Kukkonen, Dr Karin

Job Title:
College: St John's
Period/ Subject: 18th century

Research Interests:

Broadly speaking, I am interested in the ways in which literature engages the human mind: what are the textual strategies that evoke storyworlds, that keep us at the edge of our seats, that make us feel we understand fictional characters – and how do they work? In order to investigate these questions, I combine the literary tradition of poetics with cognitive approaches to literature, especially based on theories of cognitive and evolutionary psychology.
My current research project, “Rules of Old”, is on the poetological rules discussed in English neoclassical discourse, such as poetic justice or the dramatic unities. It explores how these rules interface with cognitive processes and how they provide successful solutions for particular problems of storytelling. The project traces how these rules make their way into the eighteenth-century novel and argues that the rules serve as focal points of analytical interest well beyond the neoclassical context.
In the long run, this combination of poetics and cognitive literary study leads me towards a number of new research questions: about the impact of changing tastes and contexts on the poetological rules, about the compatibility of cognitive literary study and traditional approaches like hermeneutics and close reading, and about the role which cognitive literary study assigns to literature itself – is it a delightful trap for the human mind, a by-product of evolution, a training ground for our cognitive skills or perhaps something else entirely?

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