| Description: |
DOC-Stipendium Marijana Mikic:
Preparing a dissertation for publication as a monograph. Abstract of the dissertation:
Recent cognitive narratological research has examined the role of emotion and empathy in texts by ethnic American writers who grapple with questions of race, ethnicity, and identity. The work of scholars such as Patrick Colm Hogan, Sue J. Kim, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and Stephanie Fetta has been instrumental for bringing cognitive approaches to narrative emotion into conversation with more politically oriented concerns at the center of race and ethnic studies. “Race, Space, and Emotion in Twenty-First-Century African American Literature” seeks to continue and expand the existing conversation. The dissertation combines insights from cognitive research on emotion, narrative theory, African American studies, and Black geographies to examine how twenty-first-century African American storyworlds aesthetically capture relationships between the social production of race and space and individual emotions as varied as fear, hope, shame, guilt, anger, and grief. To illustrate that there is much we can learn about “emotions in context” from African American narrative, it examines storyworlds by Colson Whitehead, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, Brit Bennett, Percival Everett, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Sherri L. Smith, and N.K. Jemisin. On the one hand, the project seeks to highlight how research from the cognitive sciences and cognitive narratology provides valuable insights for examining emotion and empathy in African American literature. On the other hand, it foregrounds how a reading of individual emotional experience as closely bound up with race and geography can enrich cognitive narratology and offer a more contextually and communally oriented understanding of emotions. |