The Iconic Power of Short Stories - A Cognitive Approach Chapter in Literary Visualities

Renate Brosch
The Iconic Power of Short Stories –

A Cognitive Approach
Abstract: Based on a cognitive approach to genre as reading experience, this
chapter argues that the reader’s role in making sense of short stories is differ-
ent than in reading long narratives. Because of the brevity of the form, readers
are more involved cognitively, contributing input from their personal experience
and their cultural knowledge when responding to the gaps and absences in the
text. The aspect of visuality is a special case in this reader response to stories: on
the one hand, the reading experience is accompanied by an ongoing, dynamic
default visualisation whose mental imagery remains vague and indistinct in
order to accommodate incoming information. On the other, certain moments in
the narrative are conducive of highlighted and intensified visualisations whose
images stand out in the reading process and often enter long term memory.
Several textual cues for these latter especially vivid images are suggested, such
as defamiliarisation and emotional appeal. Among these strategies the narrative
perspective and the construction of narrative space play a prominent part as trig-
gers for visualisation based on an embodied response. A close examination of
these visual strategies in a case study of Graham Swift’s short story “Seraglio”
(1982) concludes the chapter.
1 Introduction
As most discussions of the genre have noted, it is impossible to distinguish short
stories from long narratives on the basis of textual properties alone. I have,
therefore, in several publications advocated taking the reader’s response into
account, and this chapter addresses short stories as specific reading experience
Copyright © 2017. De Gruyter, Inc.. All rights reserved.
(cf. Brosch 2013). Unfortunately, however, the experience of reading short stories
cannot be separated absolutely from the reading of novels, or other long texts,
either. Rather, as this article will show, the differences are scalar and modelled
on a continuum where, for example, a Victorian three-decker and a Hemingway
short story represent opposite poles of the spectrum. Hence, in spite of its more
emphatic response-oriented angle, the following discussion resembles earlier
genre theory in describing tendencies rather than essential features, and aesthet-
ically successful strategies rather than inherent properties. It differs from con-
ventional understandings of genre in paying attention to mental organisational
DOI 10.1515/9783110378030-006
Literary Visualities : Visual Descriptions, Readerly Visualisations, Textual Visibilities, edited by Ronja Bodola, and Guido
Isekenmeier, De Gruyter, Inc., 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID=4895017.
Created from ed on 2023-02-19 19:23:41.
166 Renate Brosch
processes. Faced with the profusion of hybrid genres in the contemporary media
landscape, critics of genre theory have to include the mental representations
attendant on identifying such schematic structures. Whether conceptualised as
“preference rule systems” (Herman 2002, 11) or prototypes (Rosch 1975) or sche-
mata (Sinding 2012, 153), genres are generated in the production and reception
of literature through the activation and adaptation of mental representations in
cognitive processes that utilise everyday capacities and cultural knowledge. This
dynamic and interactive understanding of genre is well attuned to the enormous
adaptability of the short story. Subsequent references to genre are thus based on
a pragmatic and performative understanding, which regards genre not as sets of
stylistic devices or textual properties, but as sets of (ideal and abstract) deter-
minants on the production and interpretation of meaning (Frow 1995, 10). The
particular determinants of the short story depend, I propose, to a large extent on
the power of images.
It has often been noted that the short story invites a degree of reader par-
ticipation not frequently found in other narrative texts (Korte 2003, 5). In order
to overcome its disadvantages in quantity, the genre presents its readers with
extra challenges. Since readers seem to remember best the parts where they have
to actively contribute, it is these textual challenges that often make the reading
experience significant. Hence, participation in the form of puzzling over myster-
ies, in trying to evoke unusual images or in coming to terms with dissonance and
indeterminacy will increase narrative impact. These interactions between reader
and text are addressed in the following chapter from the perspective of reading
experience. As Groeben (1980, 49) already noted, there exists a fundamental dif-
ference between the immediate reading experience (‘Leseerlebnis’) and herme-
neutical acts of interpretation, a difference that is too often ignored in literary
criticism, because its goal is interpretation.1
Certainly, the experiential aspects of literary texts are difficult to investi-
gate, because they are indistinct and transient mental operations. In contrast to
later interpretive acts, they often take place automatically or at a subconscious
level that needs to be deliberately recuperated. But the methods that allow us
to venture into these speculative domains have received important impulses
1 Iser (1978, 149) also registers the essential difference between a first and later readings which
can never repeat the order of disclosure occasioned by the text because knowledge about events
and outcomes is already available at second and later readings. This fore-knowledge enables the
literary critic with hindsight to analyse how the text produces the ‘first’ meaning. However, inter-
pretations often make judgements that are implicitly based on the spontaneous processes of first
reading. This is why cognitive poetics is a useful additional analytical tool; for a comprehensive
interpretation of the text, hermeneutics and discourse analysis remain valid approaches.
The Iconic Power of Short Stories – A Cognitive Approach 167
from the insights in the neuro- and cognitive sciences since the 1980s. Cognitive
approaches can now supplement interpretation with an analysis of the mental
operations that necessarily inform it. Though cognitive narratology and cogni-
tive poetics now provide criteria for analysing the reader’s mental operations and
their corresponding textual cues, they are not set to displace interpretation as
a central activity in literary studies. The whole endeavour of cognitive literary
studies is to make overt the mental pathways underlying the process of constru-
ing meaning. It recognises interpretation as a formal, scholarly extension of the
informal processes that take place during basic reading (Easterlin 2012, 24). To
disregard these experiential processes would mean to ignore the very aspect
where many differences can be observed between short stories and other narra-
tive genres.
There are several answers to the objection that responses to a literary text
are too singular and personal to be investigated. First, it is common knowledge
that the structure of the text limits the number of ways to comply with textual
guidance. Moreover, certain organisational processes can be safely assumed to be
shared by all readers, because of the way the brain is hard-wired: when process-
ing a literary text, readers connect the information given to their own physical
and mental experience and to their cultural knowledge: “On the one hand […]
linguistic expressions encode a particular construal of the events represented;
on the other […] this interacts with the reader’s ‘elaborate conceptual substrate’,
that is, the reader’s background knowledge and ability to understand an expres-
sion’s ‘physical, social, and linguistic content’” (Langacker 2008, 4, citing Neary
2004, 119). As a result of the advances made in cognitive narratology, we are able
to identify and explain some important mental operations performed during the
reading process, such as priming, foregrounding, projecting, and blending. None
of these operations or reading modes is specific to the short story. But in short
stories all of them help to capture and hold the reader’s attention and to increase
participation, thus demanding cognitive input from the reader and denying him
or her a purely immersive reading experience. As I will argue, all these organisa-
tional acts have at least a visual component, some are completely visual. Hence,
the importance of images for the genre.

One of the most prominent ways in which readerly participation takes
place is in visual imagining. Again, traditional literary scholarship often resists
investigating these images, arguing that they are too personal and singular to
be generalised (Esrock 1994, 180). In order to perform certain functions within
their cultural context, images must first be envisioned by a recipient; without
the receiving mind, the image does and means nothing at all. Only in this sense
of a circuitry between individual reception and its exchange with the “cultural
imaginary” (Fluck 1997) does Mitchell’s (2005, 10) idea of an “agency” of images
168 Renate Brosch
make sense beyond its metaphorical appeal. There is no denying that via visual-
isation the visual culture at large can be influenced: that museum-goers flock
to see the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa was caused by the poetic power of
Walter Pater’s description, not by the undeniable power of Leonardo’s picture.
Our imagination of Victorian London as a city of fog, slums and industrial filth
probably owes more to Charles Dickens than to any historical documentation.
The longevity of these literary visualities is ensured by their remediation into
other fictions as well as into their receptive visualisation. But visual culture schol-
ars often prefer to ignore the fact that any effect, function and meaning of images
depends on their mental performance or – as traditional literary studies would
have it – on the imagination. This traditional concept is, however, too loaded in
the present context, which deals with the more narrowly conceptualised visualis-
ation as defined by Esrock (2005, 633) where ‘visualisation’ is used as a synonym
of ‘imagining’ and means the production of mental images or mental representa-
tions in the process of reading.
Visualisation as I understand it is generated through an interplay between
the text’s instructions and the reader’s processing capacities. On the side of the
text, meaning in short stories is partly imagistic in character, since short narra-
tives resort to compression, and compression tends to be visual (Dancygier 2012,
18). Moreover, images are especially suited to convey issues that cannot easily be
put into words. On the reader’s side, allusions, omissions and indeterminacies
in a text make multiple meanings possible and activate the reader’s visual imag-
ining. Imagining is a complex phenomenon where primary embodied responses
overlap with interpretive reflection. Some of the dynamic mental representations
that accompany a reading are especially vivid and memorable; these moments of
heightened attention and imagining are perceived as significant and are likely to
enter into interpretation and memory. Hence, in processing the literary text and
foregrounding certain images, meaningful patterns are established which form
the basis of later interpretive understanding.
Thus visualisations help readers to organise the complexity and indetermi-
nacy of narrative. They aid comprehension, meaning production and memory.
And heightened emotional experience while reading depends at least in part on

