Narrative and Belief: The Persuasive Power of Religious Narratives
and Supernatural Fiction | Leiden University, 17 October
This symposium brings together four scholars of religion from the Netherlands, Denmark,
Norway, and Australia to discuss the persuasive power of religious narratives and supernatural
fiction. Combining semiotic and cognitive approaches, the symposium aims to examine textual
mechanisms that promote a semiotic effect of ‘reality’ and to theorise how belief is created in
interplay between text, reader, and community.
Time: 11.15-16.00, followed by drinks.
Venue: Leiden University, Van Wijkplaats 2, room 2.
PROGARMME (revised)
11.15. Welcome, Prof.Dr. Ab de Jong (Leiden)
11.25. Prof.Dr. Carole Cusack (Sydney): Supernatural Fiction as the Basis of Aesthetically
Pleasing, Non-Dogmatic, Alternative Value Systems
12.05. Dr. Markus Altena Davidsen (Leiden): How Supernatural Fiction Persuades: A SemioCognitive Approach
12.45. Lunch
13.30. Dr. Dirk Johannsen (Oslo): At the Crossroads – On Doubt and Persuasion in Fantastic and
Religious Tales
14.10. Prof.Dr. Anders Klostergaard Petersen (Aarhus): Constructing Persuasion in Religious
Narratives
14.50. Coffee
15.10. Response, Prof.Dr. Ab de Jong (Leiden)
15.25. Final discussion
16.00. Drinks (Het Pakhuis)
ABSTRACTS
Prof.Dr. Carole Cusack (Sydney)
Supernatural Fiction as the Basis of Aesthetically Pleasing, Non-Dogmatic, Alternative Value
Systems
Late modernity is saturated with highly affective narratives (film, literary fiction, graphic novels,
television series, online virtual worlds etc.) and the processes of exposure to, prolonged immersion in,
and social vindication of certain fictions (as well as their sensuousness and tangibility in visual and
experiential terms) may result in the transformation of “the essential structures of everyday life”
(Harvey 2004: 264). This paper argues that religion and religious narratives are less “special” than has
often been claimed (Religious Studies scholars being susceptible to a variant of the sui generis claim in
their assessment of their subject), and that narrative, as the basic building block of human identity
(both individual and social) always contains the potential to be read as transcendent and uniquely
meaningful (as mythology, theology etc) for particular individuals and groups. Some of these
narratives become the foundation of new religions; most do not. The deciding factor – when
examining Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and George Lucas’s Star
Wars, for example – seems to be congruence between the fictional narrative and the zeitgeist, what I
have elsewhere termed the interdependence of religious forms and their “host cultures” (Cusack
2010).
Dr. Markus Altena Davidsen (Leiden)
How Supernatural Fiction Persuades: A Semio-Cognitive Approach
Drawing on (cognitive) narratology this paper proposes an explanation of how supernatural fiction
persuades, i.e. how supernatural fiction is able to construct an ‘aura of factuality’ and attach it to its
supernatural motifs. I catalogue and illustrate a number of ‘veracity mechanisms’ that contribute to
this effect. These include ‘evidence mechanisms’ that affirm the reality of the supernatural within the
narrative world, and ‘anchorage mechanisms’ that imply that the narrative ultimately speaks about
the actual world rather than about a fictional world. Inspired by cognitive blending theory, I then
demonstrate how veracity mechanisms of different sorts reinforce each other. Most fundamentally, the
semiotic effect of ‘reality’ can be disembedded from the mechanism producing it, thus allowing the
reality effects from different veracity mechanisms to add up to a ‘total reality score’. Furthermore, the
plasticity of human cognition allows veracity mechanisms to be blended with each. Religious
interpretations of supernatural fiction typically arise as blends of evidence and anchorage mechanisms
yielding a reading of the text as ‘a fictional story about real supernatural entities’.
Dr. Dirk Johannsen (Oslo)
At the Crossroads – On Doubt and Persuasion in Fantastic and Religious Tales
The paper provides a historical perspective on the question of “the persuasiveness” of supernatural
tales. Persuasion implies doubt. Against the backdrop of a study on the conceptual history of
“religion” and “oral tradition” in the 19th century, it will be shown how both textual and paratextual
utterances of doubt became a defining feature in the classification of supernatural tales. The paper
then focuses on critical re-evaluations of this classification towards the end of the 19th century,
analysing the interplay of academic and literary approaches to the supernatural in Norwegian
intellectual circles.
Prof.Dr. Anders Klostergaard Petersen (Aarhus)
Constructing Persuasion in Religious Narratives
There is no construal of persuasion in narrative types of religious writings that is particular to this
subset of literature. Narrative forms of religious literature are exploiting the same rhetorical and
semiotic mechanisms that are intrinsic to any other type of literature devoted to persuasive purposes,
be it commercials, ideological writings, etc. Yet, there may be a difference in degree with respect to the
distribution of devices used to achieve the strived for purpose. In my paper I shall take a closer look at
the formal, functional, and semantic dimensions of religious narratives with a particular focus on the
means used to obtain ‘persuasivity’ in the performative staging of the texts under scrutiny. My prime
focus will be on texts originating during the formative stage of the Christ-movement. Additionally, I
shall concentrate on the use of counter-intuitive semantic elements in the religious writings based on
the assertion that they may be particularly apt for attaining the aspired persuasive goal (cf. notably the
work of Boyer).