Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts brings together in one volume cutting-edge research that turns to recent findings in cognitive and neurobiological sciences, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines, to explore and understand more deeply various cultural phenomena, including art, music, literature, and film. The essays fulfilling this task for the general reader as well as the specialist are written by renowned authors H. Porter Abbott, Patrick Colm Hogan, Suzanne Keen, Herbert Lindenberger, Lisa Zunshine, Katja Mellman, Lalita Pandit Hogan, Klarina Priborkin, Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Ellen Spolsky, and Richard Walsh. Among the works analyzed are plays by Samuel Beckett, novels by Maxine Hong Kingston, music compositions by Igor Stravinsky, art by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, and films by Michael Haneke. Each of the essays shows in a systematic, clear, and precise way how music, art, literature, and film work in and of themselves and also how they are interconnected. Finally, while each of the essays is unique in style and methodological approach, together they show the way toward a unified knowledge of artistic creativity.

The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical issues. How does narrative both inform and limit the way we think today? From conspiracy theories and social media movements to racial politics and climate change future scenarios, the reach is broad. This volume is distinctive for addressing the complicated relations between the interdisciplinary narrative turn in the academy and the contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling in the public sphere. The scholars collected here explore new theories of causality, experientiality, and fictionality; challenge normative modes of storytelling; and offer polemical accounts of narrative fiction, nonfiction, and video games. Drawing upon the latest research in areas from cognitive sciences to complexity theory, the volume provides an accessible entry point for those new to the myriad applications of narrative theory and a point of departure for new scholarship.

4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) is a relatively young and thriving field of interdisciplinary research. It assumes that cognition is shaped and structured by dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and both the physical and social environments. With essays from leading scholars and researchers, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition investigates this recent paradigm. It addresses the central issues of embodied cognition by focusing on recent trends, such as Bayesian inference and predictive coding, and presenting new insights, such as the development of false belief understanding. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition also introduces new theoretical paradigms for understanding emotion and conceptualizing the interactions between cognition, language, and culture. With an entire section dedicated to the application of 4E cognition in disciplines such as psychiatry and robotics, and critical notes aimed at stimulating discussion, this Oxford handbook is the definitive guide to 4E cognition. Aimed at neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and philosophers, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in this young and thriving field.

Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures. Applying the cognitive neuroscience of categorization, emotion, figurative thinking, narrativity, self-awareness, theory of mind, and wayfinding to the study of literary works and genres from diverse historical periods and cultures, the authors argue that literary experience proceeds from, qualitatively heightens, and selectively informs and even reforms our evolved and embodied capacities for thought and feeling. This volume investigates and locates the complex intersections of cognition, literature, and history in order to advance interdisciplinary discussion and research in poetics, literary history, and cognitive science.

This handbook provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in narratology and is now available in a second, completely revised and expanded edition. Detailed individual studies by internationally renowned narratologists elucidate central terms of narratology, present a critical account of the major research positions and their historical development and indicate directions for future research.

How do readers make sense of Hemingway’s short stories? How is it possible that the camera-like quality of his narrative can appeal to our senses and arouse our emotions? How does it capture us? With reserved narrators and protagonists engaged in laconic dialogs, his texts do not seem to say much. This book consciously revisits our responses to the Hemingway story, a belated response to his invitation to discover what lies beneath the surface of his iceberg. What this pioneering critical endeavor seeks to understand is the thinking required in reading Hemingway’s short fiction. It proposes a cognitively informed model of reading which questions the resources of the reader’s imaginative powers. The cognitive demonstrations here are designed to have potentially larger implications for the short story’s general mode of knowing. Drawing from both cognitively oriented poetics and narratology in equal measure, this book explains what structures our interaction with literary texts.

This is a book about the human propensity to think about and experience the world through stories. ‘Why do we have stories?’, ‘How do stories create meaning for us?’, and ‘How is storytelling distinct from other forms of meaning-making?’ are some of the questions that this book seeks to answer. Although these and other related problems have preoccupied linguists, philosophers, sociologists, narratologists, and cognitive scientists for centuries, in Stories, Meaning, and Experience, Yanna Popova takes an original interdisciplinary approach, situating the study of stories within an enactive understanding of human cognition. Enactive approaches to consciousness and cognition foreground the role of interaction in explanations of social understanding, which includes the human practices of telling and reading stories. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centred approaches that have dominated structuralist and early cognitivist views of narrative meaning, as well as pragmatic ones that view narrative understanding as a form of linguistic implicature. The intersubjective experience that each narrative both affords and necessitates, the author argues, serves to highlight the active, yet cooperative and communal, nature of human sociality, expressed in the numerous forms of human interaction, of which storytelling is one.

Scholars of ecocriticism have long tried to articulate emotional relationships to environments. Only recently, however, have they begun to draw on the complex interdisciplinary body of research known as affect theory. Affective Ecocriticism takes as its premise that ecocritical scholarship has much to gain from the rich work on affect and emotion happening within social and cultural theory, geography, psychology, philosophy, queer theory, feminist theory, narratology, and neuroscience, among others. This vibrant and important volume imagines a more affective—and consequently more effective—ecocriticism, as well as a more environmentally attuned affect studies. These interdisciplinary essays model a range of approaches to emotion and affect in considering a variety of primary texts, including short story collections, films, poetry, curricular programs, and contentious geopolitical locales such as Canada’s Tar Sands. Several chapters deal skeptically with familiar environmentalist affects like love, hope, resilience, and optimism; others consider what are often understood as negative emotions, such as anxiety, disappointment, and homesickness—all with an eye toward reinvigorating or reconsidering their utility for the environmental humanities and environmentalism. Affective Ecocriticism offers an accessible approach to this theoretical intersection that will speak to readers across multiple disciplinary and geographic locations.

"Explores how writers and artists represent cognition in print fiction, digital fiction, and video games and what these representations tell us about our minds across media"--

Making Mind: Moral Sense and Consciousness in Philosophy, Science, and Literature posits the genesis of narrative as an adaptive function stemming from consciousness and moral sense. The book is unique with its idea of the individual character evolving narrative in relation to the group. Central to the argument is the claim that prehistorically, consciousness and moral sense intersected to form narrative. More than addressing the origin of story, the book examines and explains the evolution of narrative. The book is an interesting study of how our species-inherited moral sense can differ dramatically from one individual to another. While mores pertain to a group, narrative comes from and is processed by the individual and reaches its high point in the novel. We see how the moral sense works in characters as a monitor, and we feel it operating in us as readers in terms of approval, or not.