Dødstematikken i nogle H.C. Andersen-texter og relationen til de sociale, sexuelle og skriptuelle traumer
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Betragtninger over litteraturens og litteraturundervisningens funktioner
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Træk i den historiske udvikling i Danmark 1870-1900Pontoppidans emancipatoriske positionerHistoriske problemer i den småborgerlige og borgerlige socialiseringKommunikationsformer og kunstnerrollens degraderingDrømmen om løsrivelse fra... more
Træk i den historiske udvikling i Danmark 1870-1900Pontoppidans emancipatoriske positionerHistoriske problemer i den småborgerlige og borgerlige socialiseringKommunikationsformer og kunstnerrollens degraderingDrømmen om løsrivelse fra markedsunderkastelseBorgerlighed og driftregulering
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Tendenser i nyere fiktionsanalyse: Kommunikation, ekspression og historisering
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Joseph Carroll's target article "An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Studies" makes a bold argument for the importance of an evolutionary perspective in the humanities, and it provides a sweeping overview of the literary... more
Joseph Carroll's target article "An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Studies" makes a bold argument for the importance of an evolutionary perspective in the humanities, and it provides a sweeping overview of the literary research based on evolutionary theory. Carroll makes important arguments for the necessity of fusing methods and research results from the humanities and the natural sciences and the necessity of combining cognitive and evolutionary perspectives. (I make similar arguments in Embodied Visions.) To build bridges between the sciences and the humanities is a vital project if the humanities are to survive as a scholarly endeavor. Central to Carroll's argument is to reopen the question of Human Nature. Given the way social constructivism in sociology and the humanities has neglected universals based on innate features of human nature, this is a crucially important move. The question of human universals has not been central to the study of fiction since the Structuralist era, and social constructionists have falsely presupposed that the human brain has no innate architecture and is thus infinitely malleable. Carroll argues convincingly that the central themes in literature reflect problems that have been vital to human survival. Further, Carroll's emphasis on universalism avoids an excessive reliance on a fine-grained modularity, and the critique of massive modularity is a convincing argument for the role of culture in establishing universal themes and structures. Carroll also gives an important emphasis to the idea that culture can only be instantiated in individual brains with specific life histories. In short, the target article is a great argument for the value of evolutionary bioculturalism. The most tricky part of the article is the section on the adaptive function of literature, which raises many thorny questions and problems. The central problem in the article is linked to the use of the word "art." Carroll wants both to define "what is peculiar and essential" to art and to identify a specific adaptive problem that this peculiar and essential mental disposition would have fulfilled in ancestral environments. He further wants to identify design features that mediated this adaptive function. The problems derive from the requirement that art should be something peculiar and essential, since such an essentialist definition relies on a rather historically specific understanding of art related to its institutionalization. It makes much more evolutionary sense to see the different activities that we now call art as developed out of a series of adaptations that have provided behavioral flexibility. Activities like storytelling develop in tandem with the radical increase of intelligence and the ability to provide verbal representations of memorized or imagined scenarios. As pointed out by Carroll and E. O. Wilson, whom Carroll cites, flexible intelligence evidently had enormous adaptive advantages. A flexible intelligence even supports inventions of recent art activities like film or video games that run on the old bio-computer developed in the Pleistocene by synthesizing visual, acoustic, and narrative skills. There are no special design features in the brain developed in the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness) and reserved for an art-essence, for instance film art, to be invented many years later. Different arts and different types of a given art activate different mental capacities, and although it is highly probable that we could identify neurological activity typical of a given aesthetic activity, I doubt that it is possible--as Carroll supposes--to identify neural activity specific for aesthetic forms. Art enhances many different activities, from strengthening social bonds to allocating special resources for perceptual activities and thus making certain phenomena special, to borrow Ellen Dissanayake's term for the function of art, or serving as means of strengthening mechanisms for imagining counterfactual situations. …
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The article discusses the relations between sexual emotions and emotions related to care, and also discusses the question of the function of modesty
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Research Interests: Psychology and Routledge
The paper will analyze how action films use different emotional sources of arousal in order to create narrative tension in the PECMA flow and analyze how different emotions link to each other or contrast each other in what you... more
The paper will analyze how action films use different emotional sources of arousal in order to create narrative tension in the PECMA flow and analyze how different emotions link to each other or contrast each other in what you metaphorically might call an emotion symphony. It will illustrate this by a close analysis of the narrative flow in Die Hard. It will use the neurologist Jaak Panksepp’s (1998, 2012) description of how the human emotions are controlled by seven basic emotional systems, and also use the tool HTTOFF-scenarios, short for hiding, tracking, trapping/being trapped, observing, fighting and fleeing, that describe action patterns shared by all reptiles and mammals.