the power of a story’s images. The degree of emotional involvement fluctuates
across a text, of course, but as Toolan (2012, 224) states, the short story makes
the most of its licence to counterbalance brevity by including moments of “excep-
tional emotional and ethical resonance”. I propose that one of the ways in which
short stories overcome their disadvantage in quantity is to appeal to the read-
er’s visualisation. Thus, experiencing short stories unfolds in a tension between
verbal economy and imaginative projection.
But the question remains, when and how the text triggers especially vivid
visual imaginings (and intense reading experiences). I will address these ques-
tions in the following trying to throw some light on the textual cues that elicit
heightened attention and trigger visualisations that stand out in the reading
experience and remain in memory.2
In order to do so, I have to disaggregate complex interdependent mental
organisational processes and probe them for their emotional impact. Herman
(2003, 172) names five core problem-solving activities, among them bounding
into segments, foregrounding and imputing causal relations as fundamental
parts of cognitive processing. According to Brown (1989, 242), everything can be
organised mentally as either a sequence or a compression; both options are actu-
alised in reading, so that the flux of processing and the foregrounding of certain
images alternate. The stream of reading experience is segmented into units that
are bounded and classifiable and thus more readily recognised and remembered.
Brown (1989, 243) claims that readers of short stories compress semantic units in
a “synchronic reflective act” which encodes meaning “iconically” in a memora-
ble way.3 These condensed images or parts of images have an intensifying effect
that encourages projection and enhances memorability. Herman (2002, 85) also
identifies these highlighted visual moments as a (not always conscious) mne-
monic resource.
In the following, I am going to describe visualisations in first reading pro-
cesses and discuss what they contribute to interpretation. Using insights from
cognitive literary studies, I seek to identify narrative devices that prompt the
visual imagination and to single out those reading experiences that promote long-
term visual memory. While most visualisations that accompany a reading process
hover below the threshold of awareness, some “iconic moments” are highlighted
and tend to inform later recollections of a text. These intensified visualisations
occur when either embodied or cultural understanding or both receive extra
challenge, thereby causing an intense emotional and/or cognitive engagement
with the text passage. Since short stories seek to compensate brevity by making
special impact, they frequently rely on these strategies that undermine habitual
and automatic text processing.
2 My approach is traditional in that it presupposes a dense, carefully crafted narrative literary

form which encourages an alert, attentive reading as well as later reminiscence. Yet, it is clear
that many stories are neither read nor written in pursuit of these aesthetic qualities. But many
an author’s comments deal with the problem of casual consumption and ephemeral reading
experience, seeking strategies for leaving a trace on the reader’s mind.
3 Brown (1989, 242) refers to these iconic compressions as “configurations”. But in order to avoid
the implication that these images are static, I prefer the term “iconic moments”.
170 Renate Brosch
2 The Immediate Reading Experience

Neuropsychological experiments show that mental images are essential to any
act of cognition and that visual thinking is a component of cognition just like
verbal reasoning (Kosslyn 1980, 4). According to Sadoski and Paivio’s (2001, 1–2)
‘dual coding theory of cognition’, visual and verbal systems function in tandem
and readers shuttle between them. Johnson-Laird (1983, 407) proposes that there
are three kinds of representations for discourse: the sound or text, a propositional
one “close to the surface form of the utterance” and the mental model which is
constructed on the basis of the truth conditions of the propositions expressed by
the sentences in discourse4. According to Bortolussi and Dixon (2013, 26–27),
the verbal propositional input is transformed into a mental model or representa-
tion and this is what we remember. Clearly then, visualisation plays a crucial role
in text processing.5
As Turner (1996, 18) explains, our constantly active faculty for “storying” is
linked to bodily perceptions, especially to visual perceptions, which are again
and again repeated in stories. He argues that there is a link between fundamental
image schemas and understanding sequences of narrative. According to Lakoff
and Johnson (1980), these image schemas pattern the way the human mind
works. As defined in their foundational study, image schemas or conceptual
metaphors offer a visual form of knowledge, an “imaginative rationality”, which
supplements propositional knowledge with a knowledge that is “embodied,
imaginative and gestalt” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 235). Image schemas carry
culturally determined semantic surplus and values (e. g. ‘good is up’ and ‘bad is
down’), which is processed automatically during the immediate reading experi-
ence (Stockwell 2002, 109, 105).
These image schemas as well as deixis and perspective constitute visual
elements in narrative texts that appeal to embodied experience. Since textual
visuality is anchored in sensorimotor perceptions of the real world, their recep-
tion resembles the experiential parameters of perceptions in everyday life. This
understanding of the reader’s experience is based on the concept of “4e cogni-
tion” instantiated by the neurosciences. 4e cognition characterises mental pro-
4 ‘Mental model’ and ‘mental imagery’ are terms used in the neurosciences for visual imagining
and visualising (cf. Kosslyn et al. 2006).
5 I am aware that cognitivists who subscribe to an enactivist position hold that the idea of men-
tal representation in narrative texts is fundamentally flawed. They argue that our response to lit-
erary characters and events is structurally the same as our everyday management of information
(Zlatev et al. 2008, 2–3). I am sceptical of this sort of strong cognitivism which tends to reduce the
polyvalence of literature by equating it with everyday experience.
cesses as (1) embodied, (2) embedded, (3) enacted, and (4) extended (Rowlands
2010, 3). The idea that mental processes are embodied means roughly that
they are partly constituted by, partly made up of wider […] bodily structures and processes.
The idea that mental processes are embedded is, again roughly, the idea that mental pro-
cesses have been designed to function only in tandem with a certain environment that lies
outside the brain of the subject […]. The idea that mental processes are enacted is the idea
that they are made up not just of neural processes but also of things that the organism does
more generally – that they are constituted in part by the ways in which an organism acts
on the world and the ways in which world, as a result acts back on that organism. The idea
that mental processes are extended is the idea that they are not located exclusively inside an
organism’s head but extend out, in various ways, into the organism’s environment. (Row-
lands 2010, 3)
The central and crucial constituent of this new concept of the mind is the embod-
iment theory. It is corroborated by the discovery of mirror neurons, which appear
to be responsible for simulation-based acts of understanding and meaning-mak-
ing.
The main argument for common mental processing in readers of a common
cultural moment is based on insights into the processing faculties of the brain:
cognitive theory holds that imagery (recalled or otherwise) is constituted by
(partial) enactment of the perceptual acts that would be carried out if one were
actually perceiving whatever is being imagined (Thomas 2014). Because the mind
works economically, readers automatically call upon their experience of reality in
processing textual narratives. Since reading narratives engenders an embodied
form of reception, story comprehension entails an imitative imagination of the
sense perceptions taking place in the fictional world. This simulation is largely
responsible for the emotional effect literary fictions can have on readers, the
feeling that ‘it has happened to them’.
Thus, on the one hand, making sense of reading is grounded in embodied per-
ception and sensorimotor experience. This is manifest in the ubiquity of spatial
cognition which is at the heart of human thinking and informs every verbal artic-
ulation, even very abstract propositions, with its properties and values. Embod-
ied response in reading narratives involves a “fictional recentering” of the read-

er’s senso-motoric positioning (Caracciolo 2011, 118; cf. Ryan 1991, ch. 1).6 This
6 Without using the term, Iser (1978, 150) anticipated the part played by embodied and enac-
tive cognition, by describing how readers are absorbed into the fictional world they themselves
imagine and how the absent world enters into their consciousness and vice versa: “Thus text and
reader are linked together, the one permeating the other. We place our synthetising faculties at
the disposal of an unfamiliar reality, produce the meaning of that reality, and in so doing enter
into a situation which we could not have created out of ourselves”.
172 Renate Brosch
fictional recentering of the reading subject is part of the illusion building which is
a prerequisite for immersive reading (Schäfer 2010, 168). A simulated enactment
enables readers to project their minds into the fictional world and to find their
way around there, designating certain figures as “trajectors” whose paths they
follow and certain elements of the ground to become visual landmarks (Stock-
well 2002, 16). Readers are not just able to mentally map the fictional world and
to place things and people into it but they can move around in it themselves and
take up different positions in it via “unconscious somatic transfer of sense experi-
ence” (Fluck 2005, 38). Besides this spatial understanding, they bring embodied
knowledge of their human environment to a reading. In everyday communication,
understanding other people takes place in many ways without verbal exchange;
mindreading is part of an automatic and largely preverbal orientation (Zlatev et
al. 2008, 3). Literary fictions invariably contain corporeal aspects, whether in the
most common form of visual perception or other sense experiences such as body
movements, postures, gestures and facial expressions that can be decoded by
readers effortlessly. Abbreviating the 4e model of cognition, we may think of this
whole set of responses as embodied or enactive visualisations.
On the other hand, literary texts are produced and received in the context
of extensive unconscious associations as well as deliberate acts of connecting
to prior knowledge, memory and circumstance, all of which constitute informa-
tional material with which readers invest the represented world. Images serve as
repositories of information and literary texts carry connotations from the larger
cultural imaginary and readers access the cultural memory archive when making
meaning. Our understanding of narratives is grounded in cultural knowledge, a
knowledge stored in the mind in visual schemas and scripts, which we automati-
cally recall when making sense of a text. Scripts and frames are historically deter-
mined knowledge clusters that facilitate the production of meaning in communi-
cation whether they are held to be correct or not (Strasen 2013, 41). Constructing
images and sequences and aligning them with the cultural reservoir of schemas
and scripts happens in everyday communication for reasons of economy. In
reading, likewise, the communicative benefit of schemas and scripts lies in the
possibility to access an entire set of objects and events when only one aspect is
mentioned, so that expressions like ‘having a check-up’ or ‘looking at the menu’
automatically imply manifold aspects of typical situations (Dancygier 2012, 33).
In the present context, it is significant that frames and scripts are not exclusively
or even primarily language-based but frequently non-propositional visual objects
and events drawn from a store-house of well-known images. This aspect of vis-
ualisation links it to the cultural imaginary in which each individual participates;
it has political implications because such meaning-making always occurs within
a pre-existing social field and within actual power relations (Bryson 2001, 5).
Hence, this aspect of reading may be designated cultural visualisation, since it is

culturally determined and potentially critical.
Visualisation processes are non-hermeneutic and non-propositional, obvi-
ously, but their Gestalt-knowledge enters into and inflects later hermeneutic acts.
Insofar, my distinction can be related to Collins’s (1991, xi) notions of “enactive
interpretation” and “critical interpretation”. Just as meaning-making is both
language- and image-based, it also depends on corporeal processing as well as
interpretive reflection. To separate the two modes is an entirely heuristic proce-
dure; in the reading process they are interdependent and interactive. Neither do
they represent distinct successive stages in reading, though embodied reactions
occur primarily in the immediate reading experience and a critical stance is often
taken afterwards. Yet, even when the reading experience feels entirely absorbing,
some critical distance always remains in any act of reading and this critical stance
becomes greater in retrospective interpretation: “separation from the experience
of interiority is what defines criticism” (Schwenger 1999, 9). As several critics
have noted, immersion and loss of critical distance is much harder to achieve in
short narratives (Wright 1989).
3 The Particularities of the Short Story Genre

