Call for Papers

Deadline: Sunday 1st July 2012

Contributions are now invited for the 2012 edition of the MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, an international, refereed online journal, aimed at postgraduate and early-career researchers.

There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with scientists and then gone off at night with some literary colleagues [...] I got occupied with the problem of what, long before I put it on paper, I christened to myself as the ‘two cultures’. For constantly I felt I was moving among two groups – comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all [...] By and large this is a problem of the entire West.  (C.P. Snow)

C.P. Snow’s infamous ‘Two Cultures’ lecture of 1959, and the heated public exchange with literary critic F.R. Leavis that ensued, highlight the great academic tension of our age: that sometimes tacit, sometimes openly explosive disjunction which exists between the arts and humanities on the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other (with the social sciences often caught in the cross-fire). Read the rest of this entry »

Art, Aesthetics & the Emotions

What does the appreciation of a work of art or a landscape consist in? Is there a link between aesthetic appreciation and emotion? One traditional idea is that, among emotions, aesthetic emotions stand as a specific category and play a crucial role in the appreciation of artworks. These are then argued to derive part of their value from their ability to elicit aesthetic emotions in those who contemplate them. Do these emotions actually exist and, if so, what role do they play in the contemplation of art and in our affective lives in general? There are also other fundamental relations between artworks and emotions. Some works of art are valuable partly in virtue of their power to induce non-aesthetic emotions, such as fear, joy or sadness. This seems to depend on their capacity to represent emotions. Yet, what does it mean for an artwork to represent or express an emotion? What is the relation between metaphors and the representation of the emotions? What are the neuronal systems involved in aesthetic experience? How do brain dynamics support artistic creativity, talent, and appreciation? Such questions clearly indicate that a proper understanding of the arts and their power has to take into account their multifarious relations to the emotions. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Rohrer, Mark Johnson, We Are Live Creatures: Embodiment, American Pragmatism, and the Cognitive Organism 2009.

Christopher Hart, Critical Discourse Analysis and Metaphor: Toward a Theoretical Framework 2007.

Christopher Hart, Critical Discourse Analysis and Conceptualisation: Mental Spaces, Blended Spaces and Discourse Space 2008.

David S. Danaher, Cognitive Poetics and Literariness: Metaphorical Analogy in Anna Karenina .

David S. Miall, Anticipation and Feeling in Literary Response: A Neuropsychological Perspective 1995.

Don Kuiken, David S. Miall, Beyond Text Theory: Understanding Literary Response . Read the rest of this entry »

September 4-8, 2012; Rome (Italy)

We are pleased to announce the 5th International Conference on Spatial Cognition (ICSC2012). The conference will take place on September 4-8, 2012, and will be hosted by ‘La Sapienza’ University of Rome.

This time the conference will be devoted to Space and Embodied Cognition, thus exploring the links between the general topic of the conference and an emergent paradigm of the cognitive sciences.

In order to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion and spread new, innovative research on spatial cognition, all space-related disciplines and approaches (behavioral, cognitive, computational, developmental, engineering, neuroanatomical, physiological, social, etc.) will be considered.

Further info: ICSC 2012

We suggest to read the debate about the relation between contemporary poetry and science that has been published in the online poetry and poetics magazine Jacket2 under the title Like a Metaphor: Ongoing relations between “poetry” and “science”.

Contributions by  Rae Armantrout, Amy Catanzano, John Cayley, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Allen Fisher, James Harvey, Peter Middleton, Evelyn Reilly, and Joan Retallack address how poetry can serve science no less than how science can serve poetry, as well as the degree of discursive integrity each should or can enjoy in the interplay.

We give and hearty welcome to our new Partner: The Embodiment Lab, created by Joshua Ian Davis (Ph.D, Term Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology – Barnard College of Columbia University).

We hope we will be able to work together in order to create that multidisciplinary research community we are already working on.

Subjects who had just read Kafka’s The Country Doctor were better at recognising patterns in grammar test, psychologists found.

Article first published in The Guardian
Author: Alison Flood

This conference aims to respond to the intense interest that interdisciplinary and intermedial designs have obtained in many of the areas of study pertaining not only to literature and the arts but also to the sciences. It will lay a significant emphasis on the ways in which the discourses of literature, film, painting, music and other such cultural practices become interwoven with the discourses of science; and, conversely, on the ways in which the practices and theories of science reach beyond their more conventional boundaries and into the fields of artistic creativity and the humanities.

The conference will welcome contributions focusing on specific instances of interdisciplinarity and intermediality within the general context outlined above. It will also be open to studies that interrogate the theoretical and critical tools that have traditionally been applied to the study of intermedial relations and/or the relationships between the various relevant fields.

Specifically, the conference is meant to commemorate the 350th anniversary of a major event in the history of science and scientific institutions: the granting of the Charter to the Royal Society of London by King Charles II in 1662. The range of the conference, however, will be considerably broader: the programme will accommodate participants with interests as diverse as literary studies, the arts, the language of art history and art criticism, writing and performance, the philosophy of science, and the history of scientific inquiry and scientific institutions.

As indicated by the number in its title, this conference is the second in a series of academic events that reflect the ongoing concerns of the eponymous research group (Relational Forms), based at CETAPS (the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies). Read the rest of this entry »

An MRI scan highlights areas of activity. Photograph: Black Star/Alamy

If you are fascinated by Neuroscience, we suggest you to read this interesting article by  Vaughan Bell published in The Observer on Sunday 29 April 2012.

Here the direct link to the article, if you want to share it.

AHRC-funded Symposium
University of Reading
27 April 2012

The symposium will be held in the conference room of the University of Reading Special Collections. The building housing Special Collections and the Museum of English Rural Life is located in Redlands Road.

Timetable

Date & Time: Friday, 27 April 2012, 10.00 to 17.50 Read the rest of this entry »