embodied reader response is part and parcel of the rise of the novel to unprecedented respectability in the era Victorian, and to verbal art in literary Modernism. The originality of this research project consists of developing a complex, context-sensitive reader model called the “visceral novel reader” that expands Paul Ricoeur’s triple mimesis of pre-, con- and re-figuration (1984) through the integration of performative theories and discourse analysis, as well as through a refined taxonomy of reading experiences. In order to approach embodied novel reading diachronically, which has not been studied yet, the project conducts a systematic analysis of the chosen text in several stages, namely the analysis of narrative structures, intermediality and paratext on the level of configuration as well as the investigation of their correlates on the level of prefiguration (lived body, media and sensory history, the body as a product of medical disciplinarization), and on the level of refiguration (the narrative, intermedial, and paratextual evocation of reading experiences). In doing so, the “visceral-novel-reader” model will flesh out the bloodless aesthetics of reception conceived by Iser and Jauß and will The Visceral Novel Reader: Der leibliche Akt des Romanlesens in der britischen Kulturgeschichte make a constructive intervention in the current debate about the practice of critique and the limits of demystification (Felski 2003, 2008, 2015). As such, the model promises to contribute significantly to the interdisciplinary investigation of readerly embodiment, emotion, and affect.

读者可以将他们所有的感官想象（包括他们过去的看法）运用到小说中，从而使所叙述的事件、人物和背景变得栩栩如生。基于现象学信念，即我们的五种感官构成了我们主观体验的身体（Merleau-Ponty 2012），本项目将这种小说阅读称为“体现”。这项研究考察了从复辟时期到文学现代主义的这种具体小说阅读。它选择了英国文学史上具有里程碑意义的小说，以便对读者在最初出版时的特定社会和历史环境下对这些小说的参与进行理论化。该语料库由十部小说组成，从《Oroonoko》到《到灯塔去》。主要目标是展现自十七世纪末到二十世纪初转向神经中心主义以来不同历史阶段的具身小说阅读。我们的假设是，读者的具体反应是小说在维多利亚时代获得前所未有的尊重以及在现代主义文学中获得语言艺术的崛起的重要组成部分。该研究项目的独创性在于开发了一种复杂的、上下文敏感的读者模型，称为“本能小说读者”，通过整合表演理论和话语分析，以及通过对阅读体验的精细分类，扩展了保罗·利科的预、配置和重构的三重模仿（1984）。为了从历时性的角度来探讨尚未被研究过的具身小说阅读，该项目分几个阶段对所选文本进行了系统分析，即在结构层面上对叙事结构、中介性和副文本的分析，以及在预表层面（活生生的身体、媒介和感官历史、作为医学学科化产物的身体）和 重构（阅读体验的叙事、中间和副文本唤起）。在此过程中，“本能小说读者”模型将充实伊塞尔和豪斯构想的冷酷的接受美学，并将《本能小说读者：英国文化历史中的浪漫主义行动》对当前关于批评实践和去神秘化局限性的辩论做出建设性的干预（Felski 2003，2008， 2015）。因此，该模型有望为读者体现、情感和情感的跨学科研究做出重大贡献。