It stands to reason that short narratives depend on the evocation of schemas and
scripts more than long ones, and that understanding a short story must have
greater recourse to contextual knowledge. Because stories do not have room to
elaborate on the determining factors of their fictional worlds and values they
demand more input from the reader who keeps activated schemas in the short-
term memory buffer until they have to be modified or discarded. This dependence
on the semantic participation of readers is well-known: short stories are under-
stood to be suggestive, to master the art of omission and allusion and to be more
metaphorical than long narratives which have space to develop metonymical rela-
tions.
Short stories, as has often been noted by theorists and critics, thrive on
gaps, mysteries, secrets (Toolan 2012, 223). Their restricted space permits ellip-
ses, absences and uncertainties which we would not accept in a novel (Hanson
1989, 25). Though this is not an exclusive speciality of short stories, their restric-
tion in quantity makes compression necessary which in turn creates a reliance
on the reader’s ability to supplement the textual given with extratextual knowl-
edge. Among the cultural knowledge we bring to our reading is some expectation
regarding the genre. These expectations shape the reading and prepare readers
174 Renate Brosch
for their contributions to the process of organising textuality. May (1984) terms the
short story a “mode of knowing” that differs from other fictions, one that is char-
acterised by epistemic uncertainty, liminality and lack of resolution or closure
(May 1984, 328). In Bassler’s (2015, 79) view, this cognitive uncertainty can mani-
fest itself on several levels: on the intratextual level as an epistemological crisis of
a character, on the experiential level as a cognitive and emotional space in which
readers are invited to rethink their own concepts and beliefs, and, finally, on an
interdiscursive level, as short stories bring together and amalgamate a multiplic-
ity of discourses.
This is another way of putting the contention that short stories make special
demands on cognitive participation by requiring supplementary input at every
level. On the intratextual level, in addition to epistemological crises and epiph-
anies of fictional characters, unresolved puzzles and problems characterise the
short story’s uncertainty: summary description relies on contextual knowledge,
reduced character specification relies on Theory of Mind and folk psychology and
omitted psychological motivation relies on empathy in readers in order to make
sense of the narrative events. In this way through what Bassler (2015, 86) calls the
“cognitive, emotional and ethical space” of participation and engagement on the
part of the reader, a multiplicity of discourses is evoked and brought to bear on
the narrative.
Whereas novels give readers a certain length of time to spend with their
characters and to accommodate to their intratextual belief systems, short stories
must somehow manage to engage readers cognitively and emotionally during a
brief reading experience. Because of their brevity, short stories cannot depend
on absorbing readers easily into an immersive fictional world, so that an embod-
ied response with complete fictional recentering of the reading subject is not
as easily accomplished as in an absorbing novel. They must rely extensively on
the reader’s supplementary input from personal experience and cultural knowl-
edge. Hence, both embodied experience of the real world and cultural knowledge
enable and constrain the readers’ mental images, and both can contribute to an
enriched reading experience. In order to leave a lasting trace on readers’ minds,
a useful strategy is to aim at moments of intense reading experience in which a

sense of significance meets a sense of vivid visuality.
Many critics have argued that the genre itself possesses a special affinity to the
visual. Early reader response aesthetics already drew attention to the importance
of images in the minds of readers. Studies of the short story have often noted its
propensity for the creation of memorable images and metaphors. Hanson (1985,
5–6) argues from the perspective of production that the compulsion for writers to
compress results in a tendency to evoke iconically. She therefore regards the short
story as a form of preference for the visual in place of the discursive. Considering
textuality, Shaw (1983, 13) points out links between snapshot photography and
short stories. Supplementing her argument with regard to reception processes,
Brown (1989) points out that it is obviously easier to organise textual material
mentally when there is less quantity for our memories to deal with. She claims
that shortness inclines readers to grasp together “achronological units” while
reading. According to Brown (1989, 242–243), the brevity of short stories encour-
ages readers to foreground what she calls “visual configurations”. On this view,
short story reading involves forming units of visualisation which are retained in
short-term memory while the reading process is going on and later consolidated
and compressed into a selection of images which are associated with the long-
term memory of a text. This is confirmed in recent experimental tests of memory
in reading literary narrative. In these experiments Bortolussi and Dixon (2013,
26, 27) find that both the surface structure of the text and the text base are lost rel-
atively quickly after a sentence has been understood; what remains in memory is
the “situation model”, “a spatial or visual representation of the entities described
in the text”. All of these arguments from different theoretical approaches con-
verge on the proposition of short stories as a specifically visual genre. In discuss-
ing this proposition, aspects of textual visuality and readerly visualisation have
to be considered.
4 T
extual Cues for Visualisation: Description,
Focalisation and Metaphor
Traditional literary scholarship attributes visuality to description, metaphor or
figurative language and to perspective and focalisation (Bal 2005, 629–630; → I.
Visual Descriptions, → Introduction, and → Horstkotte, respectively). However,
these claims have to be qualified with regard to the reading experience. While all
three textual features certainly possess the potential to enhance the visualisation
of a text, none does so necessarily.
Detailed description may encourage immersive reading, but does not nec-
essarily generate intense and enduring mental images: “To suggest that texts
encourage visualization is not to imply that the mere description of landscapes
and persons will promote imaging. The sheer presence of such ‘verbal images’
does not suffice” (Esrock 1994, 183). Implicit in this reminder is a conventional
understanding of description as the delineation of a static object. This sort of
narrative arrest is unusual in stories and has declined in novels in the course of
history as well; more often, description is part of narrativity which includes a
change of events. Description set off from narrativity is, in fact, said to constitute
176 Renate Brosch
the special subgenre of the sketch or “lyrical short story”, a text type favoured
by modernist female authors who were experimenting with absence of plot (Jean
Rhys’s “In Luxemburg Gardens”, Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”).
What might be called a “standard mode of engagement with narrative”
(Currie 2010, 106), i. e. a reading primarily interested in events in the fictional
world, tolerates only a limited amount of arrested description. Yet, the famous
effet de réel is supposed to depend on a textual production of the illusion of
likelihood and plausibility. Readers process texts economically and will hold to
concordance with everyday experience wherever possible. In order to be readily
accessible, narratives rely on activating the cognitive actualisation of readers
and their ability to naturalise and contextualise in accordance with everyday
knowledge (cf. Wolf 1993, 118; Lobsien 1975, 4). This reality effect is supposed to
encourage immersive reading and smooth naturalisation. As every avid reader
knows, one can become so engrossed in a book that ordinary life seems tempo-
rarily suspended (Schwenger 1999, 9). But such absorption is much more difficult
to achieve in the short time span of reading a short story.
In Wolf’s and Lobsien’s discussion, “immersive reading” is associated with
popular and “undemanding” literature and somewhat disparaged compared to
highly poetic texts whose indeterminacies and ambivalences will demand a more
cognitive engagement (Wolf 1993, 93). Obviously, short stories can belong to both
types of texts. But in neither case do they have room for elaborate description of a
status quo. Short stories thus remind us of the inadequacy of separating descrip-
tion from narrativity. The conventional notion that description is a static element
that halts narration and hence triggers still rather than dynamic images has to be
revised. Description is actually an essential part of narration, since the imagina-
tion of narrative requires some spatial setting (James 2008, 1). But to characterise
it as a static element against the dynamism of narrative is to confuse a special
effect with a textual structure. It depends on other factors, whether the descrip-
tion of an object or event invites keen visualisation.
Not only descriptions of locations or characters, but viewpoints and intra-
textual relations between characters contribute to the reader’s act of cognitive
mapping. Since spatial mapping is an ordinary organisational process in under-

standing, it facilitates access not only to the ‘concrete’ setting and location of a nar-
rative, but also to more abstract levels of psychological motivation and thematic
content. Narrative spaces can be employed as symbolic or metaphorical reinforce-
ment for significant themes or for psychological contrasts in short stories, so that
the semantic overdetermination will cause an intense reading experience. Like
spatial descriptions, perspective can also help intensify visualisations.
Clearly, focalisation is not itself a visual phenomenon but prompts the reader
to take a perspective. In this way, it can produce startling reading experiences and
hence vivid visualisations. But that is not the case when the perspective produces
little recalcitrance in the reader. Many literary scholars argue or at least imply
that the subjective and necessarily limited point of view of a character is more
likely to elicit sympathy, identification and affective involvement from the reader
(Adamson 2001, 90). According to Jahn (1996, 252, 256), for instance, a passage
that presents objects and events as seen, perceived, or conceptualised from a spe-
cific focus-I will, naturally and automatically, invoke a reader’s adoption of (or
transposition of) this point of view and open a window defined by the percep-
tual, evaluative, and affective parameters that characterise the agent providing
the focus.7 In the normal economy of reading practice, readers tend to adopt the
perspective of internally focalised passages on grounds of similarity with ordi-
nary experience (cf. Coplan 2004, 142–143). Since short stories often prefer sub-
jective perspectives and the use of homodiegetic focalisers, they may be thought
to appeal to an illusory identification. Yet, the effect for the reader is rarely one
of simple vicarious emulative perspective-taking. Instead, internal focalisers are
often deployed as a cognitive challenge on the assumption that interior perspec-
tive does not automatically engender emulative embodied enactment (Brosch
2007b, 156–157).
Such a simple correlation between narrative perspective and perspective-tak-
ing does not sufficiently recognise the reader’s ability to project different mind-
sets and underestimates the ability to imagine several points of view simulta-
neously. Readers are creative in dealing with textual perspectives; they easily
perform mental leaps which are habitual in everyday experience. Hence, mental
representation is never uniformly attached to a specific fictional figure (Brosch
2008, 65). Rather, it is moments when the perspective invites doubt and distrust
that are specially registered, as is the case in unreliable narration, where sympa-
thy and identification are withheld. As Emmott and Sanford’s (2012, 167) experi-
ments have shown, the more personalised a focaliser is, the less readers identify
with his or her perspective. When they encounter a limited, unreliable or elliptic
perception, readers are prompt to counterfocalise and to shift empathy. These par-
ticipatory strategies suspend attention and are likely to be remembered. On closer
inspection, short stories with a strong subjective perspective frequently belong to

