Reading literary fiction and remembering an episode from one’s life have been connected in psychology through the process of “mind-wandering”; in both memory and reading, our thoughts detach from the here and now. Novels, however, have the capacity of constructing impossible memory situations. Dead characters narrate, and plots configure multi-linear temporalities. Fiction, narrative and language arguably shape these processes of mind-wandering beyond the reach of cognition in everyday contexts.
These everyday contexts, however, are changing today. In the digital “attention economy”, memory is likened to the process of the up-date and mind-wandering is linked to distraction. Through case studies from contemporary Scandinavian fiction, including Johannes Anyuru’s De kommer att druckna i sina mödrars tårer (2017), Sarah Stridsberg’s Kärlekens Antarktis (2018) and Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Presens Maskin (2018), this lecture discusses how literature’s impossible memory scenarios allow us to rethink current dynamics of attention and distraction.
Karin Kukkonen is Professor at the University of Oslo and the convenor of the research and education initiative, Literature, Cognition and Emotions (LCE). LCE is an interdisciplinary hub that brings together literary studies, linguistics, psychology and neurosciences in a new conversation about literature. In 2019, she was awarded the first University of Oslo’s Young Researchers Prize.