Toward an aesthetics of adaptation in empirical research

Abstract

In their article “Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in Empirical Research” Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, and Pascal Nicklas discuss the requirements and potential of empirical research into the reception of adaptations: adaptation is one key strategy in the creation of literature and art in general. The creative process and product of adaptation has its counter-part on the side of reception. Empirical research into the aesthetics of adaptation aims at the experimental elucidation of the physiological background and the establishment of a model describing the perceptual underpinnings of the act of seeing an adaptation as adaptation. This implies evolutionary biological reasoning concerning the memory tasks required for this kind of perception and experimental work showing neuronal, psychological and perceptual specificities contrasting acts of reception of artistic and non-artistic stimuli. A particularly promising arena for model building research lies in poetic language and rhetorical structures of repetition.