Announcing A New Journal

An exciting announcement was made at the recent IGEL conference in Utrecht. (We have been enjoying some wonderful essays over the past few weeks from the "Stillness Contest" also presented at this meeting.) The society has decided to launch its own journal, entitled the Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL), publishing the very best empirical work on literature. Willie van Peer will act as head editor, working alongside Max Louwerse, Joan Peskin, and myself, as associate editors. Together we have assembled a very impressive review editorial board, which includes OnFiction's own Keith Oatley, along with some other names that might sound familiar to our readers (e.g., Steven Pinker, James Pennebaker). Below is a brief description of the journal from our publisher, John Benjamins:

Literature has an important role in human culture. Broadly interpreted, literature is defined as all cultural artefacts that make use of literary devices, such as narrativity, metaphoricity, symbolism. Its manifestations include novels, short stories, poetry, theatre, film, television, and, more recently, digital forms such as hypertext storytelling. This new journal, Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL), will publish empirical studies that apply scientific stringency to cast light on the structure and function of literary phenomena. The journal welcomes contributions from many disciplinary perspectives (psychological, developmental, cross-cultural, cognitive, neuroscience, computational, and educational) to deepen our understanding of literature, literary processes, and literary applications.

Our first issue should appear mid-2011, and will include a number of short pieces from leaders in the field with their thoughts on the future of the empirical study of literature. It promises to be an exciting collection. Members of IGEL receive the journal for free, so if you are interested in these topics please consider becoming a member of this society. More importantly, if you are a researcher, please consider submitting something to our new journal!

In Defense of Torment

Anguish visited on creative artists has become a stereotype, and for a reason. For centuries, artists have shown themselves to be unusually susceptible to anxiety, pain, and self- destruction. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of remarkably successful Eat, Pray Love, took on this suffering in her February 2009 TED talk. Locating the source of the creative spark within (as was the case since Renaissance), rather than without (in daimons of ancient Greece and geniuses of Rome), proved to be, according to Gilbert, an uncommonly destructive idea for artists. If you think you are the source, then you are to blame all those times when your pen, brush, or body, either refuses to move, or, worse, moves in a way that insults the muses. She suggests that the return to the old idea – that it is all out of our hands, good art and bad – may create a protective construct artists may hold up against the onslaught of creative blocks, anxiety, and self-destruction. The important thing, she says, is to keep showing up for work. If a great work of art is created, you can’t take the praise (which will prevent narcissism), and if you produce something lame, it is not your fault. After all, you have showed up for your part of the deal and it is really your daimon who must have been sleepy that day. She should take the blame.

One can’t but be moved by Gilbert’s tender plea for a shield with which to protect artists against themselves. But chasing the torment away, I think, is even more dangerous than yielding to it. Torment serves a purpose, and the purpose is to remind us that, at this particular time, we are not very good channels for inspiration. And being a rusty channel, I’m afraid, is entirely our fault. If we want to take lessons from the ancients, we should swallow both their sweet and bitter seeds. Socrates’ lesson was not that your daimon shows up some days to fill your page, other days staying away. It is that we all have a daimon, and that our daimon is with us all the time, but that our ears are too full of other things to hear it. Socrates was a slave only to his daimon, and consequently heard it all the time. Modern artists, like ancient ones, and like non-artists too, are slaves to many other things besides - success, fear, productivity – and enough noise will make the gentle music of art inaudible. Torment is the way we are reminded to quiet the noise, and start paying attention. It is a reminder to be slaves to our art. And being slaves to our art does not mean being chained to your desk. It means probing, and sometimes destroying, the inner landscape that has grown insensitive to the elusive caress of art.

So it seems it’s not just about showing up at your writing desk. While inspiration is still a gift, the torment is a warning signal that we are, for now, unfit to receive it. So, no matter how much Gilbert wants to save us from ourselves, we cannot wish away the paradox that seems both unfair and irrational - that in art, while we cannot take the praise, we have to take the blame.

Research Opportunity in Amsterdam

Who wants to join a Dutch psychological research team on literary and cinematic narrative?

