Abstract
This chapter considers the cognitive processing that occurs during the reading of narratives. It builds on Fludernik’s concept of ‘experientiality’ to describe the abstraction processes of both ordinary experiences and narrative reading in terms of the role the felt quality of experiences plays in information processing, rather than vice versa. This leads to a taxonomy of emergent structures in reading and ordinary experiences, including emergent qualities such as relational salience and dynamic valuation. The chapter concludes by describing the bottom-up aspects of reading narrative from these experiential building blocks.
This chapter is also published under the same title in Narrative and Cognition in Literature and Science (De Gruyter 2024).
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Notes
- 1.
As referenced earlier (Chapter 2), narratologist David Herman defines narrative as “a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change” (Herman 2009, 2). Narrative representations include several elements, including “a specific discourse context or occasion for telling […] [a process that] cues interpreters to draw inferences about a structured time-course of particularized events […] [that] […] introduce some sort of disruption or disequilibrium into a storyworld involving human or human-like agents [while] also convey[ing] the experience of living through this storyworld-in-flux, highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousnesses affected by the occurrences at issue” (Herman 2009, 14).
Herman concludes from this description that the phenomenology of narrative is crucial and connects it to the nature of cognition: “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 […] recent research on narrative bears importantly on debates concerning the nature of consciousness itself” (Herman 2009, 14).
Herman thus identifies four parameters for narrative representation. The inclusion of qualia raises questions about how a post hoc representation can include ‘going through’ the experience represented. That is, can processing ink on a page, for example, have the phenomenology of an event depicted in a narrative—say, the traumatic experience of a shipwreck?
In Herman’s view, it is ‘conveyed,’ meaning it is representation that elicits a subjective feeling that resonates with what the subject imagines being-a-bat, or some other qualia, might be like. What’s attractive, though, about narrative, is that it seems to give us the experience of ‘living-through’ a storyworld via the ‘pressure’ of events on consciousness. In other words, qualia are stimulated in the reading process (within the reader) that simulate the qualia represented.
- 2.
- 3.
Hruby et al. (2016) provide a history of theories of literacy that variously model readers.
- 4.
- 5.
Zwaan hypothesizes that event processing precedes language acquisition: “Our general hypothesis is that the mechanisms involved in situation-model construction from language are derived from the mechanisms of situation-model construction in the real world. Children first learn to understand basic events, such as the movement of a person or an object in the environment, before they learn to understand the phrases that describe these events” (Zwaan et al. 2001, p. 73).
- 6.
Refers to a heightened affective state that creates a felt sense of being in motion. Burke argues literary reading stimulates disportation, and that the existence of disportation points to the interrelatedness of affect and cognition (see Burke 2015, pp. 4–5).
- 7.
Mar notes several important caveats and grounds for future investigation, including a lack of deep understanding of how TOM and narrative comprehension are linked; the implication of the same neural network(s) in other activities, like future thinking and autobiographical memory; and a need to understand our tendency to anthropomorphize as part of understanding (Mar 2011, p. 125). For an introduction to how literary studies has approached Theory of Mind, see Zunshine (2006).
- 8.
Jacobs adopts a pragmatic approach to identifying foreground (FG) and background (BG) features, emphasizing different effects. Whereas FG elements are textual sites of significant focus and attention, BG elements facilitate a sense of immersion (Jacobs 2015a, p. 7).
- 9.
Some scholars have articulated models that fold together the linguistic and non-linguistic. For a perspective on how linguistic and embodied information contribute to word meanings, see Speed et al. (2015). Other scholars have theorized that emotion is crucial to perception. See, for example, Pessoa (2013).
- 10.
Sensemaking is a term used in a variety of contexts, but here I am referring to the version associated with Ezequial Di Paolo. This version places the individual at the center of dynamic couplings that engender meaning. However, the dominant strand of theorizations of sensemaking, associated with Weick (1995), focuses on sensemaking’s deep and inherent sociality.
- 11.
The time spent reading is also experienced by readers. In reading, readers respond affectively to the duration of reading, and to this duration’s relation to the representations drawn from the text.
- 12.
I believe the processing described here and Caracciolo’s ‘consciousness attribution’ and ‘consciousness enactment’ are mutually constitutive.
- 13.
The felt sense of ‘working through’ or working toward understanding is common to non-narrative reading as well. However, the nature of narratives contributes to a conceptual integration of the ‘working through’ into the meaning of the whole, whereas in most other reading ‘working through’ is quickly forgotten as the reader integrates concepts into a summative memory of the reading.
- 14.
By meaningful sequencing, I mean that reading a narrative requires coordinating parts by linking them in meaningful ways. Meanings, in this context, can relate to changes in entities about which the reader cares; and they can be part of larger social schema.
- 15.
See Zwaan and Radvansky (1998) for an analysis of the particulars of linear (‘iconic’) sequencing and the achronological temporal structures often found in literary texts.
- 16.
