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What have you found out along the way?ĮA: If we think about the language we use to describe the power of stories, we talk about being lost in a book, gripped by a story, seduced by characters… Our attention has become totally absorbed by the narrative and we find ourselves in a state of total immersion that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as a “ flow state.” MD: So from early on you identified several of the driving questions that would animate your research. Later I realized that I didn’t just want to learn more about this time period, I wanted to learn more about why these books did this to me and how they could seem to bring me into contact with an alternative fictional world. It seems that my response to reading Jane Austen is part of a “Janeite” phenomenon that has a long history and is still going on today in online communities like The Republic of Pemberley and at Jane Austen Society meetings and annual balls.

I would make my mother drive me to the library so that I could learn as much as I could about everyday life in 19 th century Regency England. When did you first get a glimpse of this power, these mysteries?Įlaine Auyoung: When I first read Pride and Prejudice in middle school, I became obsessed with this alternative world that seemed so different from my world in suburban Southern California. Marsha Dunn: You are a professor of literature, which is another way of saying you have dedicated your life to stories-to exploring the mysterious sway that stories have over human life.

She was a long standing member of Harvard’s Cognitive Theory and the Arts seminar, a cutting edge, interdisciplinary forum, bringing literary theorists into dialogue with scientific studies of the mind and its processes- all for the purpose of figuring out how “small black marks on a white page” can produce such vivid mental effects, as seminar leader Elaine Scarry says in Dreaming by the Book. This interdisciplinary approach was honed during her years at Harvard University, where she completed her PhD in English.

Another way is to say that she uses cognitive theory to understand literature and literature to understand cognitive theory. “This is your brain on…Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen” – That’s one way to sum up the scholarship of Elaine Auyoung, professor of literature at the University of Minnesota.

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In the coming weeks, we will explore how we humans construct our world-even our professional world-through stories, myths and narratives.

#Flowstate solutions series#

Below is the second installment of our multi-part series entitled The Narrative Universe.