that type of unreliability that intends a clear rejection of the point of view by the
reader. As many critics have pointed out, unreliability can refer to various forms
7 Traditional narratological models provide little insight into the readers’ mental imaging
because for them the question ‘who sees?’ refers to seeing in the text only (Bal 2004, 153). And
as Caracciolo (2013, 95) points out, most narratological pronouncements on internal focalisation
tend to reify the character’s perspective.
178 Renate Brosch
of manipulated dissent, but again, visualisation follows neither ethical nor epis-
temic rejection. When something is vividly evoked it will be visualised, no matter
what our (later) interpretive judgement; a selective effect will result not from the
reader’s cognitive dissent but from the multiplicity of deictic shifts in perspective
and frequent need for counterfocalisation in the course of reading a narrative.
To acknowledge multiple deictic shifts in perspective and counterfocalisa-
tion does not imply a denial of empathy. Empathy is a natural side effect of the
dominant person-oriented interest in reading narrative fictions (Vermeule 2010,
11). To comprehend character means thinking another’s thoughts, feeling anoth-
er’s states of mind and perceiving another’s impressions while at the same time
being aware of the fictional nature of the other.8 Instead of orientation towards
the self, readers experience a doubling (or multiplying) of the self; they are
themselves and another (or several others) at the same time. This is what makes
reading so enjoyable and what can cause a new and sometimes transformational
experience. In terms of visualisation, it entails seeing through the eyes of another
but not necessarily believing what one is seeing.
Similarly, metaphors are a possible means of highlighting certain images in
the process of visualisation. Not all metaphorical expressions are inevitably vis-
ually imagined, as commonly used metaphorical expressions and image schemas
are hardly registered as such. This is not to deny that the conceptual metaphors
(or image schemas) already mentioned influence text processing profoundly.
Indeed, they provide the basis for the most automatic and fundamental organ-
isational processes in reading. As described by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 235),
they constitute a basic pattern in the way the human mind works. Because they
carry culturally determined semantic values, conceptual metaphors impart con-
ventional meanings of a general and widely accepted sort in a specific culture
(Stockwell 2002, 109). This means that they also contribute to visualisation
because they offer a visual form of knowledge, on which human understand-
8 Iser (1978, 154) comments on the habitual orientation towards the self which is temporarily
relegated to the background: “In this process there disappears the subject-object division essen-
tial for all cognition and perception, and this is what makes literature a unique means of access
to new experiences. It may also explain why readers have so often mistaken their relationship to
the world of the text as one of ‘identification’”. In a study which is as topical as when it was writ-
ten, this Cartesianism strikes an odd note. These statements show that Iser could not have been
aware that neuropsychology would abandon the ‘subjectivity-first’ model of the mind and posit
an innate intersubjectivity that undercuts the ontological division between subject and object,
as is now the case. Iser (1978, 159) does qualify his premises at the end of the chapter, however,
by stating that literature “enables us to see how little of the subject is a given reality, even to its
own consciousness”.
ing depends (Stockwell 2002, 109). But in my opinion, because they are totally
naturalised, they occasion only automatic and unnoticed embodied responses
and inform primary acts of organisation, such as foregrounding, mapping and
deictic shifts. Hence, they furnish the primary visualisation with the standard
repertoire of “metaphors we live by” without intensifying it. They may not cause
particularly vivid imagistic visualisations but they are indispensable to the read-
er’s fictional recentering. According to May (1984, 329), who supports this view
without referencing cognitive processes, the kind of experience we find in the
short story reflects a mode of knowing that is grounded in the intuitive and imma-
terial reality of an inner world.
Thus, though image schemas are fundamental to primary and passive vis-
ualisation processes, they are not usually pictorial, nor do they trigger intense
and noticeable imaginings. Very innovative and poetic metaphors are a differ-
ent textual cue altogether. And as Gehring (2011) argues, these complex figura-
tive devices often contain obstacles for visual synthesis. Poetic metaphors are a
classic prompt for conceptual blending. Ever since Turner (1996) and Fauconnier
(1994) launched the concept in the 1990s, “blending” has become the gener-
ally accepted term for the mental activity demanded by metaphor.9 The basic
premise of blending theory is that human minds can activate two or more “sets
of information or mental spaces” at the same time and they can project these
input spaces onto one another to produce a blend (Schneider 2012, 3). Accord-
ing to Turner (2006), blending is a mental activity that is going on all the time,
whenever we process information aided by the habitual visual attributes of image
schemas. We are constantly blending the old with the new, alternative viewpoints
with previous ones, adjusting our opinions and modifying them to accommodate
alternatives with prior belief and knowledge systems. The important feature of a
blend, however, is that it consists of “emergent properties that are not possessed
by the input views” (Turner 2006, 96). Though Turner denies it, this seems to be
a particularity of literary and poetic metaphors.
When a metaphor is so difficult that it does not easily merge into a blend, vis-
ualisation is not prevented entirely; rather, mental representations tend to alter-
nate between the vehicle and target images in the manner of a duck-rabbit figure.
The very recalcitrance of these ‘incommensurable’ images arrests attention and
enriches the reading experience. They represent a major instance of dissonance
9 Though publications on the general mechanisms of blending are legion, blending theory has
not been applied to narrative analysis in any extensive way; an exception is a volume recently
edited by Schneider, who suspects in his introduction (2012, 10) that the ubiquity and range of
mental activities in which blending plays a role has put scholars off. He suggests that the appli-
cation of blending theory to narrative makes sense within a larger cognitive approach.
180 Renate Brosch
in textual visuality which prompts heightened cognitive management at a more