A new research project on experiences that are characteristic for engaging with fiction is starting in the Netherlands right now. The aim is to sort out different modes of absorption (e.g. "concentration", "transportation", "presence") in  people's engagement with literary and cinematic narrative, and to find out what properties of stories are responsible for the various experiential states. Another is to disclose the relations of various forms of absorption with aesthetic experiences, such as a sense of beauty or fascination. Frank Hakemulder (Utrecht University) and Ed Tan (Amsterdam University) will supervise two PhD students and a postdoc over the next four years. The researchers intend to keep the readership of OnFiction posted on ground breaking results of the research and look for opportunities to involve the OnFiction community in the studies.

For the moment we report that one of the two PhD positions, the one devoted to studies in absorption in film viewing, is still vacant. We are searching for a graduate in relevant disciplines such as cognitive psychology, emotion psychology, literary and film studies, who is willing to accept the challenge posed by interdisciplinary research in a stimulating academic and cultural environment. Candidates should be able to couple knowledge of theories and cognitive models of narrative in film or literature with experience of real time psychological experimentation. Affinity with manufacturing video would be an advantage. The candidate will work in Amsterdam; a fellowship is offered sufficient for living in Amsterdam and tuition. For details and application procedure please click here to go to the website for the post, and/or contact Ed Tan e.s.h.tan@uva.nl The deadline for applications is September 12 2010.

Narrative Schemata in Guidebooks

As OnFiction readers will know, we have from time to time demonstrated a certain editorial affection for travelogue. Professional geographers also have a strong travelogue tradition--and a rather parallel tradition of field guides and guidebooks: stories of places visited ahead of time and reported back to travelers who might follow.

Orientation to places through such field guides produces a particular narrative experience. Desiring guidance, travelers turn to guidebooks' accounts to guide their experience of places not only when they face the prospect of travel, but also like they might turn to literary criticism--to enrich the schemata that organize the conceptualization of places and spaces. The usual format of both field and travel guides suggests that they are rather more like encyclopedias than like stories: lists of places or sites one might visit, with glossing about the highlights--much more catalogs of settings than narratives with characters and plot.

One might consider that even if the places or place features of guides take the place of characters in stories, they are still too lacking in plot to be considered as something we might recognize as a story. However, even in the most encyclopedic formats (and certainly in the form of travel guide that hybridizes Frommers and Under the Tuscan Sun), narrative form is suggested by methods that demonstrate some of the ways that readers' emotions are enrolled in producing experiences of stories.

Some of the more obvious methods are in the sequencing and narration of travel highlights. Structuring an itinerary around a series of predictable high points helps prime a reader or traveler for particular experiences, not only in terms of appropriate preparation and anticipation for experiences to be had and transitions between them, but also in relation to the unexpected experiences of travel or exploration. The proportion and framing of such unexpecteds in relation to predictable events appear to be, in fact, some of the significant qualities determining guides' price points, with "budget travelers" or adventurous field explorers expected to want a higher proportion of information about setting (think very detailed bird guides here) and less prompting about how they ought to respond to the setting (in contrast, particularly, to the most narrative style of guide, modeled after books such as Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence).

One of the implications of the prefigured adventure format is the grappling with plot and character in which the reader / traveler must engage to form an actual experience. Each reader gets to figure out his or her own plot of activities and emotions, but each factual bit of advice is likely to also come with expectations of reactions and performative schemata. Even field guides, which seem at first much less prefigured, proffer considerable pre-ordering of experience, with normative assessments of the value of and proper response to the domain in question.


The image above is the cover of Dolores Hayden and Jim Wark's 2004 A Field Guide to Sprawl. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

Sunless and Stillness, by Tessa Overbeek

Last Thursday and the Thursday before we described the competition among people registered at the recent conference in Utrecht of the International Society for Research on Literature (IGEL 2010) for an essay on the concept of stillness. The competition was organized by Frank Hakemulder and Emy Koopman. "Stillness," said the invitation, "signifies the counterweight against our hectic, stressful everyday existence. To give a preliminary definition we would say that it is an emotion of calmness and/or reflection which can be evoked by beauty. But of course, you are free to give your own, diverting, thoughts on the matter. For the contest we would like you to respond to the following question: What particular piece of fiction (novel, short story, movie, play) contributes best to ‘stillness’ according to you and why?"

The essays for the IGEL competition were all rather different, and the organizers awarded three equal first place positions. Each winner read his or her essay to a plenary session at the conference, and an arrangement was made to publish their winning essays on OnFiction. The essay we present this week is by Tessa Overbeek of the University of Groningen.

