Universal minds
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Alan Palmer
His research interests include narratology, cognitive poetics and cognitive approaches to literature, cognitive sciences and the study of consciousness, and philosophy and literature. His recent publications include
Fictional Minds (2004); ‘Intermental thought in the novel: The Middlemarch mind’ (2005); ‘Attribution theory’ (2007); and ‘Storyworlds and groups’ (2007).
Abstract
The key to fictionality is the construction of fictional minds. A fictional narrative is, in essence, the presentation of the mental functioning of the characters who inhabit the storyworld created by that narrative. Readers enter a storyworld primarily by using their knowledge of how to interpret other people's thought processes in the real world in order to try to follow the workings of characters' minds. Otherwise, readers will lose the plot. In this essay, I will suggest that there are twelve features relating to fictional minds that recur in all or nearly all novels. This argument will be put into three contexts: the cognitive turn in literature studies, discussions regarding the concept of narrative universals, and the longstanding debate on how the term narrative should be properly defined. I will also argue that my generalizations regarding the twelve features are not invalidated by a few counterexamples, and that some, particularly postmodern, novels gain their power and impact precisely from their attempts to undermine the default assumptions contained in these features.
About the author
His research interests include narratology, cognitive poetics and cognitive approaches to literature, cognitive sciences and the study of consciousness, and philosophy and literature. His recent publications include Fictional Minds (2004); ‘Intermental thought in the novel: The Middlemarch mind’ (2005); ‘Attribution theory’ (2007); and ‘Storyworlds and groups’ (2007).
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface
- Diagramming narrative
- The new literary semiotics
- The contributions of Peirce's philosophical disciplines to literary studies
- Literary practice on the immediate horizon of the elaboration of semiotics: Peirce's meetings with a few great authors
- The making of the literary symbol: Taking note of Langer
- A semiotic definition of literary discourse
- Semiosis, art, and literature
- Story (first order predicate) logic
- Narrative self-reference in a literary comic: M.-A. Mathieu's L'Origine
- Recontextualizing character: Role-theoretic frameworks for narrative analysis
- Universal minds
- Reconsidering the unreliable narrator
- The cognitive import of the narrative schema
- The story turned upside down: Meaning effects linked to variations on narrative structure
- The role of Vorstellung in literary semantics
- Action between plot and discourse
- Perception already stylizes: On phenomenological semiotics
- Literary semiotics and cognitive semantics
- The representation of consciousness in language and fiction: A cognitive theory of enunciation
- Laughing brains: On the cognitive mechanisms and reproductive functions of mirth
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface
- Diagramming narrative
- The new literary semiotics
- The contributions of Peirce's philosophical disciplines to literary studies
- Literary practice on the immediate horizon of the elaboration of semiotics: Peirce's meetings with a few great authors
- The making of the literary symbol: Taking note of Langer
- A semiotic definition of literary discourse
- Semiosis, art, and literature
- Story (first order predicate) logic
- Narrative self-reference in a literary comic: M.-A. Mathieu's L'Origine
- Recontextualizing character: Role-theoretic frameworks for narrative analysis
- Universal minds
- Reconsidering the unreliable narrator
- The cognitive import of the narrative schema
- The story turned upside down: Meaning effects linked to variations on narrative structure
- The role of Vorstellung in literary semantics
- Action between plot and discourse
- Perception already stylizes: On phenomenological semiotics
- Literary semiotics and cognitive semantics
- The representation of consciousness in language and fiction: A cognitive theory of enunciation
- Laughing brains: On the cognitive mechanisms and reproductive functions of mirth