critical stage of text processing than image schemas. Because of the brevity of the
short story text and the simultaneous effort to enlarge its resonance, the genre
not only prefers evoking images to describing them but also makes extensive use
of creative poetic metaphors. This is why it is often called a metaphorical text in
contradistinction to novels as metonymical texts (Orr 2015, 252).
5 D
ynamic Visualisation: From Transient to
Intensified Images
Scarry (2001, 33) observes that visual imaginings without textual instructions are
usually faint and fleeting, while the images generated in reading can be extraor-
dinarily vivid and affecting. She claims that the mental representations which
reading generates surpass ordinary imaginings in vivacity, solidity and sponta-
neity, because daydreaming images are “inert”, that is, relatively static and “indi-
vidually willed”. Her argument correctly emphasises the dynamics of visualis-
ation, but it has to be elaborated because visualisation is dynamic in a double
sense: it follows a dynamic and ongoing development along a time axis and it is
itself dynamic in the sense of the fluid adaptation of its Gestalt.
It has been emphasised so far that visualisation, as it follows along the time
axis of narrative, has different degrees of intensity. Unfortunately, most of the
stream of images that accompanies a first reading experience takes place below
the threshold of consciousness or in Iser’s (1978, 139, 148) words as “passive syn-
thesis”. In analogy to what neuroscience calls the brain’s “default mode”, when
it is not concentrated on a specific task and the mind is free to wander, this rel-
atively passive stage in the receptive modes may be called default visualisation
(Richardson 2015, 226). It constitutes fictional space, objects and figures, fore-
grounds the important agents and assigns others to the background, and thus
furnishes the fictional world. As long as the text can be accommodated to ordi-
nary schemas and everyday experience, visualisation will be smooth and eco-
nomical. Most of this part of imagining during reading will probably be forgotten
once the reading is completed. In contrast to later interpretation and recall, vis-
ualising in the immediate reading process is partly inchoate and eludes a “blow
by blow” description (Phelan 2013, 69). The question then is what constitutes the
compressed visual units or situation models that do become lodged in memory.
The cognitive sciences have established that the brain manages seeing,
remembering and imagining from a common neural substrate; it does not and
cannot use entirely different circuitry to produce and differentiate the perception
of an object and a mental image of it (Spolsky 2007, 46). Yet, the mental images
that are assembled through a series of modelling acts of increasing complexity
during reading never achieve the same degree of completion as in actual physical
seeing. Nor does the visual scenario generated in reading have the vividness of
actual perception. Its coarse organisation with one or two details corresponds
to the 2½D stage of actual perception at most (Schwenger 1999, 64).10 Thus, in
spite of the similarity between and the shared brain activities in visualisation
and perception it is, nevertheless, important to remember that the two are vastly
different phenomenologically. McGinn (2004, 26–30) lists the main differences:
persistence, saturation and distinctness; which is to say that reading images are
transient, incomplete and non-specific.11
Iser’s (1978, 138) term “optical poverty” might suggest that it constitutes a
failure on the reader’s part. That is not the case at all, rather, as Troscianko (2013,
187) puts it, “indeterminacy is a capacity not a constraint”. The capacity of mental
images to be non-committal is not a lack but an advantage: it ensures their adapt-
ability to information received at a later stage. This means that mental imagery
is polyvalent to an extent that real images are not. In the reading experience, the
whole stream of images accompanying a reading never becomes concrete as in a
movie but contains a variety of fluid forms. As we read, most images that we keep
in the “visual short term memory buffer” have to be modified, some have to be
discarded completely, and only some can be retained (Kosslyn 1980, 82). Thus,
the primary advantage of the transience and vagueness of visualisations is the
ability to merge and fuse into other images.
The visual indeterminacy of mental images at this stage is important, even
necessary, because of embodied understanding: readers do not just ‘see’ the fic-
tional world but enter it with and in their consciousness. Story comprehension
entails mapping the trajectories of agents and objects across narrated paths
(Herman 2002, 8). This is the reason description is not only a visual element in
fictions, but a condition of mobility, since it may be said to drive forward the nar-
rative instead of just providing a container background. Narrative spaces open up
10 According to Marr’s (2010, 354) groundbreaking neurological study, proper vision also pro-
ceeds in stages, on a continuum ranging from a two-dimensional “primal sketch” through a
“2½D sketch”, which establishes the depth and orientation of certain key points relative to the
viewer, to full visual realisation of the perceived object in three dimensions. All these modelling
modes are employed in rapid succession – within less than half a second – to organise and inter-
pret light’s retinal stimulation.
11 They are different in kind as well as in effect. In contrast to perceptions, visualisations are
faint and fleeting; in terms of the reading experience, visualisations are guided by intentionality,
hence they are determined by textuality and rely on attention.
182 Renate Brosch
paths, trajectories, thresholds, boundaries and horizons that activate the story
world and mobilise the fictional agents as the “virtual reader’s” avatars (Caracci-
olo 2011, 117). As narratives establish frontiers and borders which mark difference
and establish relations, spatialisation is one of the primary principles govern-
ing the comprehension process (Lotman 1972, 312). By recalling the experiential
parameters of everyday life, narrative space makes an appeal to the embodied
and emotional involvement of readers. In consequence, reading is grounded in
spatialisation (Caracciolo 2011, 118). In following the trajectories of gazes, obser-
vations, and movements from one place to another, visualisation constantly resit-
uates the reader. Yet the reader is able to move around in a largely unspecified
environment where certain features may stand out but the general surroundings
remain quite indistinct.
A first reading process consists of profiling figures against ground. Drawn
from the visual arts, the distinction between figure and ground encapsulates the
way in which certain elements of a narrative stand out as figures, whereas others
act as a backdrop. As Stockwell (2002, 14) points out, the recognition of figures
and ground is a dynamic process which has to be constantly updated as differ-
ent figures are thrown into relief against various grounds. The dynamics of vis-
ualisation involve constantly reconstructing these relations: mention of the term
‘mother’, for instance, activates an additional entity which is understood but not
profiled; in the course of a story, this hierarchy may be reversed. Foregrounding
reflects the way in which we cognitively interact with the environment: in paying
attention to certain elements in the visual and spatial field around us we take
“cognitive shortcuts which allow us to more effectively process and prioritise the
constant stream of incoming data” (Neary 2004, 122). Motion is a highly influ-
ential factor in determining which elements possess agency. A profiled charac-
ter-figure is termed a ‘trajector’ while the features intersecting its path are called
‘landmarks’ (Langacker 2008, 151). Trajectors are typically agents profiled against
less conspicuous characters who occupy the background at a certain point in the
narrative. These categories designate what occupies the reader’s attention at a
certain point in the story.
In voluntary evocation of images without a text, Scarry (2001, 33) claims,

images cannot be synthesised into a sequence – one must continually abandon
an image the moment one is producing a new one. Literary visualisations, by con-
trast, accommodate and submit to the temporal dimension of narrative, so that
images qualify and condition each other in the time-flow of the reading (Iser 1978,
149). The reader is continually able to morph one image into another. The liter-
ary text permits such variations, and the short story text from its combination of
narrativity and compression allows for it to a large extent. As Iser (1978, 138–139)
noted, we are most aware of this process of shape-shifting when the progression
of the narrative is not what we had expected; when facets appear to clash, when
“we are obliged to incorporate new circumstances which means retrospective
changes to our past images”.
6 Intense Visualisations and Iconic Moments

In the reading experience, the interdependent processes of forgetting and
remembering come into play: forgetting is paradoxically prerequisite to remem-
bering. When concerned with meaning-making, readers manage two apparently
contradictory, but in fact interacting and interfering impulses: on the one hand,
the organisation of sequence and the construction of causality and coherence
in the interest of comprehensibility, which involves coming to terms with cog-
nitive dissonances resulting from gaps, indeterminacies or inconsistencies, so
that unhampered continuity can be established. On the other hand, as readers
attempt to impose coherence, attention is systematically arrested by a detail that
seems out of place, by a dissonant element that provokes astonishment, or by
a disparity that offers multiple possibilities for understanding a work. These
instances of halting reception produce visual impressions for future reference
by compressing passive syntheses into emotionally charged visual units (Brosch
2007a, 19). While readers negotiate their visualisations between retention and
protention, the dynamic, “passive” visualisation described above is part of a
holistic response best addressed with the help of the embodiment theory, because
embodied cognition is not merely rational awareness and intentional sense-mak-
ing but involves emotions and corporeal affect as well. These affective responses
are connected to textual visuality because – as psychological experiments have
shown – images can readily bring to mind embodied and affected states (Reavey
2011, 11). Whether in the form of memorable metaphors, startling descriptions or
comparisons or unusual modes of seeing, when textual visuality possesses emo-
tional appeal, it confers iconic power on the short story.
In the reading process, mental images are called into being by certain textual
strategies that can be used to capture the reader’s attention. Heightened visual-
isation depends on attention; and attention in turn differs from passive reception
in its intentionality. Attention management is crucial to reader response because
it determines a sense of progression and projection, that is, suspense and engage-
ment, and thereby influences how far we are involved in a narrative.
As readers are well aware, many short stories are such a transient experience
that they are soon forgotten. In order to remain in long-term memory, the short
story text must present extra challenge. With regard to language, it is a truism
184 Renate Brosch
that indeterminacy and defamiliarisation demand special efforts in processing,

but visuality can also present such challenges. Blanks and gaps suspend the
connectability of textual patterns, so that the resultant break in ‘good continua-
tion’ intensifies the acts of imagining on the reader’s part (Iser 1978, 189). When
a narrative arrests our attention in such a way as to make us pause and ponder,
it can also produce intensified visualisations. For any special impact, cognitive
challenge is needed, and iconic moments that are experienced as particularly
intense and incorporated into later reflections on the text are prompted by special
engagement (cf. Brosch 2015, 96). Though the mental models in our cognition
processes are dynamic and in constant flux (as are most of our techniques of rep-
resentation), captivated and suspended attention arrests certain images and thus
triggers intensification. This is why I refer to these intensified visualisations as
‘iconic moments’.
A secret of high attention and memorability lies in deviation, in challenging
mental adaptation. In processing images, as in processing language, deviation
from the conventional and the expected is an attention marker and therefore an
intensifier of visualisation. I suspect that the most dramatic shape-shifts or adjust-
ments in visualisation produce the most enduring experiences. Both embodied
and cultural visualisation can lead to protracted attention and produce vivid and
enduring images when some defamiliarising effect is introduced. This can consist
of unusual and unexpected phenomena which contradict cultural schemas or of
unusual ways of experiencing.
For embodied visualisation to produce this effect, the “unconscious somatic
transfer of sense experience” must somehow be highlighted, either through
description of unusual or emotionally charged sentience or through some dis-
turbing element that resists automatic enactment on the part of the reader (Fluck
2005, 38). Morphing and conflicting images that contradict ordinary experience
can provide an occasion for intense visualisations because of their impact on the
emotions through embodied visualisation. On the level of more critical cultural
response, a contradiction of cultural schemas or visual ambivalence, that is, con-
flicting images that must be held in balance by readers and somehow reconciled
or brought to blend in coming to terms with the narrative, can produce a great
cognitive and emotional effect and lead to a lasting engagement with the world
views imagined. In short, for images to stand out in the reading experience, cog-
nitive challenge through novelty, complexity, and/or indeterminacy is needed.
Scarry (1996, 162–168) gives examples for intense visualisation on account
of unusual perceptions in the literary text: she argues that certain passages from
Marcel Proust’s Du Côté de Chez Swann are particularly vivid because they are
guided by an intermediary in the text whose perception is unusual in some way.
According to Scarry, the reader’s visualisation is facilitated when narratives
present special viewing situations in which characters or narrators focus an inter-

ested attention on an object or event. She claims that the most intense visualis-
ations occur in reading the visual perceptions of fictional characters, when what
comes to be imitated is not only the sensory outcome but the deep structure of
production that gave rise to the perception (Scarry 1996, 161). She does not use the
term but we would now say that these instances of seeing in the text are “cogni-
tively realistic” and therefore particularly appealing (Troscianko 2013, 187).
However, Scarry omits the most important ingredient of intense visualis-
ation – the emotions. The appeal to the reader’s emotions need not be sentimen-
tal, it springs from the primacy of person-orientation in our reading of narratives.
Staging the gaze in the text encourages mental imagining in the reader when
powerful emotions are involved, for instance, in scenes of observation when
characters are observing each other with an interest in discovering their hidden
motives, or true intentions or secret selves. Providing an internal observer in the
text whose vision proceeds from indistinctness or misapprehension is not only
cognitively realistic but also profoundly engaging because the depicted process of
vision matches the readerly visualisation. In these scenes mental visualisations
have to be very gradually adjusted to accommodate the shape-shifting of the fic-
tional world. The peculiar effect derives from the pleasing congruence between
the processing activity of the reader and the content of the text passage, a congru-
ence that “might contribute to increasing the reader’s feeling of ‘presence’ in the
fictional world” (Troscianko 2013, 189).
7 “ Impeded Image-Building” and Schema

