Elaine Auyoung
310 Pillsbury Dr. S.E.
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
Elaine Auyoung (pronounced O-Young) is an associate professor of English and an affiliated faculty member of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies and the Center for Cognitive Sciences. Her multidisciplinary interests include nineteenth-century British literature and culture, the experience of reading, psychological approaches to the arts, feminist epistemology, and learning in the humanities. Her scholarship seeks to recover forms of knowledge and experience that disciplinary norms and institutional structures systematically exclude or discount. See her recent article, "A Language for Literary Expertise: Epistemic Resources and Perceptual Transformation," in a special double issue of New Literary History on "Understanding Criticism."
She is the author of When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind, which provides conceptual tools for examining reading experiences that literary critics have long dismissed as naïve and undisciplined. This book draws on psychological research on reading and cognition to account for how writers such as Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy bring readers into intimate relation with fictional characters and worlds by engaging their embodied knowledge and their readiness to form social impressions. In chapters on Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, Auyoung argues that realist aesthetics is also distinguished by readers’ mediated, one-sided relation to objects, experiences, and characters that are never within reach.
Professor Auyoung is currently working on two book projects:
“Becoming Sensitive: A Future for Literary Expertise" intervenes in current efforts to clarify the nature and value of literary study. This multidisciplinary project engages feminist epistemology and the history of modern research universities to show how higher education's ascetic, androcentric hierarchy of values has contributed to the under-conceptualization of humanistic knowledge. Challenging longstanding institutional and disciplinary biases against pedagogical research, it draws on the cognitive psychology of learning and expertise to specify the epistemic contribution of literary criticism: literary critics inductively discover and disseminate epistemic resources that enable students and scholars to perceive literary texts and the experiences they represent in more intricate and flexible ways. At a moment when knowledge, learning, and education are under attack, this project seeks to demystify and democratize the process of developing perceptual expertise. It provides critics with sharper tools for communicating the value of literary study, for reducing barriers to learning in the literature classroom, and for bringing attention to topics within the discipline that have long been unjustly excluded or dismissed.
“Permission to Receive Joy" takes a trauma-informed approach to how fiction, poetry, visual art, music, and dance create uniquely powerful but fragile experiences of joy, wonder, connection, belonging, even transcendence. It argues that the immediate situational contexts in which we encounter the arts, and which artists and performers work to create, facilitate experiences of solidarity and self-forgetfulness unavailable to audiences in everyday life. Recognizing the extent to which aesthetic emotions and judgments depend on specific situational and relational contexts in turn compels us to grapple with the fragility of these temporary states. How might we continue to feel, judge, and act on behalf of others in the absence of conditions that facilitate fellow feeling, especially when real or imagined risks to ourselves intrude upon our attention?
Educational Background
- PhD: English, Harvard University
- BA: English with Honors and with Distinction, Stanford University
Specialties
- Aesthetic Experience
- Education and Learning in the Humanities
- Methods of Reading
- Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture
- Psychological Approaches to the Arts
- Literature and Philosophy
- Epistemic Justice