The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory (original) (raw)

Literary theory and cognitive theory What is it about a story that holds our interest? Why do we find some stories more engaging than others? How to explain the pleasure we find as we listen to or read stories? 1 Certainly, a critical factor in any story's success is its themes: stories about love, death, and personal relationships, for example, have always caught our attention. 2 We know from experience, too, that much depends on the telling. There are some basic requirements: a story should not be longer than it need be-nor shorter; no matter how complex its plot, we expect its language to be clear and unambiguous; and we expect a certain orderliness in its telling. 3 And yet there is more to a story than this. None of these presentational attributes explains the capacity of a story to engage its audiences. Literary theory has for some time, at least from the 1970s, proposed that the reader, or the audience, has a role to play in the creation of meaning in a text. The most significant contributions in this respect have come from reader-response criticism, and the observations of scholars, such as Wolfgang Iser, who regard the audience as an active agent in a participatory relationship with the author. 4 Iser, for example, claimed that a text to some extent controls the audience's responses but that it contains 'gaps' that listeners or readers are required to fill. 5 From that same period there has been strong interest amongst cognitive psychologists in the mechanisms through which audiences engage with stories. 6 This is an area where important advances have been made. In this chapter I respond to research currently emerging from cognitive studies that throws light on the mental activities performed by audience members as they fill 'gaps' and process complex narrative: I refer here to Theory of Mind (ToM). This cognitive capacity relies on a resource of neural networks that each of us has developed from our early years, which enable us to understand our own mental states and, on the basis of this understanding, to develop intuitions about the intentions and actions of those around us, even though this information has not been formally shared. 7 This ability to 'read' the minds of others enables individuals to explain to themselves why others behave as they do, and thus supplies the link in the chain of causality that connects motivation and action. 8 Just as people rely on this function in everyday life, they rely on it also as they process the stories that they encounter, where neither all the motives of the storyteller nor all the desires and intentions of the characters within the tale