Revision
Scarry’s examples confirm what introspection tells us, namely that certain
textual moments are highlighted in making sense of a narrative and that some
passages do leave a lasting impression on the mind. My thesis is that automatic
enactment or smooth naturalisation does not promote intense visualisation; nor

does a facile application or affirmation of cultural schemas produce memorable
moments. Instead, intensified visualisation occurs when there is some cognitive
and/or emotional challenge because expectations are somehow thwarted. In
order to become attached to certain images, which are foregrounded and part of
later recall, the mind needs extra challenge.
Yet, a neat transfer of the concept of gaps and indeterminacies to literary vis-
uality does not seem to be possible. Firstly, default visualisation does not need to
resolve indeterminacies and secondly, iconic moments of intense visualisation do
186 Renate Brosch
not necessarily have the same epistemological effect that is attributed to verbal
indeterminacies. In terms of visualisations and mental imagery it is extremely dif-
ficult for a narrative to withhold central information. Though the fictional world
as a whole may be indeterminate and our imagining of events remain indistinct,
the strategic retention of an essential detail is very difficult to attain. Toni Morri-
son’s short story “Recitatif” (1983), for example, thematises race difference and
racism but denies readers a definite attribution of race to its principle characters.
We are taken aback and made aware of our own racist imagination. Jeanette Win-
terson’s novel Written on the Body (1992) manages the bravura feat of avoiding
gender attribution for its protagonist. Both are examples where the readers’ vis-
ualisation will oscillate between the two options presented in the text in a manner
similar to the processing of innovative poetic metaphors. The “impeded process
of ideation” allows a variety of definitive Gestalten to emerge from the same text
(Iser 1978, 188). Cases like these disturb a complacent consumption of fictions;
they contain surprise strategies that make a rejection of previous imaginings nec-
essary and some even challenge readers to question the cultural imaginary.
The reader’s inability to effectively process the meaning of a particular
passage ensures that it captures and maintains attention. The greater the liter-
ariness of a text, the more it demands a multi-level cognitive performance that
refuses smooth naturalisation (Mäkelä 2013, 132).12 Dissonance and defamiliar-
isation necessitate some sort of reconciliation in the mind of the reader which
is accomplished by way of blending or conceptual integration. The process is a
paradigmatic response to the well-known indeterminacy of literary texts. Verbal
indeterminacy challenges readers to come to terms with disparate elements of the
text by producing an emergent blend which often startles and affects because it
contrasts with conventional ways of seeing. Guided by the text, readers mobilise
the short story’s input into conceptual integration. Conceptual blending takes
place, of course, in any literary reception. Yet, because short stories must omit
information or can merely suggest and insinuate, understanding a story means
greater proximity to the different possibilities. Gaps in narrative disclosure and
information withheld foreground these different possibilities. Here the particular
uncertainty created by the genre comes into play.

But these processing activities are exactly what Iser (1978, 188) regarded as
“impeded image-building”, that is, textual strategies largely responsible for the
12 Many radical cognitive literary scholars want to abandon the “exclusivity thesis” (Herman
2011, 24). But in spite of the many useful applications of cognitive science to literature, I think we
need to guard against the dangers of extreme cognitivist theories which tend to reduce literary
experientiality to everyday experience (Mäkelä 2013, 132).
aesthetic potential of a literary text. No doubt, the resulting enriched reading

experience can have far-reaching reverberations beyond the process of visualis-
ation. On account of their impact on our imagination, revisions of the schemas
brought to bear on the text sometimes become necessary. Such revisions of cul-
tural schemas or previous assumptions are, of course, more profound and wid-
er-ranging than a mere correction of a mental representation of the storyworld.
They do not just benefit the individual engagement with a narrative text, they
also have a social/cultural function: by altering individual perceptions and chal-
lenging prior beliefs, they encourage readers to exchange with other readers and
to form temporary communities of readers with a common agenda. Hence, in the
long run they also impact on cultural memory, because they can little by little
undermine conventional ‘ways of seeing’, albeit here in a metaphorical sense.13
Literature that succeeds in engaging our imagination does this most powerfully
when it invites a transgression of the textual world and a transfer to issues that
concern us in ours. Our most rewarding experiences in reading occur when we –
for even small stretches in time – transcend the given limited perspective of a text
and adopt a larger one. Contrary to expectation, the small but challenging form of
the short story often succeeds in inspiring these transgressive imaginings.
8 G
raham Swift’s “Seraglio” (1982):
Binary Spaces and Pattern-Seeking Minds
At this point some application to a specific case study may be welcome. I will use
Swift’s short story “Seraglio” for a reading that seeks to demonstrate how the nar-
rative prompts some of the aforesaid mental organisational processes that cog-
nitive narratology has described. My analysis of the short story examines textual
micro-structures and their effects. For a cognitive reading these micro-structures
are extremely important, even though they may not be remembered in their exact
linguistic and syntactic form since long-term memory of textual surface structure
is extremely fragmentary. However, the influence of literary style on the reading

experience has little to do with remembering the exact words used. A literary
narrative can achieve its effect by creating an atmosphere or mood that is picked
up without readers being able to pinpoint why they respond in a certain way:
13 The far-reaching epistemological effects attributed to literature’s intervention in the cultural

