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Abstract:
We want to present the results of an interdisciplinary project between the Departement of International
and Comparative Literature T¨ubingen and the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological
Cybernetics T¨ubingen in which we addressed the following questions: How is the topic ‘perception’
researched by the different diciplines, do they deal with the same phenomenon and
forms of representations of perception or is there no or only a small intersection of the objects
of investigations and can one method profit from or influence the other? Particulary it will be
discussed a) how the issue of ambivalence/polyvalence and its (literary) perception is treated
in both fields and b) if there are any possibilities to find out by psychophysical experiments
how perception works in the reading process so one can reconstruct impartially intersubjective
validated mental images produced by reading literay texts. It will be claimed that both in literature
and cognitive science one is confrontated with subjective forms and ways of perception.
Both disciplines describe how signals from the outside world are interpreted and constructed to
a (readable) world (Heinz von Foerster). Where cognitive science accents the research of the
processes inside the brain and how it forms by inherent structures in combination with given
sense-data its ‘reality’, literature can focus on the act on how personal conceptions, ideas and
associations are transformed in words and texts and how these verbal representations of perceptions
interact, correspond or confront with the society and its historical and/or cultural different
forms and norms of perception. So we think that perception is always also a social phenomenon
as it is communicated and evaluated by language and other signs and signals and language can
also—for good or bad—replace one’s own perceptions. Both the brain and literature are so
to say filter-tools that form and construct ‘as-if-realities’, but, following Bachtin and its concept
of dialogical literature, literary texts boost ambiguities and polysemies where in contrast
the biological perception-apparatus is inclined to establish a monological and unambigous reality.
These claims will be undermined by the presentation of the results of psychophysical
experiments in which we analyzed possible correspondences between individual receptions of
a literary text.
