Narrativity and enaction: the social nature of literary narrative understanding

Stories, Meaning, and Experience: Narrativity and Enaction

2015

Stories, Meaning, and Experience: Narrativity and Enaction is a recent addition to the series of Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics. Admittedly, some chapters of this volume, as the author has pointed out, have been already published in academic journals or books, such as Frontiers in Psychology (2014) and Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, edited by E. Semino and J. Culpeper (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002). As the title indicates, this volume adopts a cross-discipline approach, which is grounded in psychology, philosophy, narratology, embodied cognitive science, and linguistics in order to address complicated issues in literary fiction. Traditionally, structural narratology defines narrativity as "a property of specific types of text" (p. 26) (i.e., static structure), assuming that language is autonomous; while functional narratology regards narrativity as "a property of the specific psychological functions achieved through and by those texts" (p. 26). However, the aforementioned two approaches study minds (those of narrators' or readers') in isolation. What's the strength of this volume? In this book, Popova presents a comparatively more comprehensive understanding of narrativity, which is a dynamic process, taking a cross-disciplinary approach. Here, the term "enaction" seems attractive to me. Stewart, Gapenne, and Di Paolo (2010) regards "enaction" as a new approach to cognitive science, arguing that cognition is based on the scensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. Within the paradigm of enactive social cognition, the author provides fresh insights into the understanding of literary metaphor, attaching attention to perception of causality, joint sense-making (intersubjectivity), and metaphoric functions in literary narrative. Indeed, Popova attempts to examine the close connection between narrativity (the nature of narrative organization) and figurality (figurative structures) in literary texts. In addition to an introduction and an afterword, Stories, Meaning, and Experience: Narrativity and Enaction is divided into two parts. In part one (chapters 1-3), Popova has a theoretical discussion on the issues of narrativity, including dynamic causality and intersubjective sensemaking, both of which are fundamentally important to narrative understanding and interpretation. In this part, the investigation of narrativity is extended into the imaginary world, demonstrating that metaphor plays narrative roles in literary stories. In part two (chapters 4-6), Popova puts her theoretical framework into application through the case studies of literary texts, namely, Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and two tales of Henry James (THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET and THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE), revealing emotional responses in literary fiction. What's more, every chapter is supplemented with very detailed and useful notes for reference (e.g., a reader will be directed to consult "intentionality" in Gibbs [1999] at great length). Overall, this volume is coherently structured through a good combined use of theory and practice. Meanwhile, it is logically organized by deploying theoretical foundation, theoretical framework, analytical model, and case studies. All that Popova has done makes this volume reader-friendly. If more empirical data in literary narrative were collected, the theoretical claims by Popova would have been more convincing. Anyway, the author suggests future possibilities in the empirical study of literature. Chapter one, with the title "Perceptual Causality and Narrative Causality," carries out an exploration of narrativity, focusing on causal connectivity, which can be perceived directly by the human mind in a dynamic process. In this chapter, Popova discusses the developing process of the notion of narrative causality on the basis of the experimental work of Belgian experimental psychologist Albert Michotte (1963) on the perception of causality. This chapter proceeds in four steps. First, Popova aims to explain the relation between the notion of perceptual causality and

Stories, Meaning, and Experience: Narrativity and Enactionby Yanna B. Popova

Metaphor and Symbol, 2017

Narrative, Meaning, Interpretation: An Enactivist Approach

After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment, the new wave in cognitive science known as "enactivism" has turned to higher-level cognition, in an attempt to prove that even socioculturally mediated meaning-making processes can be accounted for in enactivist terms. My article tries to bolster this case by focusing on how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them. First, it builds on the idea that narrative plays a key role in expressing the values held by a society, in order to argue that the interpretation of stories cannot be understood in abstraction from the Background of storytelling in which we are always already involved. Second, it presents interpretation as an example of what Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher (2010) have called in their recent enactivist manifesto a "joint process of sense-making": just like in face-to-face interaction, the recipient of the story collaborates with the authorial point of view, generating meaning. Third, it traces the meaning brought into the world by interpretation to the activation and, potentially, the restructuring of the Background of the recipients of the story.

Understanding as Transformative Activity: Radicalizing Neo-Cognitivism for Literary Narratives

Philosophia, 2023

Mikkonen's new book and his emphasis on understanding should be regarded as an important contribution to the contemporary debate on the cognitive value of literary narratives. As I shall argue, his notion of understanding can also help explain how literature is existentially valuable. In so doing, his account can support a radicalized contemporary neo-cognitivism according to which literature can affect us existentially and lead to a personal transformation.

Temporality of sense-making in narrative interactions

Cognitive Semiotics, 2018

Human experience is inherently temporal and involves placing events, symbols, and actions in a temporal scheme. This article deals with a specific aspect of temporal experience as it relates to reading and experiencing narrative fiction. Within an enactive understanding of human cognition, we propose a view of literary reading as a process of participatory sense-making between a reader and a storyteller. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making maintains that agents, by enacting their own sense-making, directly and partially constitute the sense-making of other agents. Sense-makers in interaction navigate two orders of normativity: their own and that of the interaction itself. Linguistic sense-making (languaging) opens up further possibilities for understanding complex spatially and temporally distributed forms of social interactions such as narrative interactions. Reading a narrative is one such example of mutually constituted navigation between an interaction dynamic and ...

Stories, Meaning, Experience: Narrativity and Enaction by Yanna B. Popova

What is it like to read a novel? What exactly happens-to time, to thought, to one's neck and shoulders-when dizzily devouring a popular ebook on a trans-atlantic flight? Is there an explanation for the quiet, compelling satisfaction of returning to the world of a book you reread every couple of years-a world that you didn't write, but surely know better than anyone-a world that any film adaptation would at best transform, at worst deface, but never match? These simple questions may seem to belong neatly to the territory of literary studies, yet they seek an account for a domain of human experience that is as complex as it is common.

Once upon a Tale: On the Foundational Role of Narrative in Constructing Linguistic and Social Experience

2014

AbstractThis paper illustrates the importance of narrativity as a cognitive and linguistic procedure, and the role of storytelling as a social practice. After examining the structural analogy between the "story frame" and our ways of organizing, representing and understanding the world, it argues for the crucial contribution narrativity gives to our experience of being human. It then analyzes the role played by natural languages as the main semiotic system through which this narrative modality is expressed, and retraces the paths along which meanings emerge as the result of recursive linguistic practices in a shared environment. Being narratively and socially constructed, we will further point out, words and meanings only make sense within a relational frame, and the practice of storytelling itself becomes a privileged way to share them in a certain - necessarily local - cultural context. Both as a received competence and an interactional skill storytelling, we will conclu...

Mediation and dynamics in the experience of narrative fiction

2015

This interdisciplinary thesis, an exercise in post-classical narratology that draws on “second-generation” cognitive science, phenomenology and semiotics, argues for mediation and dynamics as the basis of the experience of reading narrative fiction. Chapter One, “Narrative Mediation”, presents the case for seeing the primary form of narrative signification as being a triadic mediation (as opposed to a dyadic “communication”) involving not just the parties to the communication but also their joint attention on (and intentions towards) the object of their communication. The narratological implications of this triadic view (which draws on recent discussions in developmental and evolutionary psychology) are explored through readings of the Decameron and Don Quixote, and through a discussion of the semiotics of “character” in fiction. Chapter Two, “Narrative Contexture”, draws out the functionalist implications of this view of narrative language, arguing that the interaction of reader an...

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