Dr Susanne Mathies, who recently passed her PhD viva at the Open University, has published “The Simulated Self – Fiction Reading and Narrative Identity” in Philosophia. The article develops a new model of fiction reading, built on two assumptions: that human beings are entangled in stories, and that emotions are complex and have a narrative structure.

The article is open access, and can be read here.

Susanne was supervised by Dr Carolyn Price and Professor Derek Matravers.

Former doctoral student Jon Phelan has accepted an offer to publish a research monograph based on his PhD thesis, under the working title ‘Reading Between the Lines: Investigating the Cognitive Value of Literary Fiction’, with Routledge in their Literature and Education series.

Jon argues, following his PhD thesis with the Open University, that one gains cognitively through an engagement with the literary work’s literary devices (metaphor, irony, ambiguity). This is often missed in the debate, which tends to focus on the fictional status of literary fiction. The reviews of the book proposal said that ‘the book is original’ and ‘promises to reinvigorate a central debate’…’it has significant interdisciplinary appeal’. Jon notes that he is indebted to Professor Derek Matravers and Professor Sophie Grace Chappell for their continued encouragement with the project, to the commissioning editor Ms. Emilie Coin, and to the series editors Dr. David Aldridge and Dr. Andrew Green from Brunel University, London.

Congratulations go to our doctoral candidate Sarah Pawlett-Jackson (supervised by Sophie-Grace Chappell and Manuel Dries), who has published her article “Gestalt structures in multi-person intersubjectivity” in Synthese.

In the article, Sarah argues that there are gestalt principles underlying intersubjective interactions. Framed from the first-person perspective: I am able to recognise intersubjective interactions between multiple others who are not me. Sarah goes on to explore the consequences of these claims for the second-person standpoint.