In this paper I discuss the importance for narrative theory of the concept, drawn from developmental psychology, of "joint attention". 1 In the first part, I explain the basic concept and its significance for the emergence of narrative in young children. In the second part I draw out the implications of this genetic approach for our understanding of the nature of narrative signification: where classical narratology is based on a chain of representational and "communicative" dyads (signifier/signified and sender/receiver), joint attention integrates these functions into a triadic semiotic by which the sign mediates between three poles: the producer of the sign, the receiver of the sign and the object of their joint attention. In the third part, taking Boccaccio's Decameron as an example, I illustrate how this approach to the semiotics of narrative elucidates aspects of literary narrative that are obscured by the classical semiotic. Joint attention offers affordances for quasirecursive re-contextualization, since the object of joint attention may consist of another act of joint attention: literary narrative can create complex joint attentional structures by which the story is "seen" through nested perspectival prisms of embedded narrative and character.1 I would like to thank David Herman, Richard Walsh, Adam Roberts and Alan Palmer for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.

Interest in the historical phenomenon of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American black nationalism has been inspired by the revival of nationalist modes of thought among blacks since the 1950s. Because the placing of post-Second World War Pan-Africanism or the American Black Power movement within a historical context has been seen as an urgent task, the search for a coherent tradition has carried with it the danger of distortions in the historical treatment of the earlier movements. “Traditional” nineteenth-century black nationalism was essentially a conservative movement advocating racial self-improvement through the “civilizing” influence of Anglo-Saxon values, particularly Christianity. Taking black nationalism to mean the assertion of group identity for political purposes (which need not be separatist), its nature clearly changed during the period 1914–1929 as the nature of the American black community changed. For the first time in American history there existed a sizeable number of black intellectuals and a literate audience for them; the rapid growth in the number of black newspapers and magazines reflected these facts. These intellectuals were responsive to new ideas like socialism, yet the transformation of black nationalist thought during this period did not constitute a complete break with the past. This essay attempts to illustrate continuities with the nineteenth century along with those elements of radicalism that presaged modern black nationalism.Two discontinuities between modern and “traditional” black nationalism constitute essential reference points for the analysis of black nationalist thought during this period. The first relates to who is perceived as being the principal agent or vanguard of the nationalist movement.

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This essay begins by exploring how the “immersive objectivity” of the photographic image highlighted by the Surrealists tends to collapse distinctions between what is internal and external to consciousness. It goes on to show how, in the photography-incorporating fictions of Georges Rodenbach and W.G. Sebald, perceptual immersion in the photograph engenders a “dysfunctional” state of melancholic stasis in the viewer, problematizing assumptions about agency common in many contemporary accounts of distributed cognition. It concludes by arguing that the internalization of the photographic image by consciousness, as exemplified in these modernist responses to photography, with their topologically unstable dynamics as between that which is “inside” and “outside” consciousness, strikingly demonstrate the relevance to contemporary debates over the “extended mind” of Bergson’s argument that the mind should be conceived not in spatial but in durational terms, as a continuous evolution of heterogeneous states.