Reading Words and Worlds

Reading has long been recognised as a highly creative, imaginative act, emerging from a complex trans-action between reader, text, and environment. And nowhere is this cocreative process more apparent than in the reading of lyric poetry, with its intense economy of language and resultant wealth of ambiguity and implication. Yet a widespread assumption persists that reading is primarily a passive act or a matter of dispassionate deciphering, decoding, or discovering a singular, stable meaning inherent but somehow ‘beneath’ or ‘within’ language.

In this interactive talk, poet, translator, and transdisciplinary researcher Dr Patrick Errington will introduce his new, large-scale research programme funded by the UKRI’s Future Leaders Fellowship: ‘Rewriting Wor(l)ds’. Bringing together literary and creative theory with neuroaesthetics, cognitive psychology, and literacy education research, as well as community participatory methods and organisation partnerships, this project is exploring how creative responses to poems (imitation, erasure, translation, versioning, performance, etc.) can help young people enhance reading’s active, co-creative nature. Whilst the project is focused on devising real-world interventions, aiming to codevelop a mobile app that encourages creative poetry engagement for young people around the world, the talk will showcase Patrick and his colleagues’ underlying theories and empirical studies, which indicate how the tasks we are taught to do in response to works of literature shape and constrain how we conceive of those works, and conceive of reading itself.

To conclude the talk, audience members will be invited to see, discuss, and try out their own co-creative responses to an existing poem, offering guests a hands-on demonstration of how co-creative reading/writing can highlight, enact, and even enhance the inherent creativity of reading.

Please note that this hybrid seminar is free to attend.

The Zoom link will be circulated closer to the event.

This event is organised by the Narrative & Cognition Lab of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, led by Marco Bernini.

Please get in touch with us at imh.events@durham.ac.uk if you have any access requirements.