Puzzling Stories - The Aesthetic Appeal of Cognitive Challenge in Film, Television

Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, strange incongruities, inviting enigmas and persistent ambiguities have been central to the effects of many literary and cinematic traditions, a great deal of contemporary films and television series bring such qualities to the mainstream-but wherein lies the attractiveness of perplexing works of fiction? This collected volume offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and trans-medial approach to the question of cognitive challenge in narrative art, bringing together psychological, philosophical, formal-historical, and empirical perspectives from leading scholars across these fields.

About the author

Steven Willemsen is Assistant Professor in Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Groningen and Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. He is co-author of Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (with Miklós Kiss, Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

Miklós Kiss is Associate Professor of Audiovisual Arts and Cognition and Chair of the Arts, Culture and Media department at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research intersects the fields of narrative and cognitive film studies. He is co-author of the books Film Studies in Motion: from Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video (with Thomas van den Berg, Scalar, 2016) and Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (with Steven Willemsen, Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

Product details

• Authors: Steven Kiss Willemsen
• Assisted by: Miklós Kiss (Editor), Steven Willemsen (Editor)
• Publisher: BERGHAHN BOOKS, INC
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.08.2022
• EAN: 9781800735910
• ISBN: 978-1-80073-591-0
• No. of pages: 408
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Photography, film, video, TV; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Cognitive studies, Film Theory & Criticism, Cognitive Science, Film history, theory or criticism