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Abstract
Recent work in the neuroscience of time perception has revealed that humans have an unconscious capacity to ‘catch’, or synchronise with, other people’s subjective experience of time. This process has, I argue, been profoundly intuited by authors in their fictional explorations of time and subjectivity. Literary discourse offers a privileged site for explorations of temporal synchronisation, as authors are able to frame, refract and nuance the relationships they depict, so broadening our understanding of the role of subjective temporality within them. Yet there is a lack of understanding of the precise ways in which time, bodies and environments are intertwined, both in literary studies and cognitive science. This is a significant gap, because subjective time — the experience of temporal properties of events and processes, in particular duration — provides the organising fabric of conscious experience, both for fictional and actual minds.
My methodology combines cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics and cognitive historicism. Through this multifaceted lens, I show how thinking through this intersubjective time can help us understand questions of style, character and plot in narrative. Furthermore, my research expands our understanding of temporal synchronisation, revealing aspects of this cognitive phenomenon that science hasn’t yet established.
In particular, literature demonstrates that temporal synchronisation can occur through two avenues: between people, as cognitive science has studied, and which I explore in my first chapter through Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist. Secondly, between people and objects —a phenomenon which has been illuminated by literature, rather than cognitive science. My second chapter starts here, looking at the influence that family homes can have on their inhabitants in Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses. Expanding my analysis beyond the bounds of the Western, Anglophone world, I show how this human/object temporal influence exists across linguo-cultural regions, exploring Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus and Martín Felipe Castagnet’s Los cuerpos del Verano. My contribution is theoretical, offering not just original readings of texts but new methodological directions for literature and cognitive science, gesturing towards a new way of understanding time, bodies and environment.