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In the chapter I will discuss a general theory of comic entertainment. The theory is a general one because it provides a unified account of the different mechanisms in the embodied brain that support and regulate comic entertainment and... more
In the chapter I will discuss a general theory of comic entertainment. The theory is a general one because it provides a unified account of the different mechanisms in the embodied brain that support and regulate comic entertainment and the evolutionary origin of these mechanisms. I will further show how such a theory links to the PECMA (perception, emotion, cognition, and motor action) flow model that describes the fundamental features of the experience of audiovisual entertainment. The article is published in "Cognitive Film Theory" ed. Nannicelli and Taberham, p 177-195. AFI-Readers/Routledge
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This chapter analyzes the cognitive tools that viewers use when evaluating the veracity of documentaries, using the docudrama, The Queen, to exemplify viewers’ evaluations of a documentary’s truthfulness. It argues that viewers use a... more
This chapter analyzes the cognitive tools that viewers use when evaluating the veracity of documentaries, using the docudrama, The Queen, to exemplify viewers’ evaluations of a documentary’s truthfulness. It argues that viewers use a series of cognitive heuristic tools, such as availability, representativeness and anchoring, based on their individual cognitive and affective dispositions, including the personal relevance of a given documentary. It further argues that documentaries, but also fiction, tend to be believed unless such cognitive and affective processes provide disconfirmation, and that documentaries may often be veiled propaganda, as in the case of The Queen, where a central purpose is to present a glowing portrait of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
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Skitse til en litteratur- og bevidsthedshistorisk beksrivelse af perioden 1848-1901 i Danmark
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Artiklen er en grundig gennemgang af en række principielle kognitive mekanismer, der har afgørende betydning for, hvordan computerspil kan modtages af ”brugeren”. Artiklen diskuterer en række verserende synspunkter om, hvordan... more
Artiklen er en grundig gennemgang af en række principielle kognitive mekanismer, der har afgørende betydning for, hvordan computerspil kan modtages af ”brugeren”. Artiklen diskuterer en række verserende synspunkter om, hvordan computerspil kan eller ikke kan betragtes som historie og spil. Endelig fremlægger artiklen det synspunkt, at com- puterspil aktiverer en fundamental anden form for kognitiv respons sam- menlignet med at se film. At spille et spil og at se en film er kognitivt set noget forskelligt.
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Med referencer til og eksempler hentet fra såvel Kurosavas film, talk- shows, sæbeoperaer og endda Anja Andersens raserianfald på TV- skærmen, kommer Torben Grodal i denne artikel med en illustrativ introduktion til, hvordan ikke-sproglig... more
Med referencer til og eksempler hentet fra såvel Kurosavas film, talk- shows, sæbeoperaer og endda Anja Andersens raserianfald på TV- skærmen, kommer Torben Grodal i denne artikel med en illustrativ introduktion til, hvordan ikke-sproglig kommunikation fungerer, her- under hvilke interaktionelle karakteristika denne kommunikationsform besidder. Forfatteren præsenterer nogle grundbegreber inden for den ikke-sproglige kommunikation og analyserer, hvordan forskellige aspek- ter af vor medfødte kropssprog overføres og udtrykkes i audiovisuelle medier. Slutteligt argumenterer Grodal for nødvendigheden af at give analyserne af den ikke-sproglige kommunikation en central plads i ana- lyser af den audiovisuelle kommunikation.
