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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

In Affective Narratology, I considered some ways in which the study
of emotion in the real world could help to advance our understand-
ing of narrative. In other words, I undertook a literature-oriented proj-
ect. In What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion, in contrast, I was
more concerned with understanding emotion, and in recruiting lit-
erature to that end. In other words, I had undertaken a world-oriented
project. Of course, literature-oriented and world-oriented projects are
not entirely distinct. They necessarily interact. Thus, to some extent,
the former book also examined literature in order to address real-
world topics—including, in that case, space and time.
Specifically, in Affective Narratology, I argued that our experi-
ences of space and time are fundamentally emotional, first of all in
literary works, but also in the real world. Space in stories is a matter
of home and exile, where the protagonist loves or hates, feels the
calm of familiarity or is subjected to the distress of disorientation.
As to time, I argued that the structure of an event is not an objective
feature of the world in itself. The complex interaction of causal se-
quences, instantiating causal principles in the world, does not form
itself into such isolable units. It is, rather, our emotional response to
some conditions or alterations in conditions that makes one point in
time the beginning of an event and another point the end of an event.
Events are a matter of the concerns we have about the world; they
are not a matter of the world as such. In short, both space and time
are not solely a matter of objective causes and causally relevant prop-
erties, but also of motivation and agency.
The following reflections develop the treatment of space and
time from Affective Narratology. My primary focus is not on using cog-
nitive science to understand literary space and time, but the reverse.
Specifically, I take up two literary works in order to think about the
psychology of space and time—or, to follow one use, spatiality and
temporality, our experience of space and time, rather than the objec-
tive features of the world treated in (say) the physics of space and
time. The poems are by the Tang and Song dynasty poets, Lǐ Bái (701-
762 C.E.) and Lǐ Qīngzhào (1084-1151). I have chosen these poems
because they seem particularly apt for the topics of space and time.
In addition, to work against cultural bias, it is valuable to depart from
the more common focus on Western literature. I begin by considering
these poems in relation to a few concepts that are prominent in the
neuroscience of space and, to a lesser extent, time in order to consider
just what we may learn about affective spatiality and temporality by

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