Information about the Ohio State
University Workshop on Cognitive Narratology
(with Porter Abbott and Alan
Palmer)
Welcome! This page contains links to
the papers that will form the basis of the workshop on cognitive
narratology that will take place at 4:00 p.m. at the Knight House (104
E. 15th Avenue) on Monday, November 5, 2007, and that will be
co-sponsored by Project Narrative and the Working Group on Narrative and
Cognitive Theory.
Papers by Alan Palmer and Porter
Abbott will provide the basis for this workshop, and anyone planning to
attend is encouraged to download these papers and read them in advance,
since the panelists will not be presenting the papers in their entirety
during the session itself. Rather, this will be a roundtable
discussion, in which Porter and Alan will each take about 12 minutes to
synopsize their main ideas and then put those ideas into dialogue with
one another. The remainder of the time will be devoted to broader
discussion among the panelists and members of the audience.
Papers can be accessed in pdf
format if you click on the titles below. If you have any problems
accessing the papers, or any questions about the workshop
itself, please contact me, David Herman, at herman.145[at]osu.edu.
- Alan Palmer (Independent
Scholar, London, UK), "Social Minds"
An
externalist perspective on the social mind stresses those aspects of
the mind that are outer, active, public, behavioral, evident, embodied,
and engaged. I will attempt to illustrate the importance of the
functioning of the social mind in the novel by analysing an example
text, Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit.
I hope to show that it is not possible to understand Little Dorrit without an
understanding of the social minds that operate within the storyworld of
that novel.
This
paper is a response to Alan Palmer's that extends the discussion of
readable minds in fiction into the domain of unreadable minds. After
separating out the issue of misreading minds in fiction, I explore two
kinds of unreadability, distinguishable by context and effect. For the
first, I draw for my examples from novels by J. M. Coetzee; for the
second, from Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (for those unfamiliar
with any of these texts, I have sought to include enough about them to
make my points clear).