International Roundtable “Cognitive Genre Studies: Models of Reader Interactions with Text”

Contemporary theory approaches genre less as classification than as an instrument of communication and interpretation. Genres are intersubjective; they emerge in the wake of author-reader interaction and are an inevitable condition of aesthetic communication and understanding. This explains the cognitive sciences’ interest in the category of genre as a mentally embodied representation, or schema, that variously participates in and mediates aesthetic reception. The nature of this schema is simultaneously individual and collective, being based both in the biological and the sociocultural. In order to be perceived, genre schemas must be relatively stable, but they must also be relatively flexible and mutable so as to accommodate new aesthetic experience.

Cognitive genre studies combine research in cognitive psychology and cognitive poetics, reception aesthetics, and pragmatic discourse studies to offer new perspectives on current opinion within genre theory.

The following topics are proposed for roundtable discussion:

• What are the functions of genre in aesthetic reception? How do readers recognize and assimilate genres, and how are genres conceptualized in readers’ mind? How within a text are the genres of its parts as well as of its whole linked, and how are they integrated in the mind of the reader?
• What links genre as a sociocultural construct with genre as a cognitive schema for reception? Are they interrelated or do they operate independently of each other? What are the biological and/or civilizational prerequisites for their identification? Wherein lie the logics of their historical mutability?
• What possibilities, advantages, or disadvantages lie ahead for researchers in empirical and/or theoretical cognitive genre studies?

Speakers:

Irina Tarasova (Saratov State University, Russia), “On Empirical Research of Genre Models in Readers’ Minds”

Michael Sinding (Mohawk College, Canada), “Blending Generic Emotions in Tragicomedy: Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale”

Artem Zubov (Lomonosov MSU, Russia), “A History of Reading Genre in Cognitive Perspective: The Case of Science Fiction in the USA”

Discussants: Sergei Zenkin (HSE, RSUH, Russia), Peter Stockwell (University of Nottingham, UK)

Moderator – Andrei Logutov (Lomonosov MSU)

Discussion will be conducted in English and Russian (with translation)