Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (I)

Sternberg, Meir

doi:10.1215/03335372-24-2-297

Cited by 119 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 210 publications

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“…The form of de-tective fiction, for example, often centers on a quest, adventure, or mystery. As the protagonist (the detective) goes in search of solutions, the plot generates curiosity, surprise, and suspense (Sternberg, 2003).…”

Section: The Narrative Analysis Of Social Movementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrative Agency in Hashtag Activism: The Case of #BlackLivesMatter

Yang

2016

MaC

310

200

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Hashtag activism happens when large numbers of postings appear on social media under a common hashtagged word, phrase or sentence with a social or political claim. The temporal unfolding of these mutually connected postings in networked spaces gives them a narrative form and agency. Applying Karlyn Campbell's propositions about rhetorical agency to the case of #BlackLivesMatter, this essay shows that narrative agency in hashtag activism derives from its narrative form as well as from its contents and social context. Narrative agency is communal, invented, skillful, and protean.

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Section: The Narrative Analysis Of Social Movementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrative Agency in Hashtag Activism: The Case of #BlackLivesMatter

Yang

2016

MaC

310

200

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“…Sanford and Emmott suggest that "scenario mapping" and embodied responses allow the emotions of characters to be "built into" readers' "mental representations". These lead to reader emotions, modulated by approval, liking or closeness to the characters into macro narrative structures of curiosity, surprise and suspense, which can generate arousal jags and boosts (pp.196, 207; drawing on Sternberg 1978Sternberg , 2003. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 F o r P e e r R e v i e w O n l y 9 On their own, however, these accounts cannot solve the problem with The Juniper Tree.…”

Section: Listening To the Juniper Treementioning

confidence: 99%

The flow of narrative in the mind unmoored: An account of narrative processing

Jajdelska

2019

Philosophical Psychology

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Verbal narratives provide incomplete information and can be very long. Yet readers and hearers often effortlessly fill in the gaps, and make connections across long stretches of text, sometimes even finding this immersive. How is this done? In the last few decades, event-indexing situation modelling and complementary accounts of narrative emotion have suggested answers. But despite this progress, comparisons between real life perception and narrative experience might underplay both changes to our model of the world in narrative processing , and the role of reader emotions which are unrelated to characters. I reframe narrative experience in predictive processing and neural networks, capturing continuity between fiction, perception and states like dreaming and imagination, through the flexible instantiation of concepts. In this frame, narrative experience is more clearly revealed as a creative experience that can share some of the phenomenology of dreams.

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“…17 So for instance, we have no persuasive evidence that revealing first-person self-narration evokes readers' empathy more effectively than extra-heterodiegetic narration by an authorial narrator, despite the very common assumption that first person is more empathetic than third person (EN xi, 33, 96). Research in discourse processing and psychonarratology has revealed just how little we can affirm about the variety of techniques that have been nominated as empathetic, though promising projects are underway.…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

Readers’ Temperaments and Fictional Character

Keen¹

2011

nlh

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W hen it comes to character, narrative theory has long been at odds with ordinary experiences of fiction reading. Characters, says the formalist or poststructuralist theorist, are nonhuman word-masses, existents, actants, narrative-men, Nobodies, or the products of semes traversing proper names. 1 Yet readers persist in regarding characters as more human than "substantial hypothetical beings," more like friends or neighbors than E. M. Forster's species Homo Fictus allows. 2 This tendency shows every time regular readers talk about fictional characters, and there's really nothing that narrative theory can do to stop it. Instead we ignore it. Narrative theorists have chosen functional, thematic, and linguistic approaches to character over the analysis of readers' reports of self-recognition in fictional characters, or what might be described as naïve engagement with readily identifiable character types. 3 This work rarely reckons with the behavior and beliefs of ordinary readers of fiction, though it implies effects on ideal audiences. 4 For instance, in cognitive narratology, recent work on modes for representation of fictional consciousness contributes to models of narrative communication and accounts of human mind-reading ability, though the experiences of actual readers remain in the black box. 5 Common readerly practices such as liking and hating characters, connecting with or distrusting characters, have been relegated to the book group or the blog, if they are discussed at all. These ubiquitous means of engaging with narrative fiction deserve attention. This essay calls for a revival of reader-response studies, informed by evidence of the high degree of variability in reactions to fictional characters.In an historical moment where reading overall and fiction reading in particular suffers precipitous declines, 6 attention to what the remaining ordinary readers do with and to fictional characters could then change the direction of theoretical engagement with "character." Rather than increasing the distance between theorizing about fiction reading and the experiences of actual readers, we acknowledge the shaping influence of readers on character. This influence includes aspects of identity such as gender and class. Feminist standpoint theory suggests that personal identity influences all aspects of scholarly work, including

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Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (I)

Cited by 119 publications

References 210 publications

Narrative Agency in Hashtag Activism: The Case of #BlackLivesMatter

Narrative Agency in Hashtag Activism: The Case of #BlackLivesMatter

The flow of narrative in the mind unmoored: An account of narrative processing

Readers’ Temperaments and Fictional Character

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