The 2012 IGEL Summer Institute Workshop
The goal of the 2012 Summer Institute is to support the development of selected research areas by facilitating contact and collaboration among researchers with common interests. A key theme will be networking—and the development of supportive working relations among early career and experienced researchers within a selected research area. The research area identified as the focus of the 2012 Summer Institute is “The Meaningful Experience of Literature.”
The Meaningful Experience of Literature
The institutionalization of literature may have undermined the personal meaningfulness of literary reading. Instruction routinely gives priority to: (1) acquainting students with writers, their works, and their place in cultural traditions; (2) encouraging analytic examination of the language of literary texts; and (3) increasing familiarity with the views of critics who have specialized knowledge about literary traditions and literary style. In this context, the challenge is to clarify how and when people approach literature instead as a meaningful vehicle for understanding the difficulties of human affairs, the complexity of social relationships, and the intimacy and intricacy of emotional life.
Such clarification requires close empirical study of how and when reading becomes experiential. Recent studies suggest that experiential reading involves (1) subtle forms of emotional response, some of which are distinctively literary; (2) empathic participation in character-revealing portrayals of individuals facing emotionally significant events; and (3) simultaneous changes in world-understanding and self-understanding. These three aspects of experiential reading will be the focus of the 2012 IGEL Summer Institute.
Organizers of the Summer Institute will create a seminar structure within which experienced researchers can interact with early career researchers who share interest in these aspects of experiential reading. Through presentations and in conversation, participants will consider how to facilitate progress in their shared research area. Together they will attempt to (1) articulate specific research objectives, including the preliminary design of research projects in their shared research area, and (2) create plans for continued communication and consultation about these research plans and other matters of common interest. One concrete outcome of these efforts will be plans for continued interaction among the members of these emerging networks during the IGEL mini-conference scheduled for 2013 (David Hanauer, organizer). Another will be a thematically organized array of research presentations and symposia during the biennial IGEL conference in 2014. Still another will be planning for a special issue of the Scientific Study of Literature.
For each of three closely related aspects of experiential reading, three researchers, with varying levels of professional experience, have agreed to coordinate the presentations and discussion. These three aspects of experiential reading are:
• Cognitive Psychology and Literature: Imagery, Emotion, and Embodiment
• Focused Reflection: Self-implication, Meaning, and Expression
• Literary Reading and Writing: Implications for Identity Change
For further information, please contact Don Kuiken.