The project “Reading Experiences of Pain: Embodied and Critical Perspectives on Suffering in Literary Narratives” (Kone Foundation 2020-2024) explores the interaction between literary texts and readers from the perspective of narrative representations of physical and emotional pain and trauma. It brings into conversation narrative theory, cultural and medical study of pain, theories of embodied cognition, and feminist theory, and focuses on three interlinked sets of questions:
1. How do literary texts represent pain and trauma and guide their readers to approach painful experiences? Through what kinds of techniques do narratives produce and convey experiences that are particularly difficult to articulate, or even “destroy language” (Scarry, The Body in Pain, 4)? What kinds of reading practices and interpretive frames do the representations of pain and trauma call for?
2. What is reading from an embodied, enactive, and situated perspective? How does the understanding of reading as a bodily practice relate to earlier theories of reading and to empirical research?
3. What could socially and politically conscious close reading look like? What kinds of practices can literature and narrative research offer for individuals experiencing and working with pain and trauma?
The aim is to develop embodied and situated theory of reading and text-to-reader interaction as well as new critical, socially conscious practices of close reading. The research elucidates on the possibilities of literary narratives and reading to create intersubjective spaces in which it becomes possible to encounter and recognize extremely personal and subjective experiences of pain and trauma. Furthermore, it creates concrete methods for teaching and learning through literature: the theory and the analyses developed within the research are applied to the teaching of close reading in multidisciplinary settings.
The project explores the works of several Anglophone and Finnish modernist and contemporary writers, from Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison and Roxane Gay, and from Tove Jansson to Pajtim Statovci.
Publications
On literature pedagogy and close reading as an embodied, situated and critical practice:
Ovaska, Anna, Kokeva lukija ja yhteiskunta: kohti ruumiillista ja reflektiivistä lähilukemista. In Miten luemme: kirjallisuuden kouluopetuksen mahdollisuuksia. Edit. Aino Mäkikalli, Elias Heikkonen, Kaisa Ilmonen & Päivi Koponen. SKS, Helsinki 2024, 207–225. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21435/tl.288
Ovaska, Anna, Toward Engaged Narratology: Critical and Embodied Close Reading and Social Justice in a Narrative Medicine Classroom. Narrative Inquiry. Vol. 34, No. 2, 2024, 262–280. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.24029.ova
Polvinen, Merja, Ovaska, Anna & Kortekallio, Kaisa, Omituinen teksti ja ruumiillinen lukija: näkökulmia enaktiiviseen kirjallisuudentutkimukseen. Avain 4/2024, 84–91.
Ovaska, Anna & Kortekallio, Kaisa, Reading Closely: Bodies and Environments. The Polyphony 24 November 2021.
Kortekallio, Kaisa & Ovaska, Anna, Lähilukeminen ennen ja nyt: Ruumiillisia, ympäristöllisiä ja poliittisia näkökulmia. Avain Vol. 17, No. 3, 2020, 52–69. (“Close Reading Then and Now: Embodied, Environmental, and Political Perspectives.”)
Narrating and reading different forms of pain:
Ovaska, Anna, Chronic Pain on Stage: Reading the Politics of Pain. The Polyphony 29 July 2024
Ovaska, Anna, The Sense of November: Strange Emotions and Entanglements of the Self and the World in Tove Jansson’s Sent i November. In Arctic Hysteria and Other Strange Northern Emotions: Case Studies in Finnish Modernism and Contemporary Literature. Edit. Riikka Rossi, Sarianna Kankkunen & Elise Nykänen. SKS, Helsinki 2024, 122–146. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.15
Nykänen, Elise, Oulanne, Laura & Ovaska, Anna, Explorations of the Unconscious in Modernist Women’s Works. Narrative Vol. 30, No.3, 2022, 304–321.
Ovaska, Anna, Reading Shattering Minds and Extended Selves in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Madness and Literature: What Fiction Can Do for the Understanding of Mental Illness. Edit. Lasse Gammelgaard. Exeter University Press, Exeter 2022, 93–109.
Ovaska, Anna, Kertomuksia kivusta: kokemustieto ja lääketieteellinen tieto. In Hyvä ja paha tieto. Eds. Ilari Hetemäki, Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto, Maria Lähteenmäki & Esa Väliverronen. Helsinki, Gaudeamus 2021, 171–182.
Ovaska, Anna, Kivun kielestä: Kielen rajat ja kommunikaatio. niin & näin 3/2020, 93–98.
Anna Ovaska 