Description
Are our bodies involved in the engagement with complex story structures? Could the idea of a ‘disorienting’ story be more than a metaphor? Drawing on embodied-cognitive narratology, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and Mental Timeline theory, this talk argues that [1] embodied-cognitive mapping operations of a spatial nature fulfil a central role in the comprehension of narrative time. We aim to show how [2] this is particularly evident in complex narratives, which often play with ‘impossible’ non-experienceable plot structures such as time-travel, timeloops, or multi-layered plotlines. The presentation investigates how such complex forms of narrative temporality depend on blending of concrete embodiedcognitive schemas into a ‘mental timeline’ (e.g. visualizing a container schema to understand multiple embedded plotlines as existing ‘inside’ each other; or mentally representing time travel as movement along a spatial source-path-goal schema, shifting ‘forward’ or ‘backward’ in time relative to a deictic center), which allows such abstract narrative temporalities to be both conceivable and comprehensible.| Period | 13-Jun-2019 |
|---|---|
| Event title | SCSMI annual conference of the Society of the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Hamburg, Germany, HamburgShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |