Literary narratives are spaces of experimentation, of odd simulations of alternatives to the cognitive order of sense-making. The experimental dimension of literature rests, on the one hand, on its strong experiential backdrop and, on the other hand, on the challenge to that familiar human experientiality. The experimentation in literature ranges from outlining the impossible to counterfactual speculation, from the doubling of perspective to the hypergranularity of perception, expressed in distinctive genres that result from the interaction of agents and spaces. Starting from an exploration of the relations between narrative and space (Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu 2016, Brandt 2009, Hallet and Neumann 2009) and the consideration of spatial metaphors and the productivity of the concept of narrative for sense-making of cultural phenomena (Lefebvre 1974, Jameson 1991, Soja 1989), this paper proposes to consider literary narrative as locus of experimentation that goes beyond experientiality. Such experimentation, far from having a direct use or application, provides room for imagination to play out cognitive possibilities that reality does not accommodate, and as such is a cultural technique of resilience to cope with crises and uncertainty (Abrantes 2020, Kukkonen 2023). To illustrate this hypothesis of literary narrative as a space of oddity, the paper proposes an analysis of Hervé Le Tellier’s 2020 novel L’Anomalie, regarded both as a further example of the classic motif of the double in literature (Bär 2007), and as such an example of a cognitive oddity, and as a test to the boundaries of cognitive and narrative sense-making.
Period
26 Jan 2024
Event title
XII Graduate Conference in Culture Studies: Space Oddity