imaginary in early reception theory and in this paragraph may be exaggerated, but they certainly
go beyond the processes of visualisation which have been discussed up to this point.
188 Renate Brosch
“Memory may be less important here than the on-line experience of strikingness”
(Emmott 2002, 113). Style and form influence the passive synthesis of first reading
without necessarily entering immediately into conscious awareness. Recovering
the cognitive and emotional reactions that are experienced during reading helps
to show how interpretations are grounded in “psycholinguistic processes at
work” before arriving at interpretive conclusions (Emmott 2002, 113).
Like many of Swift’s short stories, “Seraglio” deals with marital strife and
the unhappiness that comes from unresolved grievances between the partners. In
the following interpretation, my main argument concerns the cognitive mapping
of contrasted narrative spaces and domains. I aim to demonstrate that this story
works with a tripartite structure very common in short stories which demands
of the reader to visualise a set of opposed mental spaces and to resolve them by
creating a blend (Brosch 2015, 99). Several strategies are at work here that pave
the way for foregrounding certain themes. One is structural contrast, the other
focalisation. The opposed mental spaces in this story result from contrasting
input concerning the narrative setting and from the contrasting experiences and
states of mind in the two main characters. With the help of figurative language
these two domains are mapped onto each other and conflated, so that the reader
will produce a blend that integrates both when the open end demands creative
participation.
The title “Seraglio” refers to the culturally determined space of the harem
where the women are confined and kept secluded from the men. And the first
paragraph not only takes us to the exotic location of Topkapi Serai but links this
to a gendered power struggle:
In Istanbul there are tombs, faced with calligraphic designs, where the dead Sultan rests
among the tiny catafalques of younger brothers whom he was obliged, by custom, to murder
on his accession. Beauty becomes callous when it is set beside savagery. In the grounds
of Topkapi palace the tourists admire the turquoise tiles of the Harem, the Kiosks of the
Sultans, and think of girls with sherbet, turbans, cushions, fountains. ‘So were they kept
just here?’ my wife asks. I read from the guide-book: ‘Though the Sultans kept theoretical
power over the Harem, by the end of the sixteenth century these women effectively domi-
nated the Sultans. (Swift 1998, 1)
In the beginning of a narrative, readers are most alert, paying close attention to
every detail and trying to integrate it into a plausible coherence. Everything men-
tioned at the beginning of a narrative profits from this primacy effect. Because
readers have to attend closely in order to first constitute the fictional world, this
information is more resistant to revision than information given at a later stage
(Abbott 2008, 88). This rule of privileged position offers an opportunity for narra-
tives to produce startling effects when first impressions later turn out to be faulty
(recency effect). This strategy is employed here in a subtle manner that may only
be realised later.
With “Istanbul” as the second word of the story and the content of the
paragraph as a whole, the first schema activated by readers is that of tourism.
It becomes clear that the story is going to offer a European perspective on the
Turkish location. This holiday/travel schema will in fact prove to be the dominant
one with vocabulary like “guide book”, “holiday”, “tourist” occurring most fre-
quently in the story as a whole. But the first paragraph makes efficient use of the
primacy effect by activating all the other schemas that will prove relevant for the
story as well. “Tourism” is immediately succeeded by its corollary “Othering” – a
mode of Eurocentric perception that associates Turkey or “the East”, as the story
has it, with qualities diametrically opposed to Western culture, which is implicitly
posited as humane and rational. Thus the first schema of tourism is energised
by the Orientalist exoticisms at the disposal of a Western cultural imaginary. It
relies on images that can be easily visualised because they are so well-known
as to constitute a stock repertoire in cultural memory. Orientalism is evoked
through a lexical paradigm clustering around the exotic clichés associated with
the Turkish metropolis (harem, Sultans, sherbet, turbans, cushions, fountains).
These images are coupled in the second sentence with “violence” and “callous-
ness”, so that one of the dichotomies that shape the textual structure is set up at
this early stage. These binaries, juxtaposing brutality and sensitivity, will later
be carried over into descriptions of the city and the city’s past and will transform
into metaphors of the relation between the two main characters. In its last two
sentences, the first paragraph alludes to the schema of power struggle between
the sexes, when the question about the harem and the explanations the husband
reads from a guide-book trigger mention of what will be the main issue in the
story. All three units of meaning – holidaying, Othering, and vying for power –
will each acquire their own set of binary opposites in the course of the story and
they will reinforce and interact with each other.
The process of priming is slightly jolted in the quoted initial paragraph: it
is not until the fourth sentence that readers are allowed to realise that this is a
first-person narration. Hence, our taking over the internal point of view is fore-
stalled while we read the generalised proposition in the second sentence. We are
tricked into attributing the ‘proverbial’ proposition to the greater authority of a
third-person narrator until the recency effect demands a correction of point of
view. As a result, the usual scepticism with which we receive information from
subjective sources increases. Moreover, the first-person narrator does not appear
directly as an ‘I’ but indirectly in the possessive pronoun of the tag to the quoted
question (“my wife asks”). Mention of a relational term like “wife” causes the
logical background evocation of “husband” in the normal course of communi-
190 Renate Brosch
cation. It is thus his role as a husband for which the reader is primed. At the
same time, we are called upon to revise the priming which has already attributed
the general remarks of the first three sentences to the authority of a third-person
narrator. These shifts in perspective are, of course, performed easily by readers,
but an uncanny effect in this case of replacing a presumed third-person narra-
tion with a first-person narration is that some impression of reticence or secrecy
is associated with the person of the narrator/focaliser who has hidden from our
mental representation of the fictional world so far. Especially the second sentence
with its generalised moral pronouncement is tinged with doubt in retrospect. And
the story’s second paragraph confirms our suspicions when the narrator offers an
excessively theatrical description of the Bazaar in the rain, “on which one expects
to see, floating with the debris of the market, dead rats, bloated dogs, the washed
up corpses of centuries” (Swift 1998, 1).
These effects extend into the basic mental process of foregrounding, which
usually privileges narrative agents as figures and put their environment into the
background. To confer figure-status on these agents means that we regard them as
mobile, larger, more focused and more detailed than the rest of the described field
(Stockwell 2002, 19). In this respect the first paragraph offers slightly defamiliar-
ising details: the shift from authorial to personal narration contains a loss of fic-
tional ‘objectivity’ concerning the initial privileging of narrative space in the first
three sentences. Nevertheless, an awareness of the importance of setting beyond
obvious container functions remains. From the beginning “Istanbul” assumes
agency like an uncanny place in a ghost story. This makes sense as we realise later
because the story is about a couple haunted by the ghosts of a traumatic past.
It is thus apparent from the start that the setting is more than a container
background to the narrative. “Seraglio” centres on a fundamental mystery: the
complexities of injury and blame in a husband and wife’s relationship, who are
“close but not touching, like two continents, each with its own customs and
history, between which there is no bridge” (Swift 1998, 6). The husband’s adulter-
ous affair and the wife’s subsequent miscarriage endow the relationship with a
history of secrecy and mutual blame. Istanbul, described as a place with a history
of cruelty and callous murder, as a labyrinth where one can be lost and where
corpses of centuries are washed up, becomes the symbol for this marital state of
affairs. Hence, all three thematic clusters overlap and reinforce one another.
As we will soon find out, despite personalised I-narration, this first voice in
the discourse exhibits a great reluctance to expose his own feelings and cannot
be trusted for correct assessment of the emotions of others. At the same time,
the way we imagine the narrator-character is crucial to our understanding of the
story. As soon as we notice the internal focalisation, we can attribute the spe-
cific narrative style and thematic idiosyncrasies to the mind style of the narrator.
According to Semino (2002, 97), the term “mind style” captures the personal and
cognitive dispositions of a character, while “ideological point of view” refers to
the character’s social, cultural and political world view. Both mind style and ide-
ological point of view can be observed in the linguistic structure of narration.
What is immediately noticeable in this narrative voice is the narrator’s habit of
presenting his views as general truth, a habit expressed in his frequent use of the
impersonal and inclusive pronoun “one” for his own imaginations. This linguistic
detail serves to characterise the narrator as someone who habitually speaks from
a position of (unfounded) authority, an impression that is confirmed by his con-
stant reference to the travel guide-book. The mention of “guide” or “guide-book”
is a noticeable repetition in this story (it occurs nine times, more often than any
other of the key terms), pointing to the narrator’s self-perception of his preferred
role in his relations to his wife (“she looks upon me to be her guide in this”, Swift
1998, 3) as well as to his profound insecurity regarding the role. These presump-
tions and unwitting denigrations of his partner are his particular mind style,
which will alienate the reader sooner or later and underscore the impression of
unreliability rather than dispel it. His habit of never referring to his wife by name,
but always as “my wife” consolidates the impression. The strangeness of this
elision builds up as the story proceeds and reaches a level of absurdity in the last
scene in the hotel room when she tries to tell him of the sexual harassment she
experienced.
Neuropsychological experiments have shown that subjects could build up
images of scenes on the basis of verbal descriptions; the relative ease in generat-
ing images depends on the coherence of the description (Kosslyn 1995, 309). Such
coherence is not impaired by unreliable perspectives, though their realism and
plausibility probably is. The narrator’s descriptions of Istanbul are a good case
in point: under his Orientalising gaze the city, past and present, its inhabitants
high and low, its skyline, spectacular sights and ordinary sites are subsumed into
the binary schema of inhuman disregard for suffering and sensitive appreciation
of art and beauty, thus imposing on the perceived world a rare visual coherence:
“City of monuments and murder, in which cruelty seems ignored. There are crip-
ples in the streets near the Bazaar, shuffling on leather pads, whom the tourists
notice but the inhabitants do not. City of siege and massacre and magnificence”
(Swift 1998, 2).
Unreliable focalisation concerns the frame, direction and selection of things
to be seen in the story world. In this case it serves a melodramatic rendering of the
fictional world that is an expression of the mind style as well as the ideological
viewpoint of the narrator. That he unwittingly exposes his own emotional defi-
ciency and lack of empathy, preferring to see things from an aesthetic distance
is part of his mind style. But his theatrical descriptions are also ideological in
192 Renate Brosch
being derived from the most blatantly racist images of the Orient. Together, his
psychological disposition and the underlying prejudices impress an extraordi-
nary coherence onto the descriptions of narrative space, producing highlighted
visualisation.
Emmott and Sanford’s (2012) findings about personalised focalisers,
however, suggest that readers may visualise but at the same not be persuaded
by the images generated. In general, unreliable and limited perspectives prompt
readers to counterfocalise. Such counterfocalisation is not a mysterious capacity;
it is employed in everyday life when we shift perspectives and ‘read between the
lines’ of someone’s statements recognising facets which the person has omitted
or downplayed (Emmott and Sanford 2012, 167). Dramatic monologues and unre-
liable narration are standard literary devices for provoking the capacity of readers
to gather information which the speakers did not intend to divulge. Here the nar-
rator’s own propensity towards intentional psychological violence is expressed
in his excessive fascination with acts of brutality.
Because Swift’s narrator is gradually revealed to be morally despicable, his
pronouncements and perceptions will be relativised by readers who will pick
up cues for alternative interpretations. In this case, the distrust occasioned by
the narrator’s hectoring voice and behaviour and his melodramatic perceptions
causes us to pay increasingly close attention to his wife. Hence, the silenced wife
will gradually emerge into the foreground of visualisations as readers learn to
distrust the narrator. This is a major reversal of figure-and-ground attribution and
invested with a lot of emotional partisanship; it will therefore lead to an intensi-
fication of visual imagining.
In the last scene in the hotel room, when she is telling her husband about
the sexual abuse by the hotel porter, the wife’s body language is described by the
narrator who seems unable to decode it. While the narrator interrogates her in
“inquisitorial tone” (Swift 1998, 6), at the same time looking out of the window
and realising that he does not “really want to know what happened” (Swift 1998,
7), the wife’s gestures speak to the reader of vulnerability, suffering and despair
(Swift 1998, 8). Here, readers are challenged to employ Theory of Mind and
“kinesic intelligence” for reading correctly and empathetically the states of mind
of the fictional character (Spolsky 1996, 159). This last scene contains images of
the wife’s corporeality that compress the violence of the story and encapsulate
the cruelty of the relations depicted.
First, there is the repetition of the visual indicator of the wife’s wavering eye-
brows (Swift 1998, 7), which the narrator admires coldly because of their beauty
like “Arabic calligraphy” (Swift 1998, 5), but which we can relate to her suffering
because we were told that it occurred for the first time after her miscarriage (Swift
1998, 5). Then the wife performs a gesture commonly signifying vulnerability and
a wish for (self)-protection: “She holds one hand, closed, to her throat. She has
this way of seeming to draw in, chastely, the collar of her blouse, even when she
is not wearing a blouse or her neck is bare. It started when we lost our baby”
(Swift 1998, 7). This reminder of the earlier traumatic experience is omitted from
the observation of her expressive gesture at the end of their argument: “My wife
sits down on the bed. She leans forward so that her hair covers her face. She
is holding her stomach like someone who has been wounded” (Swift 1998, 8).
Counterfocalisation allows us to imagine the wife’s distress and hence enlarges
our distance to the narrator who accuses his wife “with deliberate casualness” of
spoiling their holiday (Swift 1998, 8). The shift in sympathy that readers perform
in this scene, results in part from a decoding of the body language via enactive
and embodied cognition.
Lexical repetition is a common strategy in short stories to ensure notice of
significant themes. The phrase “with deliberate casualness” has occurred before,
when the narrator described a traffic accident. This incident, when a taxi driver
in his shark-like taxi seemed to be purposefully running over and injuring a poor
peddler is the first event in the story of the holiday in Istanbul after sightsee-
ing on Topkapi (Swift 1998, 2). This exaggerated and therefore probably warped
description of events echoes the narrator’s theatrical perception of the exhibit in
Topkapi museum, where he feels he has stumbled on a crime scene (Swift 1998, 1)
and where he has the illusion that the spattered robe of a sultan is his own “lent
to another, who is murdered in mistake for yourself” (Swift 1998, 2). Here again,
the second-person pronoun that the narrator uses to generalise his impressions
actually provokes resistant reading, so that we will probably feel sceptical about
having the same feeling. The strange distribution of blame that accompanies
the accident (“The injured man looked as if he were to blame for having been
injured”, Swift 1998, 2) also function to foreshadow the flashback to the couple’s
loss of the baby and their mutual unvoiced accusations. By the time the phrase
“with deliberate casualness” is repeated in the hotel room scene, we have learnt
to attribute this evidence of malicious cruelty to the main character, not to Turkish
culture.
What triggers a counterfactual reading of the I-narrator’s story is not only his
coldly aestheticising account of his wife’s behaviour while she is suffering, but
also his descriptions of the city in which his fascination with the violent aspects
of Ottoman history is evident. Inadvertently, his descriptions of the city (“like
an array of upturned shields and spears”, Swift 1998, 1) and the foreign culture
(“massacre and monuments … pillage and slaughter”, Swift 1998, 2) reveal his
affinity with the violence and cruelty he describes and his deep-seated and
unconscious emotional deficiency.
As is common in short stories, this one utilises narrative space not only as
194 Renate Brosch
background to the events but transforms it into a metaphor for expressing more
vividly the theme of power struggle between the sexes. The city situated on the
isthmus between Europe and Asia Minor is perfect for this use. In Western cul-
tural memory it resonates with stock images which are alluded to in the first
paragraphs: the proximity of aesthetic sensitivity and cruelty, the uneven power
balance in the traditional Sultan’s harem and the clash of European and Eastern
cultures. The narrator’s perception activates Orientalising schemas that associate
Turkey with sensuality and violence, beauty and danger. He combines clichés of
the Arabian Nights (“the sensuous, uninhibited East”, Swift 1998, 6) with images
of coldly performed savage customs like ritual murder, implying the moral infe-
riority of the foreign culture (Swift 1998, 1). Like a haunted man, he sees cruelty
everywhere – in the rulers of the past, the present-day policeman, the taxi driver,
and the hotel manager. His obsessions provide an opportunity for the evocation
of cultural values determined by the imperial and colonial logic of the West.
For the reader, the Orientalist schema input is relativised, however, through the
increasingly evident unreliability of the narrator. The interplay of narrating mind
style and ideological point of view in the short story thus subtly challenges and
undermines the conventionally hierarchical tourist schema.
From the generally impressive visuality of the story, generated through
extreme coherence of mind style and ideology, three moments of particularly
intense visualisation emerge which readers probably agree are the memorable
scenes of the story: the scene of the accident with the shocking lack of interest
on the part of the policeman, the hotel scene where the callous behaviour of
the husband resembles that of the policeman and – in between – a flashback
where the narrator describes the loss of sexual passion that has resulted from the
loss of their child. For me and for the students with whom I discussed the story,
these three scenes represent the most intensely visualised moments in the story.
The three iconic moments are extremely affecting and result in an emotionally
enriched reading experience. In the last of these three scenes we can observe how
iconic power derives from intensified embodied visualisation:
We would lie in bed, close but not touching, like two continents, each with its own customs
and history, between which there is no bridge. We turned our backs towards each other as if
we were both waiting our moment, hiding a dagger in our hands. But in order for the dagger
thrust to be made, history must first stop, the gap between the continents must be crossed.
So we would lie, unmoving. And the only stroke, the only wound either of us inflicted was
when one would turn and touch the other with empty, gentle hands, as though to say, ‘See,
I have no dagger’. (Swift 1998, 6)
This key passage uses the word “dagger” that has already been repeated in the
story to create an extended metaphor or conceit that incorporates all the activated
schemas by figuring the sexual abstinence of the couple in Orientalist terms. Like
actual pictures, mental images can neither hypothesise, nor negate. Swift’s effec-
tive evocation of this image relies on the effect of what Prince (1992, 2) calls “the
disnarrated”. By narrating how husband and wife hide or disown daggers and do
not show blades, the passage elicits images of exactly these weapons and their
potential to wound, creating a powerful atmosphere of lurking violence. Due to
the nature of the conceit, readers have to perform a conceptual integration of
images belonging to the sphere of the setting and images belonging to the main
characters. As a result, the idea of deliberating secret murder contained in the
image is mapped onto the state of the marriage.
In these iconic images we can observe the most prominent feature of the
narrative: the constant construction of binary opposites, like the opposition of
beauty and savagery in the first paragraph. The mental spaces readers develop
to encompass the exotic place are mapped onto the mental domain of the social
relations: so that the Othering that informs the descriptions is transferred to the
narrator’s states of mind. His creative use of metaphor enhances the contrastive
vision and further connects the structuring binaries of space and place to the con-
flicted relationship of the couple. The powerful images of conflict and violence
reflect the conceptual system of the narrator, his cognitive habits and personal
way of making sense of things. On account of the highlighted adjustments to our
accompanying stream of images we have learnt to attribute his associations to an
ethically unacceptable way of thinking, a way of thinking that the story gradually
encourages us to reject. Thus, the ethical benefit of the unsympathetic reading
experience is a rejection of cliché schemas we might have otherwise accepted as
standard tourist attitudes. The story thus makes an effective appeal to the reader
to question both the contrastive Orientalist and gender schemas.
As a coda, I want to refer to the final paragraph of the story which appears to
perform a volta and to suggest a slightly different interpretation. In the last scene
when the narrator looks down on London from the plane before landing, he com-
ments, “one wants the moment of the story to go on for ever, the poise of parting
or arriving to be everlasting. So one doesn’t have to cross to the other continent,
doesn’t have to know what really happened, doesn’t have to meet the waiting
blade” (Swift 1998, 9). Broich’s (1999) interpretation emphasises this postmodern
metanarrative. He picks up an earlier metafictional reference by the narrator who
had compared the couple’s life to “characters in a detective novel” (Swift 1998, 6)
and connects it to this final confession of a preference for deferral and avoidance
that is visually compressed in the plane hovering in the air like an unresolved
story (Broich 1999, 288). This ambivalent ending may be seen to stand for the act
of fictionising itself because the traumatic past accounts both for the origin of
and the necessity for narrative. Narrative has to do with a forever elusive struc-
196 Renate Brosch
ture, that appears to be, as Pedot (1999, 59) shows, the most powerful impetus of
a given narrative.
As readers are left without a closure, they will cast about for a way to resolve
the ambiguous ending. The narrator’s regressive fixations maintain an abstractly
conceptualised interim position, the in-between as the only possible space of
“perpetual convalescence” (Swift 1998, 3). In order to avoid responsibility, he
indicates a space of interim, where one is constantly poised on a hiatus between
knowledge and uncertainty. For the I-narrator, story-telling is an escape mecha-
nism for holding experience at bay: “They [the stories] buy the reprieve, or the
stay of execution, of distance” (Swift 1998, 9). Though we have to admit this
potential of stories, we have exercised our participatory faculties in interaction
with this one to break down the schemas that were offered to us.
My article aimed to distinguish two modes of visualising in the reading
process as well as two major types of resource which allow readers to make sense
of the text. To separate more vivid mental imagery from the automatic default
visualisation that accompanies it is, of course, a heuristic distinction, but one
that can productively relate visualisation to better-studied processes of percep-
tion. While default visualisation is undisturbed by gaps and indeterminacies
as it draws on cultural schemas and scripts in ongoing adjustment of the story
world, highlighted moments of intense visualisation result from less smooth and
less automatic processing. They can be triggered by dissonance in the embodied
enactment of narrative events or be the outcome of cognitive challenge through
the ambiguities of a narrative. My case study tried to show that reading strategies
constantly resort to binary organisational patterns, a predilection which short
stories often take into account and work with. The example showed how intense
visualisations undermine and question conceptual binaries by charging them
with semantic surplus that contradicts the assumptions of the cultural imaginary.
By correlating stereotypical Orientalist images with the psychological cruelty of
the male I-narrator, visualisation in this case serves to make readers resistant to
both – the patriarchal attitude and the Othering, too.
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III Textual Visibilities

