Session 6 Flashcards
(23 cards)
What were the learning objectives of the 6th session?
- Define and explain the theory of mind approach to cognitive narratology.
- Explain what this approach adds to our understanding of literature and literary reading.
- Apply a theory of mind approach to literary texts.
- Explain the narratives strategies allegedly used during mindreading/mentalizing.
- Explain and describe Alan Palmer’s concepts of continuing consciousness fram, embedded narrative, social mind, and intermental thought.
- Describe some limitations of a theory of mind approach.
What does the attribution of internal states refer to?
- In everyday interactions with others, we try to understand them by attributing internal states and dispositions to them.
- Consciousness allows us to adapt intelligently to our environment and we attribute this ability to others, too. (Palmer)
What does mind-reading refer to?
Lisa Zunshine points out that we continously engage in processes of mind-reading and try to explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, beliefs and desires. This is a mostly unconscious process.
What is the Darwinist argument on mind-reading?
Being able to guess the mental states of others ensures survival in a group; mind-reading as an evolutionary achievement.
What is the basic assumption of the Theory of Mind?
- It doesn’t matter whether we deal with real or fictional people. We always have a theory about other minds.
- We explain exterior observable action and behavior in terms of interiority: thoughts, feelings, beliefs, desires and so forth.
According to Zunshine, how does mind-reading affect our enjoyment of reading?
She writes, that “our enjoyment of fiction is predicated -at least in part- upon our awareness of our “trying on” mental states potentially available to us but at a given moment differing from our own.”
How does reading fiction stimulate us according to the Theory of Mind approach?
Furthermore, “by imagining the hidden mental states of fictional characters, by following the readily available representations of such states throughot the narrative, and by comparing our interpretation of what the given character must be feeling at a given moment […], we deliver a rich stimulation to the cognitive adaptations constituting our Theory of Mind.
What is the Fictional Minds approach by Palmer?
- Palmer argues that we as recipients primarily understand narratives of all kinds by trying to grasp the intentions and motivations of the represented minds (characters and narrators).
- “[…], in essence, narrative is the description of fictional mental functioning.”
Why do we read fictional narratives according to the fictional minds approach?
- It enables us to exercies our mind-reading abilities: we can use and test assumptions of the working of other people’s minds.
- We can playfully deal with and discuss the internal states of others.
- We can assume -try on- other and hitherto unknown perspectives on the world.
- We can get a sense of what it is like to experience the world as someone else.
- Empirical research shows that identifying with fictional characters significantly increases the test subject’s ability to empathize with other (real) people.
- Reader positions between perspective-taking and perspective-understanding.
What are narrative strategies that give access to fictional minds?
- Interior monologue
- Free indirect discourse (Erlebte Rede)
- Psychonarration
What is free indirect discourse?
- A scenario in which the narrator renders a character’s thoughts or feelings and this rendering remains close to the character’s own oral syntax.
- Grammatically speaking, it is reported speech or thought without an introductory verb.
What is Psychonarration?
A scenario in which the narrator uses his or her own language to tell us what a character thinks or feels.
In Palmer’s approach of fictional minds what is an internalist perspective?
An internalist perspective stresses those aspects that are inner, introspective, private, solitary, individual, psychological, mysterious and detached.
In Palmer’s approach of fictional minds what is an externalist perspective?
An externalist perspective stresses those aspects that are outer, active, public, social, behavioral, evident, embodied and engaged.
In Palmer’s approach of fictional minds what is the social mind?
Social mind describes those aspects of the whole mind that are revealed through the externalist perspective.
What is intermental thought?
- It is an important part of the social mind.
- Such thinking is joint, group, shared or otherwise collective thinking.
What is sympathy?
Feeling for someone/ a character
What is empathy?
Feeling with someone/ a character
What is identification?
Feeling as if one were someone else/ a character.
What do the terms Immersion, Transportation and Absorption refer to?
The feeling of being “inside” the fictional world.
What is identification?
The feeling as if one were in the shoes of a character.
What happens to ourselves upon identification according to Forster?
- Our own self-concept becomes temporarily more difficult to retrieve.
- But, this self-loss not only varies between people but also fluctuates over the course of exposure to the narrative.
- Narrative consumers psychologically function on two simultaneous levels - both as themselves and as the characters with whom they identify.
Why Read and Study literature?
- Literature enhances our understanding of other minds and emotions (the quality of what it‘s like)
- It provides an understanding of other times and places
- Literature is a mode of engaging with the Other
- It invites us to exercise our evaluative and ethical dispositions
- Literature urges us to examine alternatives to the status quo
- It addresses other possibilities (and even impossibilities)
- Literature has a defamiliarizing effect (i.e., takes you out of your habitual, automatic, tacit understanding of the world)
- It provides training in ideological complications
- Literature also involves aesthetic experiences, escapism, or simply
‘entertainment’ - We are interested in the way literature achieves all of the above
