By Marie Holm Vinther
Swedish scholar Ingela Nilsson, was hosted by UCSB Classics for her talk Ekphrastic and Embodied, a talk on novelistic storytelling, in ancient times and today.
Storytelling is more than a sequence of unfolding events, it is creating a “storyworld” where distinct spacious environments and embodied experiences are collaboratively created by the writer and the reader, says Ingela Nilsson, a professor of Greek and Byzantine Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden.
“Spatial form, embodiment, descriptions, repetitions, and all this, triggers an immersive reading process and forces the reader to actively engage in the plot by following the cues offered by the text and then creating a world in which they can immerse,” Nilsson told students and faculty in a recent talk hosted by UCSB’s Center for the Study of Ancient Fiction, within the Classics department.
“We read not only for the plot, but for storyworlds,” she said. Nilsson’s research focuses on ancient and Byzantine literature, historiographical writing, fictional strategies, and the relation between word and image. The talk, tilted Ekphrastic and Embodied - Spatial Form as Novelistic Storytelling, explored how space works on a textual level and on a plot level.
Nilsson explained that spatial form is more than setting a story’s events on a linear timeline. Space is also how the reader constructs the storyworld based on characters, descriptions of environment and, in particular, the reader’s personal prior knowledge. This storyworld unfolds like a cloud around the timeline in all directions engaging the reader, an prompting them to imagine possible futures for the plot.
Classics scholar Ingela Nilsson discusses Can an Object Love? a book by Swedish author Ellen Söderblom Saarela in her recent lecture at UC Santa Barbara.
Nilsson said personal immersion into a story is what makes each reader-experience individual. “None of these versions of reader experiences is the correct one. It is up to anyone who involves in it,” she said.
Nilsson offered an example of spatial form with an excerpt from the ancient Greek romance novel Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius, which describes drinking water from the Nile in Egypt with your bare hands. Drinking water this way is a common human experience that most people can relate to. This ability to relate comes from the embodied experience stored in our minds, Nilsson said.
“Embodied experiences leave cognitive traces in our long-term memory and offer ways to categorize the situations we face in real life or in narratives by recalling senses,” Nilsson said. Interpreting texts via embodiment makes human experiences more tangible and measurable and is similar to how science analyzes the world. This common approach among humanists and scientists opens up opportunities for interdisciplinary work, she added.
UCSB Classics hosted this talk after a waiting a long time for the opportunity. “Ingela Nilsson has been on the top of our list of scholars to invite for guest talks at the Centre for Ancient Fiction,” said Emilio Capettini, an assistant professor of Classics speaking on behalf of the department. “It has been challenging since she lives far away, but we are delighted that she accepted our invitation and is here today.”
Nilsson also mentioned a book by the Swedish author Ellen Söderblom Saarela to show the impact of embodied experiences in literature. The book Can an Object Love? is a series of essays on female subjectivity, feminism and sexual abuse. Nilsson sees this book as an example of how readers can get an outside perspective, and thereby a new insight on their own experiences, by mirroring the the book’s textual experiences, if they have been involved in or will come to experience real life abusive situations.
Nilsson argues that embodiment is “how we can reconcile our intellectual understanding of our own real life situations with the situations we sometimes find ourself in, for example as objects without power in the case of abuse.”
The effect, she says is that textual spatial form and embodiment allow the reader to reflect on their own personal experiences, also as storyworlds. “What has been described as particularly novelistic, that is spatialized and embodied, appears not only in the novels but in many kinds of storytelling — also the kind we craft around ourself.” Nilsson encouraged students to always look to the material to indicate the right literary tools, and apply spatial form and embodiment only when relevant.
Marie Holm Vinther is a third-year international student at UCSB from Denmark, who is majoring in Communication. She wrote this article for her Digital Journalism course.