The Eyre Affair goes scholar

We are glad to find that Jasper Ffforde's The Eyre Affair is the subject of scholar investigation. One of the papers of the recently published proceedings of the "Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice" conference arranged at the University of Helsinki in August 2004, studies the first of the Thursday Next's adventures.

Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice

Harri Veivo, Bo Pettersson and Merja Polvinen (eds.),

Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2005.

This volume explores how advances in the field of cognitive science can be incorporated into the study of literary interpretation. The last two decades have seen the establishment of cognitive studies as a valuable interdisciplinary approach in the humanities and beyond. However, what it can - or could - offer to the practice of literary interpretation is not entirely clear. In this volume fourteen papers by scholars from three continents address this issue.

And the one in which we are particularly interested is:

8. Navigating Through Fantasy Worlds: Cognition and the Intricacies of Reader Response to Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, Margarete Rubik

Abstract

My paper focuses on an analysis of Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, to investigate what cognitive problems may be posed by its mere understanding, and more particularly its manipulation of reader expectation and creation of suspense. The novel is a favourite with most academic colleagues and students. An exuberant mixture of postmodern action thriller, satire, science fiction and metafiction, and intertextual puzzle, it creates an alternative world which both enacts and parodies genre paradigms, inter-discursively links up to a legion of canonical and popular texts and for its effects plays off the semi-mythical status some of these literary texts have achieved in the academic community with the marginality of literature in today's everyday life. Can cognitive science help us to explain how readers react to this highly complex book, which dispenses with such epistemological strongholds of cognition as the space-time continuum and the distinction between fact and fiction? How can reception of a book work which is so original that the next move of the plot is entirely unpredictable and which completely inverts the recognizable world and its laws? How can readers cognitively process this complexity and heterogeneity, if the real-world frames and scripts they must needs rely on are constantly discredited and exploded in the course of the action? Why is the novel nonetheless experienced as being exciting and suspenseful when it is impossible to project, from our previous reading experience, what might happen next? What kind of (literary) knowledge and (re)congnition is presupposed for the surreal humour to work at all? What role do paratextual markers and epigraphs play in the cognitive process? The Eyre Affair, of all books, is a challenge to investigations how cognition might work in literary reception.

Categories: Books, Talks, Scholar, Jane_Eyre, Sequels