Changing Affinities: How Multiverse World-Building Promotes a Self-Awareness of Alienation Cognition
Title and/or Affiliation
PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge
Presenter Bio
Julia Jin Wang is a PhD Candidate at Cambridge University’s Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, examining how multiverse narrative world-building impacts reader affects of alienation and familiarization. She is interested in the in-between, including translation studies, interculturality, image-text, non-mortals, and the overlap between creative and analytical methods of research.
Session
Panel: Sociocultural Constructions of Identity
Location
Zoom
Start Date
10-7-2022 11:00 AM
End Date
10-7-2022 12:15 PM
Abstract
This paper examines the multiverse world-building in Diana Wynne Jones’s (1986) novel, Howl’s Moving Castle, specifically, its midpoint storyworld reframe from a high-fantasy monoverse to a two-world multiverse in which the other world is like our actual world. Such world-building impacts the implied reader’s affect of affinity (familiarity and alienation) toward the individual characters and therefore the meaning-making and experience of the overall story. My method includes developing Deictic Shift Theory and adapting tools from A.I. emotional modeling. The process of changing and complicating one’s affect of affinity can hold up to a mirror to one’s existing socioculturally-constructed feelings of the familiar and the alien. It can disturb the cognitive rigidity of the conceptual boundary between in-group and out-group identities, hopefully working to detach the affect of alienation from those currently categorized as having an out-group identity.
Changing Affinities: How Multiverse World-Building Promotes a Self-Awareness of Alienation Cognition
Zoom
This paper examines the multiverse world-building in Diana Wynne Jones’s (1986) novel, Howl’s Moving Castle, specifically, its midpoint storyworld reframe from a high-fantasy monoverse to a two-world multiverse in which the other world is like our actual world. Such world-building impacts the implied reader’s affect of affinity (familiarity and alienation) toward the individual characters and therefore the meaning-making and experience of the overall story. My method includes developing Deictic Shift Theory and adapting tools from A.I. emotional modeling. The process of changing and complicating one’s affect of affinity can hold up to a mirror to one’s existing socioculturally-constructed feelings of the familiar and the alien. It can disturb the cognitive rigidity of the conceptual boundary between in-group and out-group identities, hopefully working to detach the affect of alienation from those currently categorized as having an out-group identity.
Comments
Moderated by Liz Parker Garcia