An extra piece of information, published with the invitation and relevant to Tessa's essay, is that the idea for the competition came from the Yann Martel’s project, What is Stephen Harper Reading? Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister of Canada.

Here is a quote from Martel's website:

"Who is this man? What makes him tick? No doubt he is busy. No doubt he is deluded by that busyness. No doubt being Prime Minister fills his entire consideration and froths his sense of busied importance to the very brim. And no doubt he sounds and governs like one who cares little for the arts.

"But he must have moments of stillness. And so this is what I propose to do: not to educate—that would be arrogant, less than that—to make suggestions to his stillness.

"For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written. I will faithfully report on every new book, every inscription, every letter, and any response I might get from the Prime Minister, on this website (click here)"

Sunless and Stillness

“All I have to offer is myself.” Chris Marker 1997

This quote by the famously unfamous Chris Marker seems like the second best way to introduce this reclusive French filmmaker. The best way would be to show you his films. Marker is what could be called media-shy. He does not do interviews or publicity. But what better way to let himself be known than to make art?

His film Sans Soleil (Sunless) inspired me to write this essay, but describing it could not possibly do it justice, even if I had a billion words at my disposal. I can only hope that a reflection on my experience of it will encourage others to go and see it for themselves.

Seeing Marker’s Sunless felt like being inside his head, looking through his eyes, following his train of thought, or trying to. The gaps between ideas may have been small in his mind, but required a giant leap in mine. This made watching it quite challenging, yet at the same time makes this film great. My understanding grew with each viewing, and it felt like that process would never stop.

By now you must be thinking: “That sounds like hard work, wasn’t this essay supposed to be about ‘stillness’?” It is, although I would like to make a few changes to this definition of it: “an emotion of calmness and/or reflection which can be evoked by beauty.” What I would want to challenge most is the last word. There is a lot to be said about beauty, which I think is a very important phenomenon when studying literature and other media (which from here on out, I would like to call “the arts”). But not all great art is necessarily beautiful.

Yann Martel’s inclusion of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in his list of books for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (and his motivation of this choice) shows that he means something more when he uses the concept of stillness. I would also like to erase the “or” from the definition, because I think great art makes calmness and reflection occur together, although not always simultaneously.

What seems very accurate in the introductory text to this contest, is the statement that stillness can be a counterweight against our stressful everyday existence. It is my hypothesis that experiencing art entails roughly the same processes as making art. I would like to propose that it has more to do with creativity than with beauty (which are both not restricted to art).

The Brain Book, a recent and comprehensive guide to the human brain by Rita Carter, states that creativity depends on two things: the first is a certain state of “idleness,” the second is a foundation of knowledge. The bombardment of stimuli we have to endure in our daily lives forces us to ignore a lot of information. In order to function, we only consciously perceive what is relevant to what we are doing at that moment.

Creativity, however, requires a different state of mind, which is more open and relaxed, or calm, if you will. On EEG scans, this state can be recognized by slow alpha waves. In this state we do absorb information that we usually shut out, and are able to let it resonate with our memories (or reflect on it). According to Carter, this results in the generation of new thoughts and ideas that can be novel and useful.

This is a definition of creativity that closely resembles my (slightly altered) definition of “stillness.” There is calm and there is reflection, plus it is a state that is different from the one that is usually dominant in our daily lives. I would like to call it an “open mind.” It goes without saying that when something is open, things can both enter and leave it.

Which brings me back to Chris Marker, Sunless and my experience of it. It truly felt like someone had opened his mind to the world, had mixed what entered with what was already there, and had finally opened up his mind to me. Because he was in this special mental state, he could be more open than he could ever be in an interview.

Opening my own mind in return seemed like the only right thing to do. At first, I could not take it all in, and some things escaped my attention. What I did absorb engaged with my memories and must have been appropriated by that process, as if it was converted into my knowledge. This enabled me to see new themes and motives with every viewing, and this helped my interpretation of the film, which by that time was probably as much my own construction as it was his. I followed his associations as well as I could, but could not help but add my own.

The memory of that experience resulted in this essay. Could creativity lead to more creativity? I would not dare to compare mine to his, but something new was created nonetheless. Creativity does not only occur in art, but in science and leadership as well. New ideas can change the world, so anything that can stimulate their occurrence must be encouraged.

