Research across these fields has pointed to surprise as a key mechanism of interpretation. Cognitive neuroscience shows that the human brain continuously generates predictions about the world to guide perception and action (Hohwy 2013; Clark 2016). When these predictions fail, they trigger biological alarm, experienced as surprise, a response that refocuses attention and updates knowledge (Izard 1991; Kagan 2002; Roberts 2003; Antony et al. 2021; Reisenzein et al. 2019). The same predictive dynamics also operate in semantic processing, narrative comprehension, poetry reading, and aesthetic experience more broadly (Panksepp 1998; Degen & Tonhauser 2021; Jacobs 2023; Kuperberg & Jaeger 2016; Michaelov et al. 2024).
Cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics often place epistemological uncertainty, expectation, and surprise at the center of narrative analysis and readerly experience (Sternberg 2003; Toolan 2008; Currie 2013; Kukkonen 2017; Tobin 2018). Cognitive linguistics shows that ungrammatical forms and unexpected meanings elicit distinct neural responses (Coulson et al. 1998; Lepock et al. 2024), that pragmatically unexpected expressions prompt listeners to reconstrue the communicative situation (Degen et al. 2015), and that marked constructions that violate entrenched collocational patterns – instances of “grammatical surprise” – convey affective stance and dramatic force (Jing-Schmidt 2024).
Yet sustained exchange between linguistic and literary studies remains limited, reflecting long-standing institutional divisions that have curtailed dialogue on shared questions of expectation, interpretation, and affect. By focusing on surprise as a shared cognitive-affective process operating across domains, from placement of grammatical constructions to management of reader’s epistemic vigilance, and from addressee and reader positioning to latency in metaphorical mapping, this panel brings traditions into dialogue.
The panel features three presentations of no more than 18 minutes each, leaving at least 15 minutes for open discussion.
Vera Tobin’s paper looks at the role that placing, evading, and deflecting blame plays both in the reception of narrative twists and in the structure of those twists themselves. Sleight of hand around source information is a common device for setting up and deploying narrative surprise, bolstered by cognitive tendencies that help ensure that audiences will both make key inferences and revise them in retrospect. Still, when stories seem to tell us one thing, then turn around and tell us something else, they introduce a specter of misdoing: Someone around here has been unreliable. Tobin shows how this specter serves as a locus of narrative energy and source of cognitive trouble in Teju Cole’s Open City, then connects this analysis to recurring patterns in the reception of novels and films that hinge on surprise. She argues that structural features of these narratives tend to activate readers' epistemic vigilance, resulting in either a sense of readerly culpability or its defensive opposite.
Next, Jimin Kang’s paper examines the “stranger-interlocutor,” a silent addressee that unsettles the boundaries between narrator, listener, and reader. Analyzing Anna Seghers’ Transit and Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, where exiled narrators recount their stories to a stranger, Kang argues that this narrative configuration enables intimacy without stakes and invites narrativization in real time, allowing for emergent realizations. The “you” of second-person narration further disrupts distinctions between homo- and heterodiegetic narration, creating “unnatural” narratives that situate readers in a surprising relation to the text. In both novels a final twist reframes the narrator’s intentions and implicates the reader in the moral quandaries of the text.
Finally, Zhuo Jing-Schmidt’s paper examines how narrative surprise arises from delayed metaphorical mapping rather than event misprediction, reframing Eileen Chang’s aesthetics of quotidian materiality as formal devices of interpretive surprise. Ordinary objects and microevents in Chang’s Eighteen Springs initially appear either as literal details or as isolated associations. The larger semiotic network they ultimately form remains occult. As such details accumulate, latent metaphorical structures gradually emerge. The paper argues that this semiotic latency – delayed conceptual mapping through patterned repetition – generates surprise, as readers are compelled to revise previously processed details within a newly recognized metaphorical frame.
Through interdisciplinary inquiry, this panel contributes to debates on form, interpretation, narrative design and reader response by showing how cognitive affective mechanisms illuminate overlooked dimensions of form-meaning interpretation rooted in the human mind – issues central to the renewed interest in form and given new urgency in the age of Large Language Models.