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Renate Brosch

The Iconic Power of Short Stories –

to venture into these speculative domains have received important impulses

the importance of images for the genre.

And heightened emotional experience while reading depends at least in part on

2 My approach is traditional in that it presupposes a dense, carefully crafted narrative literary

2 The Immediate Reading Experience

tion” instantiated by the neurosciences. 4e cognition characterises mental pro-

ied response in reading narratives involves a “fictional recentering” of the read-

Hence, this aspect of reading may be designated cultural visualisation, since it is

3 The Particularities of the Short Story Genre

a useful strategy is to aim at moments of intense reading experience in which a

mapping. Since spatial mapping is an ordinary organisational process in under-

inspection, short stories with a strong subjective perspective frequently belong to

in textual visuality which prompts heightened cognitive management at a more

In voluntary evocation of images without a text, Scarry (2001, 33) claims,

6 Intense Visualisations and Iconic Moments

that indeterminacy and defamiliarisation demand special efforts in processing,

present special viewing situations in which characters or narrators focus an inter-

7 “ Impeded Image-Building” and Schema

enactment or smooth naturalisation does not promote intense visualisation; nor

uncertainty created by the genre comes into play.

aesthetic potential of a literary text. No doubt, the resulting enriched reading

is extremely fragmentary. However, the influence of literary style on the reading

13 The far-reaching epistemological effects attributed to literature’s intervention in the cultural

nated the Sultans. (Swift 1998, 1)

New York: Oxford UP, 2006.

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7 “ Impeded Image-Building” and Schema