Puzzling Stories: The Aesthetic Appeal of Cognitive Challenge in Film, Television and Literature

by Steven Willemsen (Editor), Mikl s Kiss (Editor)

Overview

Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, strange incongruities, inviting enigmas and persistent ambiguities have been central to the effects of many literary and cinematic traditions, a great deal of contemporary films and television series bring such qualities to the mainstream—but wherein lies the attractiveness of perplexing works of fiction? This collected volume offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and trans-medial approach to the question of cognitive challenge in narrative art, bringing together psychological, philosophical, formal-historical, and empirical perspectives from leading scholars across these fields.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781805393146
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	04/01/2024
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Steven Willemsen is Assistant Professor in Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Groningen and Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. He is co-author of Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (with Miklós Kiss, Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2017).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Steven Willemsen and Miklós Kiss

Part I: THE ATTRACTIONS OF COGNITIVE CHALLENGE IN (POST-)CLASSICAL NARRATIVES & GENRE FICTION

Chapter 1. Aesthetics and ‘Active Discovery’: The Pleasure of Moderate Cognitive Challenge in Mass Art
Todd Berliner

Chapter 2. Narration, Implicature, and the Deceptive Puzzle Film
Warren Buckland

Chapter 3. Cognitive Challenge in Complex Science Fiction: Knowledge, Reason and Threat in Narratives of Time Travel and Extraterrestrial Contact
Hilary Duffield

Chapter 4. Strange Loops and Nonhuman Realities: Complex Narrative Faces the Climate Crisis
Marco Caracciolo

Part II: MESMERIZED MINDS & BODIES: ART-CINEMA & MODERNIST AESTHETICS

Chapter 5. The Puzzling Film Environments of Fellini’s 8½
Steffen Hven

Chapter 6. 2 or 3 Things? Polyphony, Cognitive Challenge and Aesthetic Pleasure in Godard’s (Counter) Cinema
Maria Poulaki

Chapter 7. Embodying Fragmentation in Film: The Spatio-temporal Logic of Cinematic Modernism
Maarten Coëgnarts

Chapter 8. The Most Difficult Riddle
András Bálint Kovács

Part III: NOVEL PLEASURES IN CONTEMPORARY SERIAL TELEVISION: FROM COMPLEXITY TO CONFUSION

Chapter 9. Multiform Television
Matthew Campora

Chapter 10. ‘I Can’t Keep Track of Any of It Anymore’: Cognitive Challenge and Other Aesthetic Appeals in Community
Jason Gendler

Chapter 11. How Not to Comprehend Television: Notes on Complexity and Confusion
Jason Mittell

Part IV: READING, VIEWING, ENGAGING: CONCEPTUALIZING THE PLEASURES OF BEING CHALLENGED

Chapter 12. Challenges of Enjoying Morally Ambiguous Character Drama: The Dexter Case
Ed S. Tan, Monique Timmers, Claire M. Segijn, Suzanna J. Opree, Guus Bartholomé

Chapter 13. The Fascination of Failure: On Predictability, Unpredictability and Postdictability in Art
Marina Grishakova

Chapter 14. Expressive Challenge and the Metaphoricity of Literary Reading
Don Kuiken

Chapter 15. Who Likes Complex Films? Personality and Preferences for Narrative Complexity
Steven Willemsen, Katalin Bálint, Frank Hakemulder, Miklós Kiss, Elly Konijn, Kirill Fayn

Index

Editorial Reviews

“Puzzling Stories is a remarkable volume which presents theoretically advanced essays—which sometimes are themselves cognitive challenges for the reader—and consistently good analyses of a great variety of complex fictions… This collection is of exceptional quality. Meticulously edited, it is a welcome addition to the growing literature on narrative complexity.” • Projections

“Puzzle films have often been thought to be marginal and eccentric parts of our media landscape. But they stand revealed in this diverse collection as important prototypes for wide-ranging innovation in cinema and television. These ingenious and lively essays harvest the insights of recent work on puzzling narratives to show that contradiction, anomaly, and impossibility have been central to screen storytelling for decades. From The Philadelphia Story through 8 ½ and the work of Godard, up to Twin Peaks’ hallucinatory third season and other instances of complex TV, the authors show that rigorous reflection on puzzle films can illuminate central questions of narrative construction and reception.” • David Bordwell, University of Wisconsin—Madison

From the Publisher