Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures

Cognitive approaches to cultural texts are increasingly gaining currency in contemporary debates in literary and cultural studies. Yet they have often been criticized for focusing too narrowly on the interaction between a text and a single, highly abstract reader, and for disregarding both actual readers and the larger historical, political, and cultural context in which a text is produced and consumed. The proposed research project aims at bridging some of the perceived gaps between cognitive narratology and more context and politically oriented approaches. It will use a cognitive approach to explore the narrative strategies employed in a range of ethnic American literary productionspecifically by African American, Chicano/a, and Muslim South Asian American writerswith a special emphasis on empathy, affect, and emotion in both the production and the reception of such texts. The central aim of the project is to develop a cognitive approach that helps us to investigate the role of empathy and emotion in the literary mediation of ethnic and cultural difference and to gain a better understanding of what larger cultural repercussions such imaginary engagement may have in the contemporary political climate of the United States.

Cognitive approaches to cultural texts are gaining currency in contemporary debates in literary and cultural studies. Yet they have often been criticized for focusing too narrowly on the interaction between a text and a single, abstract reader, and for disregarding both actual readers and the larger historical, political, and cultural context in which a text is produced and consumed. The Narrative Encounters project aimed at bridging some of the gaps between cognitive narratology and more context and politically oriented approaches by exploring the narrative strategies employed in a range of ethnic American literary production-specifically by African American, Chicanx, Arab American writers, and South Asian American writers-with a special emphasis on empathy, affect, and emotion in both the production and the reception of such texts. To this purpose, it also carried out an empirical study in the United States to gain insight in the contemporary reception of a controversial story by the African American writer Alice Walker. Our project thus contributed to the emergent field of critical race narratology, a form of investigation that not only applies narratological concepts to texts authored by "ethnic" identified American authors but also considers how issues around race and ethnicity might force narratologists to reconsider their understanding of narrative and how paying attention to the formal features of ethnic American literatures might challenge their understanding of narrative theory. Our results suggest that we must give special attention to textual features such as a historically and emotionally charged understanding of place, space, and geography, the shifting temporalities of ethnic American literatures, and the narrativization of ethnic food as site of remembrance, identity formation, demarcation, and assimilation, along with contextual factors such as multiple audiences, permissibility, and gatekeeping within the publishing industry. Our inclusion of empirical methods also points to the complexities in the reception of texts that are perceived as divergent or "radical," thereby opening a promising new research agenda for the field of critical race narratology.