The launch of the research action took place in form of a first project presentation within the interdisciplinary hub “Literature, Cognition and Emotions (LCE)” that constituted my main research environment at UiO, and a short research stay at the “Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin”, included a project presentation at an international workshop at Humboldt-University Berlin. Both launch activities proved crucial for implementing the notion of ‘4E cognition’ – that is, of the enactive, embedded, embodied, and extended qualities of the mind – as key aspect of the project’s theoretical and analytical approach. Additionally, the research action’s starting period was marked by the launch of the project website. In the following project phase, I co-organised and co-hosted two research workshops in cooperation with colleagues form LCE and UiO’s department of Comparative Literature, inviting internationally experts from literary and media studies, cognitive linguistics and psychology, as well as empirical reader response research as key contributors. Both workshops also included a public outreach event, one at Oslo’s House of Literature, one at the National Library of Norway. The project’s next crucial stage was marked by the secondment period at the Norwegian Reading Centre at the University of Stavanger, focusing on methodological questions.
In addition to the outlined events and measures, I participated in various international conferences and workshops in the course of the project. Due to the covid-19 pandemic however, several planned events had to be cancelled. In total, the project presentations and research discussions within the different outlets played a crucial role in developing the project further, in consolidating its framework and sharpening its hypotheses.
The project’s main research results so far can be outlined as follows: As the project’s comparative corpus analyses showed, the dominant appeal to the readers’ visual perception in multimodal novels and the strategies to position them as (co-)observers serve to evoke the readers’ readiness for multisensory engagement with the text. To this end, as the conducted research showed, the novels also make significant use of ‘traditional’ stylistic and narrative strategies of reader engagement, such as the figure of the ‘fictive publisher’. With regard to multimodal novels as well as other historical multimodal print artefacts (such as illustrated magazines), the research action was able to substantiate the hypothesis that textual/narrative and multimodal elements alike are being functionalized to direct the reader-observer’s attention to the medium (book, magazine, etc.) as a physical artefact and a complex communicative object that readers have to and do engage with in a multisensory way.
With regard to dissemination and communication, the research work so far resulted in four book chapters (one published, two forthcoming, one in peer review), two journal articles (one published, one to be submitted in Feb. 2022), two review articles, a contribution to a poster exhibition at UiO, a short essay in an edited volume targeted at a broader audience, a podcast episode on “Multimodality and Materiality in Literature”, and a concept video on “Material Reading” (both currently in post-production).
