Cognitive Approaches to Literary Bordering

Borders are central to spatially and culturally. How can we as readers use literary texts and other narratives in order to understand borders, borderings and border experiences? In this lecture I will be using a combination of border studies, border poetics, and cognitive approaches to help find out. A border poetics approach proposes connecting borders met by characters in narrative storyworlds with the borders of the narrative itself as they are met by readers or listeners. Many analyses of borders in literature still however focus mainly on borders that are presented in texts rather than on the borders of those presentations. The question of how these borders can be linked to the borders of those textual presentations remains to be answered fully. I propose that 4E cognitive approaches (around Embodiment, Enactment, Extension and Embeddedness), involving also cultural cognition, emotion, predictive processing and kinesic cues can be combine with border poetics to provide answers to this question. I will also be drawing on cognitive approaches in the interdisciplinary field of border studies which focuses on the way in which narratives are co-constructed by tellers and readers/listeners. To do this I will be carrying out analyses of borders in Aritha van Herk’s Places Far from Ellesmere and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. These do not only address important bordering processes – postcolonial, centre/periphery, Arctic – in the Canadian context, but also reflect actively on cognition, reading and bodies. I will use border poetics analysis as a starting point, mapping the texts onto the geographical and bordered spaces of Canada, showing how they map these spaces on to a bordered textual space. After that I will show how they invoke various kinds of embodiment, movement and cognition for the reader, connecting these to topographical, cultural, architectural, epistemological and textual borders.