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This article argues that the central dimensions of film aesthetics may be explained by a general theory of viewer psychology, the PECMA flow model. The PECMA flow model explains how the film experience is shaped by the brain‘s... more
This article argues that the central dimensions of film aesthetics may be explained by a general theory of viewer psychology, the PECMA flow model. The PECMA flow model explains how the film experience is shaped by the brain‘s architecture and the operation of different cognitive systems; the model describes how the experience is based on a mental flow from perception, through emotional activation and cognitive processing, to motor action. The article uses the flow model to account for a variety of aesthetic phenomena, including the reality-status of films, the difference between narrative and lyrical-associative film forms, and the notion of ‘excess’.
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Research Interests: Art and Oxford university
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Research Interests: Art and Oxford university
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is 76 years old and has recently made a new movie, The Fabelmans. But if you think that the film deals with problems related to old age, you are wrong. Again, he turns back to the central trauma that has inspired most of his films: The... more
is 76 years old and has recently made a new movie, The Fabelmans. But if you think that the film deals with problems related to old age, you are wrong. Again, he turns back to the central trauma that has inspired most of his films: The divorce of his parents when he was about 12 years old. Now this theme is dealt with in a more explicit autobiographical frame even if the family members have got other names. It is the history of the father that disappears and the boy that become fascinated with films. In his childhood Spielberg thought that it was the father that had caused the divorce, and early films has that perspective, but later he finds out that it was the mother that had a relation to the father's best friend, and this again changes the perspective. In very many of his films he tries to portray different solutions to the pain of separation from the parents, with producing a series of transitional object relations and by portraying the interaction of celestial and divine forces.
Virtual Reality experiences, brain, body, and muscular agency – An embodied approach informed by neuroscience For some years there have been experiments with and commercial exploration of so-called Virtual Reality Media. I will discuss... more
Virtual Reality experiences, brain, body, and muscular agency – An embodied approach informed by neuroscience For some years there have been experiments with and commercial exploration of so-called Virtual Reality Media. I will discuss how and to what degree the word reality is a meaningful description of the experiences induced by the media. I will look on experiences of reality and presence in some examples of two types of VR: The first type of VR has full 200+ degrees of visual and acoustic immersion – that I call limited VR because the Viewer-Agent (VA) may control their access by means of eye direction and moving of the head, but they have not any control/agency by means of arms/hands or legs. The second type I call full VR and in such VR-types the Viewer-Agent has also have some interactive capabilities based on hands and legs. Thus limited VR may be said to have 'head-agency', whereas full VR also has 'body-motor' agency, and I will later show how these two types of agency partly rely on two different neurological systems and this has major implications for the experiences facilitated by the two different systems. I will discuss the embodied basis of our experience of reality and how the effects of VR are intimately related to the way in which the neurological wiring and programming of our embodied brain frames our VR experience, including discussing why many people have strong negative experiences with VR, resulting in nausea, dizziness and claustrophobia.
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Audience Bonding: Film Viewing as Rituals of Emotional Bonding among Viewers The topic of this article is to analyze how the experience of a viewer of film is related to being part of an actual or an imagined audience. Some analyzers of... more
Audience Bonding: Film Viewing as Rituals of Emotional Bonding among Viewers The topic of this article is to analyze how the experience of a viewer of film is related to being part of an actual or an imagined audience. Some analyzers of the film experience describe it from the point of view of a viewer-I that look at characters as a third person, a he or she, for instance Carroll (1998) and Plantinga (2009). Other analyzers describe the experience by means of character simulation, a kind of first person perspective where the viewer-I fuses with the character-I. In Moving Picture Grodal (1997) I argued that the film experience may cue not only first person and third person perspectives, but also a 'we' perspective, a 1. person plural perspective.