Literary in Life

This consortium reconsiders how literature reflects, explores and modifies social life. The project analyzes fiction, poetry and cases of new media texts in order to map the traffic between the poetic and the everyday, between the artistically designed and the incidentally occurring. It focuses on the poetics of literary practices in their traditional, creative and experimental manifestations in literature and other textual forms.

Methods from transdisciplinary narrative studies, cognitive poetics of emotion, rhetorics of literary affectivity, and poetics of experimentality are utilized and developed. This approach provides detailed analyses on how literary conventions and novelties work in and through the latest forms of cultural and social meaning-making, how stories and metaphors work as tools for literature and social life.  The project will take literary scholarship into a new direction. The focus is on literary works and literariness and opens up the boundaries that have traditionally isolated artworks from the world of everyday life and routine textual practices.

In order to study the forms and functions of literature and life intertwined, the project asks 1) how the literary interacts with the communicative in everyday social interaction, 2) how literary experimentation revolts against and remodels dominant cultural values and discourses, and 3) how literature creates structures and discursive possibilities for individuals to express and to share emotion and affect.   Three universities contribute to the multidisciplinary effort of understanding the human mind in action.

Academy of Finland

Professor / Consortium PI

Mari Hatavara

mari.hatavara [at] uta.fi

+358 40 1901 565