nCOGNITO - Papers in Cognitive Cultural Studies

Moral Emotions in Literary Reception

Csenge Aradi — 2025-12-01

This special issue explores moral judgment as a central dimension of narrative reception, emphasizing its role in shaping how readers make sense of narrative worlds. The issue focuses in particular on moral emotions, arguing that they function as key drivers of narrative understanding rather than as secondary responses. Special attention is given to negative moral emotions such as anger, indignation, contempt, and moral disgust, which are shown to intensify engagement, guide attention, and structure interpretive outcomes. The articles examine how these emotions influence readers’ ethical positioning toward characters and actions and how they affect memory and interpretation. At the same time, the volume highlights the capacity of literary narratives to challenge entrenched moral expectations by suspending, complicating, or reconfiguring default judgments. By analyzing narrative strategies and linguistic devices that shape moral emotions, the issue offers a nuanced account of ethical engagement as a dynamic interplay between cognitive mechanisms, cultural norms, and individual experience.

Emotion Detection in Literary Texts with a Corpus Linguistic Approach

Gábor Simon — 2025-12-01

Narrative fiction is rich in emotions described by the narrator or other characters. These emotions can be carefully analysed using close reading techniques, but what methods can be used in a distant reading analysis? How can we detect and identify characters’ emotions in large corpora? Beyond the emotional vocabulary of a language, are there any reoccurring patterns of emotion description used by narrators in novels of different genres and ages? The paper overviews the basic problems and methodological proposals in corpus linguistic literature to provide a solid foundation for empirical analysis. Moreover, a pilot study is conducted using the ELTE Novel Corpus to analyze the emotions represented in Dezső Kosztolányi's novels and to determine how to detect them through corpus stylistic analysis. In the pilot analysis, I focus on two negative emotions: a basic emotion of anger and a more complex emotional stance of shame.

Moral Emotions and Narrative Multiperspectivity in Social Novels

Márta Horváth — 2025-12-01

This article explores the interplay between moral emotions and narrative structure in Imre Kertész’s Detective Story, focusing on how anger and compassion are evoked through its multilayered narrative perspective. Drawing on recent findings in moral psychology and cognitive literary theory, the study argues that social novels typically evoke emotional engagement—particularly moral emotions—to stimulate ethical reflection.

First, I will briefly summarize relevant psychological frameworks, including the dual-process theory of moral judgment and theories of moral emotions. Second, I will argue that anger and compassion are inevitably interconnected, based on the appraisal theory of anger. Third, I will apply these theoretical insights to literary reception, exploring which narrative structures elicit emotional responses such as anger, and how these responses are typically accompanied by compassion. My central example will be Imre Kertész’s Detective Story, a multilayered narrative. I contend that its three embedded narrative levels shape the emotional profile of the sociocritical narrative by reinforcing the first-order narrator’s explicit moral judgment through evooking anger and compassion in the reader.

Moral Emotions and Aesthetic Experience in Young Readers

Orsolya Szilvássy — 2025-12-01

The paper considers readers’ engagement, aesthetic appreciation, narrative understanding and their moral or social involvement in many senses as interrelated—not only in general literature, but also in literature for young people. It introduces first the theoretical background terminology, mainly drawn from cognitive psychology and poetics and then examines a Hungarian novel, focusing on the relation between the narrative strategies and readers’ social emotions and moral judgment during reading the text. The novel in question, Be Faithful Unto Death (1995)—originally Légy jó mindhalálig (1920) by Zsigmond Móricz—is regarded as a classic and seminal work of Hungarian literature which offers young readers opportunities to experience empathy, explore moral emotions, and engage in moral reasoning. However, it also poses challenges to these abilities, to the extent that it engenders a certain level of difficulty for novice readers to become fully absorbed in the act of reading. In connection with that we also have to ask if the affordance of the texts correlates with the understanding competences and aesthetic preferences of their target audience - with reference to empirical (neuro)cognitive research.

Reclaiming Bodies, Freeing Souls

Kai Qing Tan — 2025-12-01

First published in Korean, Han Kang's Human Acts depicts the brutal massacre and the military's violent suppression during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising to share the long-lasting impact of the traumatic event with audiences across time and space. The acknowledgement of shared trauma, regardless of geography, time and culture, is strongly indicated by Han's conscious decision not to celebrate her Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of the persistent violence against humanity in the ongoing wars around the world (Noh 2024). Addressing the reception of trauma narratives, this article examines how Human Acts evokes readers' transcultural empathy for shared trauma arising from war and civil unrest. To this end, it applies recent approaches to embodied reading by Caracciolo and Kukkonen as well as concepts in trauma studies, including (implicated) witnessing, affect and transcultural empathy. Its analyses of passages with detailed and defamiliarizing depictions of the human body (body parts, viscerality and senses) in the realist setting illustrate how readers affectively enact "what it is like" to be involved in the uprising through their "virtual bodies" (Caracciolo 2014). The disruptions in the embodied reading process implicate recipients in the secondary witnessing of violence (Rothberg 2019) and elicit their acknowledgement of shared trauma through embodied means, which "can build bridges between people from diverse historical backgrounds" (Garloff 2020, 211). Moreover, by figuratively reclaiming the students' bodies through their virtual bodies, readers assist in the important Korean spiritual process of freeing the lost souls of Gwangju from the trauma and towards the afterlife. The article thus argues that recipients' post-reading recognition of their collective responsibility against injustices against humanity can "lead to new versions of collective politics that build on alliances and assemblages of differently situated subjects" (Rothberg 2019, 21).

From Heroic Ethos to Social Order

Orsolya Rauzs — 2025-12-01

This study focuses on moral aspects of the Hildebrandslied, a medieval German heroic poem, which tells the story of a fight between father and son. The aim is to investigate how the moral elements of the heroic genre appear in the text, i.e., the values of loyalty and bravery, and the emotions pride, shame, and anger. The analysis of the text also highlights how narrative techniques like dialogue, repetition, or dramatic irony influence the empathy and moral judgments of recipients. The study suggests that although there is a culture-related difference in the interpretations of contemporary and modern audiences, the special combination of the techniques makes the identification with the father figure generally more likely.

Fritz Breithaupt: The Narrative Brain: The Stories our Neurons Tell. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2025

Márta Horváth — 2025-12-01

This contribution is a critical review of Fritz Breithaupt: The Narrative Brain: The Stories our Neurons Tell. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2025, 274.p.

Francesca Arnavas and Marzia Beltrami, ed. Literary Fairy Tales and the Embodied Mind, 2023

Zoltán Kocsis — 2025-12-01

This contribution is a critical review of Francesca Arnavas and Marzia Beltrami, editors. Literary Fairy Tales and the Embodied Mind. Vol. 37, Issue 2 (2023) of Marvels & Tales. Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies. https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol37/iss2/