Explorer Immersion and defamiliarization

General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Introduction 1 Narrative fiction's capacity to induce immersion and defamiliarization has a long history in the fields of literary and aesthetic theory. Most theoretical treatments of the two concepts give privilege and normative impetus to one type of response or related type of text. In this article we set out to rethink the concepts of immersion and defamiliarization by bringing them into dialogue. This dialogue involves an investigation of overlaps and differences between two theoretical paradigms, cognitive narratology and unnatural narratology. Our aim is to track evidence of, and to advance, understandings of the forms and functions of immersion and defamiliarization, which have been inspired by cognitive and unnatural approaches to narratology. Where these concepts have been associated with dualistic notions of cognition and purely mimetic notions of narrative, immersion and defamiliarization have come to seem in opposition in a way that we are seeking to show is too simplistic. The three literary texts, which provide illustrative material, share thematic or formal affinities with dreams and with grief, two issues themselves invested in the dialectics between immersion and defamiliarization, and with dreams lying between the realm of the real and unreal. In Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess, a narrator's dream vision brings him face to face with grief; in Borges' " The Circular Ruins " , a character turns out to be not only creating with dreams but created from a dream, which produces grief; in Kafka's " A Country Doctor " a narrative voice performs grief in an immersion-challenging setting that some readers refer to as dreamlike. The article consists of the following parts: an introduction to the concept of immersion as seen from cognitive narratology and to the concept of defamiliarization as seen from unnatural narratology; the three readings of Chaucer, Borges and Kafka; and finally the conclusion. …