Apprehending causal history is crucial, not only to following the plot but also for extracting the kinds of meanings Currie emphasizes. That is, in processing (hearing, viewing, reading) narrative, this causal history is crucial for higher order evaluation (who is morally culpable, for example?). However, experience is inseparable from understanding causal history. And the way causal history is understood arguably involves three components: (1) selection of components (delimiting the when, the where, the what (occurs), and the who (the agents and receivers of action, not necessarily human). (Importantly, because experience is rich, this is selective—much (most?) is excluded); (2) baseline evaluations of each component; (3) evaluations of dynamics. We process for causal history through interleaved processes of selection and evaluation. This interleaving occurs within interleaved acts of perception and higher order cognition.
- 17.
Paul Ricœur (1984) describes the ongoing importance of ‘configuration’ in grasping narrative. Such juxtapositions point to how ongoing configuration can involve dramatic swings in a reader’s understanding of a text.
- 18.
Some literary theorists might argue that these structures are homologous to Theory of Mind (TOM), which is common to both narrative texts and ordinary cognitive experience. However, I believe the structure described is distinctive, and since this argument is reconcilable with the general position of TOM theorists, it does not seem worth pursuing at length.
- 19.
To illustrate this, consider the experience of reading a mystery novel. As you proceed through the work, you are weighing particular information and constructing theories that render the crime meaningful in terms of the social agents who exist within the framework of the plot.
- 20.
Armstrong notes deep similarities between music and literary reading in the sense that both involve working through experience to produce emergent meanings: “melody is not an objective entity but a developing temporal construct” (2013, p. 96).
- 21.
This folding is useful—it entails enfolded subjective and objective processes. Simply, ‘valuing’ is both objective and subjective.
- 22.
The point isn’t that the character is good or bad—the point is that the reader assigns a value (this manipulability is a signature of the role of processing).
- 23.
One opportunity of process-oriented rather than object-oriented models of cognition is that it may lead to re-examination of valuation and salience. Rather than the abstractions ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘ugly,’ ‘advantageous,’ ‘threatening,’ and the like, they highlight values based on imagined (sometimes fantasized) actions related to identity concerns.
- 24.
By exploring these dynamics, we complement the ‘top-down’ approach (where the seminal example of a narrative is a finished, communicable verbal or written text) with a bottom-up approach (where acts of narrative comprehension take center stage as the reader synthesizes and evaluates features of the narrative, ultimately developing an emergent sense of the meanings of parts or the whole). This bottom-up perspective may shed a different light upon what is at the ‘top’ (that is, the nature of ‘finished, communicable verbal or written texts’).
- 25.
To characterize the simulation in reading as ‘closed-form’ would be to repeat the errors associated with artifactual views of narrative in earlier cognition.
- 26.
This might not be consistently the case. Consider a rather ordinary example: say you’ve gotten tickets with a friend to a concert for a band you love, but you are not a ‘night person.’ The experience of the concert might be one of mixed positive and negative feelings (enjoying the music vs. fighting off sleepiness and grouchiness). In addition, though, you might experience feelings of processing the experience with an eye toward how you will recount it later, including your evaluation. This may subtly alter your experience of the concert.
- 27.
One certainly might argue that this kind of anticipation occurs in other circumstances. However, what’s distinctive about consuming artifacts is how the ‘working through’ experience is permeated by a sense of anticipating this retrospective evaluative moment, which (again) can manifest as a feeling of tracking authorial intention.
- 28.
Armstrong describes ‘gap-filling’ as a key form of cognitive processing that distinguishes reading. See Armstrong (2013, p. 84).
- 29.
There is a potential critique of this position. Say that you believe that juxtaposed perspectives in narratives have correlatives in ordinary experiences in the retrospective gathering of perspectives on a particular situation or event (the juxtaposition of perspectives in artifactual narratives sometimes works like this). Then, in situ ordinary experiences might include a mentalized juxtaposition of imagined perspectives in the mind of the subject. However, this example seems overblown: the complexity of processing a particular experience would seem to preclude this kind of mental gymnastics.
- 30.
Armstrong describes familiar/unfamiliar ‘grafting,’ while many scholars, notably Gerrig, emphasize the dynamic, ongoing deployment of schemas (Armstrong 2013, p. 72).
- 31.
The displacement creates cognitive work that results in a proto-configuration, although one might want to call the displacement itself the proto-configuration. Here the point is to assess the materials from which proto-configurations are drawn.
- 32.
Foregrounding may have important effects with regard to the reader’s self-perspective as well: Miall and Kuiken (2001) offer a “defamiliarization-reconceptualization cycle” theory, which states that when a reader encounters stylistically foregrounded language in a text, his/her schemata may be inadequate for comprehension. As a result, the feelings evoked by the text facilitate alternative perspectives which can direct and motivate readers to search for new understandings.
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Miller, B. (2023). Narrativity and Reading Narratives. In: Narrativity in Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40349-1_4
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