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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

inition of events in relation to goal pursuit and achievement. These
points bring motivation, thus emotion, into the discussion of time
and space. 7
Yet even in research of this sort—by Tversky and others—emo-
tion usually remains in the background. For example, Bortolussi and
Dixon summarize work on spatial cognition that points to links with
emotion or motivation. But these remain largely implicit. Specifically,
they write that “results suggest that readers maintain a representa-
tion of the spatial layout that is relevant to a character’s goals and ac-
tions in the story world” (180).
It is unsurprising that literary works often deal with emotions,
both the emotions of characters or narrators and those of readers. Lit-
erature also deals with space and time, principally considering the
ways in which people respond to spatial conditions and temporal
change, the ways space and time impact our pursuit of goals and,
more generally, our—highly emotional—response to our “being-in-
the-world” (to adopt Martin Heidegger’s famous phrase). Literary
depictions cannot, of course, be considered at all definitive in their
representations of emotional responses to space and time. Nonethe-
less, we have reason to believe that successful literary works—espe-
cially those that are celebrated across cultures and time periods—are
likely to provide representations that resonate with readers’ sense of
their own experiences. As such, the analysis of such works may pro-
vide valuable suggestions for understanding our embedded, embod-
ied, and emotional relations to space and time.

Lǐ Bái’s “Changgan Ballad”

There are, of course, many literary works that one could consider in
this context. Rather than starting with some obvious European work
(e.g., Edgar’s description of an imaginary drop from a cliff in King
Lear), it is valuable to turn to a tradition that is perhaps less often an-
alyzed in cognitive terms. Due to the extent of its development and

7 I follow a range of other theorists in the view that “emotions constitute the
primary motivational system for human behaviour and that each emotion
has unique motivational and regulatory functions” (Izard and King 117).

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