Crying, Moving, and Keeping It Whole: What Makes Literary Description Vivid?

Abstract

Vividness is used in a range of senses which often conflate the intensity of an experience with the accuracy of mental images. In this article we consider the vividness of responses to literary descriptions of faces in the light of the psychology of face perception and the neuroscience of the mirror neuron system. We distinguish between intensity of experience and accuracy of mental images and compare two models of reader response to descriptions: the jigsaw model (the reader constructs a mental image from items of verbal information) and the experiential model (the reader has an emotional, embodied, and holistic response). We predict which aspects of facial description will provoke a vivid response in the experiential sense and discuss examples of literary descriptions of faces in the light of these predictions. We conclude with an illustration of how these insights can be used in literary history and interpretation.

Audiobooks and Print Narrative: Similarities in Text Experience

“…Vision is the dominant sense in humans, and mental images are often experienced to have a visual component (see also Spence and Deroy 2013). But static visual pictures or even filmic snippets in the head are inaccurate as a general metaphor for mental imagery elicited by narrative, even though they are by far the most widespread in narrative and literary scholarship (Jajdelska et al 2010;Troscianko 2013). The metaphor presupposes that the imager's embodied stance vis-à-vis the imaged contents is one of a detached spectator, with little or no vicarious involvement in the contents themselves.…”

“…One's psychological set is different in conjuring enactive mental imagery as compared to mentally inspecting a detached visual picture. An enactive image has more of a holistic potential, tapping more deeply into the affective charges of the narrative in question (Jajdelska et al 2010). In a fraction of a second, it makes the imager experience rather than contemplate the situation rendered in the narrative.…”

Reading imaginatively: The imagination in cognitive science and cognitive literary studies

“…4 Recognising that for these kinds of reasons imageability and experientiality aren't the same thing is an important step in disentangling the confusion surrounding vividness, a key term in discussions of mental imagery. As Jajdelska et al (2010) point out, the term is commonly used to denote two fundamentally distinct things: level of detail and/or accuracy on the one hand, and intensity on the other. The two are often entwined not just at the level of analysis, but also in experiential report, as illustrated in Herz and Schooler's (2002) suggestion that the emotional intensity of odour-cued "involuntary memories" may lead people to overestimate the "vividness" and "specificity" of those memories; if a strong sense of being "brought back" is induced (by olfactory cues, for instance), this can result in an impression of more detail being accessible than is actually the case.…”

Empathy at the confluence of neuroscience and empirical literary studies

“…The field is defined by an overarching interest for the role of the body in the pleasures and intellectual adventures of reading. Empathy is usually approached in piecemeal insights concerning the textual underpinnings of embodied aesthetic responses such as charactercentered mental imagery (Jajdelska, Butler, Kelly, McNeill, & Overy, 2010;Kuzmičová, 2014), visceral experience from sensuous narrative (Burke 2011 on 'reader disportation' andKimmel, 2011), as well as more indistinct experiences such as increased bodily awareness (Esrock, 2004). While most of this literature refrains from systematic adherence to embodied and enactive cognition as a school of philosophical thought, a more comprehensive and philosophically aspiring account can be found in the work of Caracciolo (especially 2014b).…”

“…Although some embodied theories of reading have expressly focused on backgrounding textual strategies that make the literary medium as transparent as possible (Jajdelska et al, 2010;Kuzmičová, 2012), there is also a substantial argument toward the view that empathy may be enhanced (Caracciolo, 2014b;Kimmel, 2011), or even preconditioned (Miall & Kuiken, 1999), by defamiliarization and foregrounding (e.g. novel metaphors).…”