From Literary Immersion to Fission-fusion Aesthetics

In this chapter, Anderson draws on the notion of fission-fusion, originally from anthropology and ethology, and develops the concept in relation to literary reading and immersion. The term fission-fusion refers to the shifting capacity of all sorts of phenomena (including people, animals, and conceptual systems) to act autonomously or come together in an integrated group, as the situation demands. It is a useful extension and corrective to the notion of distributed cognition. Anderson explores the idea in relation to literature itself and literary engagement, suggesting in the end that immersion is too passive a metaphor for the experience of literary reading and literary aesthetics, and proposes that the fluxing and dynamic nature of fission-fusion is a useful way of thinking about the experience of literary reading.