Fictionality and Cognition: An autofiction case study

Alison Gibbons from Sheffield Hallam University presents a talk in the series “Current Research in Narrative Studies,” the research seminar of the British and Irish Association for Narrative Studies. These seminars are held in a hybrid format, with speakers and audience from the Association membership around the country, hosted at York by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies. 

Abstract:

This paper considers the cognitive processes which underpin how readers engage with narratives that possess hybrid fictionality. Autofiction is a case in point: a genre in which the author appears as a character, and the nonfiction of their autobiographical life combines with the fiction of invention and fabrication. Specifically, I explain the reading experience of Michelle Tea’s autofiction Black Wave by creating a cognitive model that combines the storyworld, Text World Theory, and conceptual blending. In the process, I proposed two new concepts: the “author model” and “ontological dissonance”. My model’s value is then put to the test through analysis of Black Wave alongside corresponding reader response data.

Bio:

Alison Gibbons is Reader in Contemporary Stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the author of Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of Style and Reader Response: Minds, Media, Methods (John Benjamins, 2021), Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives in Language (Palgrave, 2018), Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (Routledge, 2012), and Mark Z. Danielewski (Manchester University Press, 2011). Alison’s research pursues a cognitive approach (including empirical methodologies) to contemporary innovative narratives and she is currently writing a monograph on autofiction and fictionality.