Martel’s plan may make his prime minister a better leader, and it may even lead to more funding for the arts, which seems to be the writer's second objective. If politicians would feel what I felt when experiencing Sunless, would they be more willing to invest in art? Possibly, although perhaps some people are more open to hard facts, presented in a more straightforward manner.

This is where the empirical study of arts comes in. Technologies that allow us to study the brain are becoming more numerous, and with the right methods we can hopefully soon prove what we already feel: that art can stimulate our minds in a way that is not only pleasurable, but also useful.


Rita Carter et al. The Brain Book. An Illustrated Guide to its Structure, Function, and Disorders. London: Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2009.

Chris Marker, director. Sans Soleil (Sunless). Argos Films, 1983.

Tessa Overbeek

Creative Writing and Psychology, by Elaine Hatfield

Many doctors have become writers of fiction, perhaps most notably Anton Chekhov, also a good number of philosophers, for instance Jean-Paul Sartre, but what about psychologists? Not so many perhaps, and not so famous in the world of fiction, at least not yet. At OnFiction, we know a few, and we are asking some of them to write posts for us about the relationship of their psychology to their writing of fiction. Anyone who is a psychologist who writes fiction, or a knows of such a person who might be good for us to approach, please get in touch with Keith Oatley (e-mail is in my Profile).

The first psychologist-novelist we have asked to write for us is Elaine Hatfield, a noted social psychologist whose best known work is on love and its social implications. Her first novel was Rosie, about a young psychologist, Rosie St Giles, who has a temporary teaching job at the University of Hawaii. She has a prestigious research grant on love which is singled out by a United States Senator as being a waste of tax-payers' money. Rosie is zippy and unusual as a protagonist, and the novel's other characters are interesting and recognizable. The novel is about the fortunes of Rosie and the US Senator who thinks his ridicule of Rosie's research will be a cheap way of winning votes. Hatfield's style is racy. Her mix of politics, the workings of academe, and sexual goings on (of which there are quite a few) works really well. An excellent read.

Creative Writing and Psychology

I’ve always been interested in creative writing. When I was 12, I was poet laureate of the Detroit Police Gazette—the Truborg. It has all been downhill from there. Nevertheless, when I started a serious creative writing career fifteen years ago, I was surprised to discover that creative writing and academic writing aren’t that far apart.

Firstly, psychologists probably have a head start as creative writers since we are intrigued by character and human foibles.

Secondly, in both careers you do best if you explore the topics that interest you. If you try to please the crowds, you are doomed.

Thirdly, therapists, scientists, and budding creative writers have to have realistic expectations as to the praise they will receive. It is easy to believe that if we are just brilliant enough, work hard enough, do everything right, we will reap the adulation of the crowds. That is expecting way too much. There is an old saying: “When we’re 20, we worry about what people think of us; when we’re 30, we don’t care what they think; by the time we’re 40, we realize they’re probably not thinking of us at all.” I would argue that if you can find a very few colleagues and readers who admire your writing, you should count yourself very lucky. As for the other 99%, I’m afraid we just have to take censure in stride.

In the interests of “truth in advertising,” I thought that I’d share a few of my favorite “awful” letters with you to remind us all what anyone who deals with agents, publishers, and the public can expect—on a good day.

1. Thanks, but this is way too good for us. We publish pointedly tasteless stuff.

2. Thank you so very much for your submission “Holy Guacamole.” Your piece is well crafted, but cannot be used in The Blackstone Circular. Some of my subscribers are rich, while others are working class. They would be offended. Can you send me a positive point of view, either about them or about your own class of people?

3. We sorry fo’ say we nevah choose your submission to Hybolics. But dat no means ees junk. Jus cuz we nevah take yo’r stuff dis time, no sked cuz we kinda moody. Shoots den. Write on, brah.

The point? My suspicion is that, in creative writing and psychology as in life, the prerequisites for “success” are not talent but independence, enthusiasm, endurance, and resilience. That—and a large dose of self-mocking humor. A thick skin might also help. The rewards of a successful career must be intrinsic: the pleasure of saying what you can’t help saying and doing what you can’t help doing. If one casts one’s fate to the adulation of colleagues or the crowds, then—good luck.

Elaine Hatfield