Affording Innerscapes: Dreams, Introspective Imagery and the Narrative Exploration of Personal Geographies

Bernini, M.

doi:10.1515/fns-2018-0024

Affording Innerscapes: Dreams, Introspective Imagery and the Narrative Exploration of Personal Geographies

Bernini, M.

Authors

Dr Marco Bernini marco.bernini@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Abstract

The essay presents an interdisciplinary theory of what it will call “innerscapes”: artefactual representations of the mind as a spatially extended world. By bringing examples of innerscapes from literature (Kafka’s short story The Bridge), radio plays (Samuel Beckett’s Embers), and a creative documentary about auditory-verbal hallucinations (a voice-hearer’s short film, Adam + 1), it suggests that these spatial renditions of the mind are constructed by transforming the quasi-perceptual elements of inner experience into affording ecologies. In so doing, they enable an enactive exploration of inner worlds as navigable environments. The resulting storyworlds display features that resemble the logic and ontology of dreams. Cognitive research on dreams and cartographical studies of the personal geographies of dreamscapes will thus inform the understanding of what innerscapes are, do and can do if used, as the essay argues they should be, as enhancing devices for what Jesse Butler has called ‘extended introspection” (2013: 95).

Citation

Bernini, M. (2018). Affording Innerscapes: Dreams, Introspective Imagery and the Narrative Exploration of Personal Geographies. Frontiers of Narrative Studies, 4(2), 291-311. https://doi.org/10.1515/fns-2018-0024

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Mar 21, 2018
Online Publication Date	Nov 26, 2018
Publication Date	Nov 26, 2018
Deposit Date	Mar 21, 2018
Publicly Available Date	Nov 26, 2019
Journal	Frontiers of narrative studies
Print ISSN	2509-4882
Electronic ISSN	2509-4890
Publisher	De Gruyter
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	4
Issue	2
Pages	291-311
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1515/fns-2018-0024