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Narratology and cognitive sciences. On Lars Bernaerts, Dirk de Geest, Luc
Herman, Bart Vervaeck (Eds.), Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to
Literary Narrative
Gianluca Consoli
Résumé
Compte rendu de Lars Bernaerts, Dirk de Geest, Luc Herman, Bart Vervaeck (Eds.), Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative.
Abstract
Review of Lars Bernaerts, Dirk de Geest, Luc Herman, Bart Vervaeck (Eds.), Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative.
Lars Bernaerts, Dirk de Geest, Luc Herman, Bart Vervaeck (Eds.) 2013, Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative,
Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press. 978-0-8032-4481-8
In September 2000 David Herman published an article in Image & Narrative titled Narratology as a Cognitive Science. He had two complementary goals: to sketch out some of the implications of recent works in cognitive science for narrative theory; and to explore how current modes of narrative-theoretical inquiry bear on research in the cognitive sciences. Since then the relationship between cognitive sciences and narrative theory has become increasingly close. However, at present cognitive approaches to literary narrative still tend to constitute more a set of loosely confederated heuristic schemes (derived from a variety of source disciplines, such as linguistic, computer science, psychology, etc.) than a coordinated research program1. So, the “cognitive turn” of literary studies and the basic goal of reconnecting the study of narrative with the study of mind-brain not only encompass various corpora (fictional and nonfictional narratives, computer-mediated narratives, comics, cinematic narratives, pictorial and musical media, etc.), but they also are realized by multiple methods. Anyway, a collection of essays such as Stories and Minds contributes to a greater unity of the field.
The chapters in the book mainly focus on the gappy and sparse nature of literary narratives, which typically present various kinds and levels of gaps, holes, empty spaces, and lacunae. According to the classical, structuralist narrative theory, compensating the hidden information represents an essential - probably, the main - activity of readers. An activity that, at the same time, requires additional efforts, but also enables interpreters to access new insights and deeper narrative connections. Over the last decades, what cognitive sciences have definitively clarified is that this kind of narrative activity is inherent not just in literary interpretation, but also in the daily processing that goes on in our brains and makes sense 1. Herman, David (2009) Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
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of our fragmented self and discontinuous phenomenal experience2. To put it explicitly: our memory, our thinking, our consciousness, and our mind are fundamentally the product of narrativization, conceived as a cognitive skill designed by evolution to cope with partial, incomplete, minimal cues.
On this basis, the postclassical, cognitive narrative theory aims at strengthening the «nexus of narrative and mind». In particular, the editors of the book distinguish between a generic “cognitive” approach and the specific “cognitivist” one pursued in the volume. The former indicates a variety of inquiries directly affected by the cognitive turn: they are typical of the “first wave” of the cognitive approaches, exclusively dedicated to deriving results from the cognitive sciences and reinforcing the empirical basis of narrative studies. The latter indicates the form of research that focuses on the mental operations required to comprehend narratives, hovering between the intentionalist accounts and the neural explanations of the reader’s subjective experience. By this perspective, the empirical studies of literature move from surface phenomena (such as eye movement and speed of reading) to the mental patterns behind them. In the same vein, the interpretative analyses of the more traditionally hermeneutic approach are refunctionalized in order to determine and describe the relevant cognitive processes.
According to this perspective, some of the central questions of the volume are as follow: «How do gaps in our memory for texts shape our comprehension of a given narrative? How does the stylistic control of the reader’s attention create and remedy the gappiness of the narrative? What make us capable of filling the lacunae in visual representations, the portrayal of bodily experiences, or the figuring of fictional minds? Why do we fill some of the empty spaces and ignore others? Why do we pursue this gappines and at the same time try to resolve it?» (p. 13).
Three sections bring together new research to investigate these questions. The first section proposes three complementary analyses of the readers’ mind, examining memory for the literary text (chapter 1, M. Bortolussi and P. Dixon), rhetoric and stylistic strategies designed to control readers’ attention (chapter 2, C. Emmott, A. Sanford and M. Alexander), the ability to cope with the incomplete cues inscribed in literary texts (chapter 3, E. Auyoung). Also, the second section proposes three interconnected approaches, dedicated to describing the reader’s experience integrating narratological and philosophical models. Using enactivist theories, chapter 4 (M. Caracciolo) conceives the reading experience as an active interaction based on imaginative simulation. In line with the phenomenological orientation, chapter 5 (A. Kuzmičová) deepens the embodied nature of the reading experience, analyzing the readers’ sensorimotor participation in the imaginary storyworld. In contrast to reductionism, chapter 6 (M. Mäkelä) stresses that literary experientiality involves, at the same time, a sense of cognitive familiarity and estrangement and so it is different from familiar forms of informational transmission. The third section places the reading mind in a broader cultural perspective. Chapter 7 (R. Sommer) analyzes several cognitive strategies for filling cultural difference typical of intercultural reading. Chapter 8 (B. Keunen) suggests that the activity of reading implies the attribution of intentions to characters, not only to make sense of them, but also to evaluate them in terms of thick moral concepts.
Finally, it is important to point out that a crucial aspect emerging from Stories and Minds can 2. Cfr., for example, Dennett, Daniel (1991) Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin. Hutto, Daniel (2008)
The Narrative Practices Hypothesis: Clarifications and Implications, Philosophical Exploration, Vol. 11, No. 3,
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be further implemented. The basic approach of the volume and several chapters explicitly stress that literary narrative can be of special interest to cognitive sciences. This is undoubtedly true: the study of narratives can enrich the theories of mind and the understanding of self-construction. However, narrative is not restricted to literary text: the narrative mind is not limited to the reading mind. On the contrary, many concepts developed in the volume in relation to literary texts as case studies (such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Saramago’s Blindness, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: cfr., for example, chapters 3, 4 and 5) afford the possibility of conceiving the narrative function as a general mode of understanding. Precisely, a mode of understanding enabling interpreters to identify story-like elements across any number of semiotic media, not only literary texts. By this perspective, whatever the narrative instantiations, stories are interactional achievements grounded in the interplay between explicit and implicit, top-down and bottom-up interpretive strategies able to mediate among single-scene inscribed elements, larger narrative sequences and storylines, and overarching event-structures macroframes. Moreover, stories require embodied and active simulations, with sensorimotor participation, that, on the one hand, combine smaller unity into a more comprehensive whole, shifting from surface information to in-depth processing, and, on the other hand, they are prompted to recognition even by partial and minimal cues. Above all, in virtue of this kind of processing, stories not only represent a target of interpretation requiring interpreters’ mental skills, but they also become resources for interpretation, that is, indispensable means to understanding oneself and others, to make sense of our experience, to enrich our mental processes, and to extend our mind.
Gianluca Consoli, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Department of Philosophy. He received his first Ph.D. in Epistemology from the University of Rome La Sapienza and his second Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of Siena. He works in aesthetics, philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences. Email : gianluca.consoli@libero.it
