Session 2 Flashcards
(24 cards)
What were the learning objektives for Session 2.
• Explain what defines a cognitive approach to narrative
• Explain the two questions that David Herman considers central to cognitive narratology • Explain Jerome Bruner’s proposal that we make sense of self and others narratively
• Define and explain Fludernik’s conception of ‘experientiality’, including the four-level model and process of narrativization. • Apply Fludernik’s ‘natural’ narratology to literary examples.
• Explain what is ’natural’ about natural narratives and what is meant by the naturalization of narratives.
What is cognitive narratology?
“Approaches to narrative study that fall under the heading of cognitive narratology share a focus on the mental states, capacities, and dispositions that provide grounds for – or, conversely, are grounded in – narrative experiences. This definition highlights two broad questions as centrally relevant for research on the nexus of narrative and mind:
1. How do stories across media interlock with interpreters‘ mental states and processes, thus giving rise to narrative experiences?
2. How (to what extent, in what specific ways) does narrative scaffold efforts to make sense of experience itself?”
What is the main statement made by cognitive psychologist Jerome Brunner?
“We organize our experience and memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative – stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on”
Between which two cognitive processes did Jerome Brunner differ?
- Logical (Classificatory, categorical and scientific) thinking
- Narrative thinking (Everyday common-sense reasoning about others and ourselves)
Why was Jerome Bruner so interested in Folk psychology?
Because “The organizing principle of folk psychology [is] narrative in nature rather than logical or categorical. Folk psychology is about human agents doing things on the basis of their beliefs and desires, striving for goals, meeting obstacles which they best or which best them, all of this extended over time”
What is tellability?
tellability = “canonicity and breach”: “to be worth telling, a tale must be about how an implicit canonical script has been breached, violated, or deviated from in a manner to do violence to . . . [its] ‘legitimacy’”
How can we summarize Bruners approach?
- In conversations, people will talk about things that have happened to others – in stories.
- The stories of the happenings contain reasons (an intentional state, belief, or desire) for a behaviour that deviates from what is considered as ‘normal’; the deviation from a canonical cultural pattern is made meaningful by the imputation of intentions
What does the Idea of Emplotment refer to?
Narrative emplotment can shape the diverse events and actions of life into a meaningful whole; the continuous flow of time can only be experienced through narrative configurations.
Why according to Paul Ricouer can we speak of narrative psychology?
- The narratives that provide identity can decompose in moments of crisis, leading to the experience of meaninglessness
- Therapy can help in the reconstruction of a (new) meaning-giving narrative of selfidentity
- Difference between personal and literary narratives: personal narratives are continuously adapted/modified (also: used strategically!); literary narratives promise closure and are written to be comprehended (mostly)
- There is a feedback loop between personal and literary narratives
According to Bruner’s idea of the narrative organization of experience, how is the self-concept created?
One’s self-concept is created by using and adapting plots from the stock of stories and myths that are available in one’s culture. This is based on the notion of emplotment.
What are Fluderniks Main arguments for a natural narratology?
- All narratives (no matter how strange or incomprehensible) are ultimately about human experience
- There can be no narratives without a human (or anthropomorphic, i.e., humanlike) experiencer (the conditio sine qua non for narrativity)
- Embodiment, i.e., our physical being in the world, constitutes the most basic feature of experientiality – our physical being in the world is the precondition for experiences to take place
- Everything that happens in fictional narratives has its roots in somebody’s experience of the world, situated in a specific time and space frame
What does Fludernik consider to be a natural narrative?
- She views ‘natural’ narrative as a prototype for the constitution of narrativity and argues that narrative is always ‘natural’ in the sense that it is anchored in human everyday experience
- ‘Natural’ narratives “provide a generic and typological resource for more subtly and complexly textured artefacts of creative structuration” (Fludernik 1996: 19)
- In simple terms: we know how stories in literature work because we are all storytellers and are confronted with narratives every day
What does experientiality mean for Fludernik in Comparison to Carraciolo?
What does Monika Fludernik propose in her natural narratology?
She redefines narrativity in terms of experientiality
Give the basic definition of a narrative kept in the lecture.
A prototypical narrative can be characterized as:
(i) A representation that is situated in – must be interpreted in light of – a specific discourse context or occasion for telling.
(ii) The representation, furthermore, cues interpreters to draw inferences about a structured time-course of particularized events.
(iii) In turn, these events are such that they introduce some sort of disruption or disequilibrium into a storyworld involving human or human-like agents, whether that world is presented as actual or fictional, realistic or fantastic, remembered or dreamed, etc. (iv) The representation also conveys the experience of living through this storyworld-influx, highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousnesses affected by the occurrences at issue. Thus – with one important proviso – it can be argued that narrative is centrally concerned with qualia, a term used by philosophers of mind to refer to the sense of “what it is like” for someone or something to have a particular experience.
What are natural narratives according to Labov?
natural’ narratives, i.e., oral stories of spontaneous storytelling, constitute the basis of all narratives (including complex literary forms such as modernist or postmodernist fiction)
What are natural narratives according to Labov?
natural’ narratives, i.e., oral stories of spontaneous storytelling, constitute the basis of all narratives (including complex literary forms such as modernist or postmodernist fiction)
What is the idea of natural linguistics?
- Linguistic processes are located within more general processes of cognitive comprehension, which relate to human embodiment in a ‘natural’ environment
- Higher-level cognitive categories rely on embodied schemata
Who came up with the concept of naturalization?
Jonathan Culler in th 1970s
In Culler’s idea what is naturalization?
In narratives “The strange, the formal, the fictional must be recuperated or naturalized, brought within our ken”
How does Fludernik redefine naturalization as narrativization?
Fludernik redefines naturalization as ‘narrativization’: a reading strategy that naturalizes texts by recourse to narrative schemata by narrativizing texts, we establish experientiality, and thus make any story understandable even when readers are confronted with potentially unreadable narratives, they look for ways of narrativizing them
Explain the four-level process of narrativization.
- Level I – includes the real-life script of agency as goal-oriented process as well as our understanding of time and space (what we know about being in the world)
- Level II – introduces the scripts of narrative mediation (what we know about how something can be narrated): TELLING, VIEWING, EXPERIENCING, and REFLECTING
- Level III – subsumes generic criteria and narratological concepts (what we know about the shapes in which narratives usually come)
- Level IV – narrativization, the level on which the parameters from levels I to III are utilized in order to grasp, and usually transform textual inconsistencies and oddities (what we know about how something narrated makes overall sense): “level IV constitutes an all-embracing dynamic process engendered by the reading experience”
What are the three central questions when applying natural narratology to literary examples?
- What is the central human experience that the text is trying to convey?
- Who is the anthropomorphic experiencer (characteror narrator)?
- How is the text connected to the cognitive frames and scripts on the different cognitive levels?
What are the main interests of cognitive narratology?
- relationship between what a reader ‘knows’ and the ‘information’ of the text – top-down and bottom-up processing
– strangeness and familiarity
– concepts and schemata at various levels of abstraction 2. Making sense of events in time
- order, duration, frequency
- curiosity, suspense, surprise
- mind time and clock time
- temporality and cultural schemata of time - worldmaking
- storyworlds, situation models
- fictional space - Fictional characters
- mental model construction
- embodied reactions
- experientiality and qualia
