From esroce@rpi.eduThu Jul 31 15:12:07 1997
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 10:08:07 -0400
From: Ellen Esrock <esroce@rpi.edu>
To: selmer@rpi.edu
Subject: Web Page

Selmer,
Sorry this is so late.  Edit at will to match the others in length and
style.  Shall we have photos?  Ellen


Ellen Esrock is an Associate Professor of Literature at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute.  She teaches courses in twentieth century literature
and visual art, psychology and literature, and theory/history of
photography.  Drawing on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, she has
been exploring the felt experiences of image and word that are elicited in
response to works of visual art and literature.  Her concerns are with
embodied consciousness as produced though multi-sensory forms of mental
imagery and through the somatosensory system.


Selected publications:
The Reader's Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response   (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1994).  The Reader's Eye  challenges the
exclusively linguistic orientation in literary studies.  Supported by
contemporary research in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and
psychoanalysis, the argument is that the reader's use of visual imagery can
have unique cognitive and affective consequences for the reading and study
of literature.

Translator and Editor of The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Poetics of James
Joyce.  By Umberto Eco.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.


Works in progress:
Embodying Consciousness:The Somatic Experience of Word and Image explores
how the somatosensory experiences of own bodies contribute to our
affective, sensual, and cognitive experiences of visual and literary art.
Sensing the Text is composed of my own interviews with writers and literary
scholars about their sensory experiences in reading. Those interviewed to
date are Margaret Atwood, Carlos Fuentes, Northrop Frye, William Gass,
Geoffrey Hartman, John Hawkes,  Michael Riffaterre.