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2008
Flanagan, Joseph . 2008. Knowing More than We Can Tell: The Cognitive Structure of Narrative Comprehension. Partial Answers 6(2): 323-345. . Publisher's Version

This article proposes a cognitive approach to narrative that moves away from a “representational” paradigm – one concerned with exploring the fictionalized representation of conscious experience – to a conceptualist paradigm – one concerned with the functional organization of the mental structures that underlie our ability to comprehend a narrative in the first place. Stated blandly, my argument is that literary narratologists in particular need to jettison the remnants of traditional criticism that conceives of narrative in the form of a mimetic textual artifact and to adopt a method that systematically explicates the explicitly mental structures than underlie narrative comprehension. What kinds of categories, distinctions, and relations must be realized in the mind-brain in order to effect narrative comprehension? I suggest that this emphasis upon what we can characterize as the “content” of the mental structures that underlie narrative comprehension (rather the content of the narrative text) offers a paradigm for narratological research that respects the need for both disciplinary specialization and interdisciplinary collaboration.

 

June 2008: Joseph Flanagan is University Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of English at the University of Helsinki.  His current teaching and research interests include modern and contemporary literature, literary theory, alternative varieties of generative linguistics, and the cognitive sciences.     

Hyvärinen, Matti . 2008. Life as Narrative Revisited. Partial Answers 6(2): 261-277. . Publisher's Version

The article reconsiders Jerome Bruner’s famous article “Life as Narrative” (1987), and in particular its thesis about those who “become” the autobiographical narratives they are telling. Galen Strawson’s recent criticism of narrativity is used as one perspective to weigh Bruner’s thought. Autobiography is, for Bruner, a cognitive achievement, yet he challenges the understanding of narrative as simply following and imitating life. He foregrounds the ways in which life imitates narrative, and the manner in which narrative cognition precedes and organizes experience. However, the key idea about the merger of autobiographical narratives and lived life privileges autobiography vis-à-vis the continuous process of the reception of narratives. Autobiography is never the sole cognitive resource used in organizing experience. The article argues that Bruner’s later emphasis on “folk psychological,” canonical narrativity and the “breaches” of these expectations as a cause of real narratives marks a change in his thought. The function of narration is to contain, solve, or deal with the “uncanniness” of life and shattered expectations. Experience is thus, to some extent, at odds with the preceding autobiographical narratives, and thus calls for revision of the preceding narratives rather than being dominated by them.  

 

Matti Hyvärinen is a Research Director at Tampere University, Finland. He has studied the conceptual history of narrative, the narrative turns and interdisciplinary narrative theory. He is the co-editor of the volumes Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media: Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds (Routledge 2015), The Travelling Concepts of Narrative (Benjamins 2013), and Beyond Narrative Coherence (Benjamins 2010). He has published in several journals and edited volumes, including the entry on narrative genres in the Handbook of Narrative Analysis. He serves as the vice-director in the research centre Narrare, at Tampere University.

 

updated August 30, 2018

 

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Sklar, Howard . 2008. Narrative as Experience: The Pedagogical Implications of Sympathizing with Fictional Characters. Partial Answers 6(2): 481-501. . Publisher's Version

Last year, guided by theories that regard sympathy as an imaginative capacity that can bridge divisions between people of different backgrounds, I conducted an experiment with nearly 200 Finnish secondary school students, in order to determine the extent to which particular texts would generate their sympathy for characters who seem unattractive, undesirable, or generally outside of the accepted norms of the societies in which they live. The present paper builds on my findings in that study by suggesting some of the pedagogical implications of providing adolescents with opportunities to engage with the lives of fictional characters, and particularly to experience feelings of sympathy for individuals toward whom they ordinarily might feel aversion or uncertainty. It examines some of the ways in which experiences with narrative fiction can be used to help develop emotional and conceptual structures in adolescent readers. In Education and Experience John Dewey contends that “the conditions found in present experience should be used as sources of problems”; indeed, the present paper shows how narrative experience can help form the basis for a problem-solving, emotionally-rich curriculum that takes as its primary aim the development of students’ capacities for emotional awareness and ethical reflection.

 

June 2008: Howard Sklar is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The working title for his dissertation is The Art of Sympathy: Forms of Moral and Emotional Persuasion in Fiction.  His essay “Believable Fictions: The Moral Implications of Story-Based Emotions” appeared in the collection Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice (Helsinki University Press, 2005). His essay on the structure of sympathy in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath will appear in Dialogue: The Grapes of Wrath (Rodopi 2009). Sklar recently taught “Fiction, Ethics and the Significance of Reading,” a course offered through the departments of English, Aesthetics and Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki.  In addition to his university-related work, Sklar teaches English in the public schools of Espoo, Finland.  He has been a secondary-school English teacher, in the United States or in Finland, since 1987. He can be reached at howard.sklar@helsinki.fi.

 

Herman, David . 2008. Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance. Partial Answers 6(2): 233-260. . Publisher's Version

Drawing on treatments of the problem of intentionality in fields encompassed by the umbrella discipline of cognitive science, including language theory, psychology, and the philosophy of mind, this paper explores issues underlying recent debates about the role of intentions in narrative contexts. To avoid entering the debate on the terms set by anti-intentionalists, my analysis shifts the focus away from questions about the boundary for legitimate ascriptions of communicative intention, the tipping-point where those ascriptions become illicit projections of readerly intuitions onto an imagined authorial consciousness. Instead, I propose a two-part strategy for examining how storytelling practices are bound up with inferences about intention. The first part uses Hemingway’s 1927 short story “Hills Like White Elephants” to argue that narrative interpretation requires adopting the heuristic strategy that Daniel Dennett has characterized as “the intentional stance.” In other words, it makes sense to assume that stories like Hemingway’s are told for particular reasons, in the service of communicative goals about which interpreters are justified in framing at least provisional hypotheses. This first part of my analysis is tantamount to grounding stories in intentional systems. The second part, which draws on work on folk psychology (and research in the philosophy of mind more generally), describes narrative as a means by which humans learn to take up the intentional stance in the first place, and later practice using it in the safe zone afforded by storyworlds. This part of my analysis involves grounding intentional systems in stories. Here I argue that narrative constitutes in its own right a discipline for reading for intentions, a primordial basis for making the ascriptions of intentionality that lie at the heart of folk psychology, or everyday reasoning concerning one’s own and others' minds.

 

June 2008: David Herman teaches in the Department of English at Ohio State University, where he currently serves as Director of Project Narrative (http://projectnarrative.osu.edu), a new interdisciplinary initiative designed to promote state-of-the-art research and teaching in the area of narrative studies. The editor of the Frontiers of Narrative book series and also of the new journal Storyworlds, he is the author, editor, or coeditor of eight books on narrative and narrative theory, including Universal Grammar and Narrative Form (1995), Narratologies (1999), Story Logic  (2002), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (2003), the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (coedited with Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 2005), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative (2007), and Basic Elements of Narrative (in press).

 

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Mikkonen, Kai . 2008. Presenting Minds in Graphic Narratives. Partial Answers 6(2): 301-321. . Publisher's Version

The paper deals with the presentation of minds in the mixed media environment of graphic narratives, inspired by the notion of narrative experientiality as it is defined in recent narratology. Focusing specifically on three interrelated medium-specific issues, it examines the way graphic narratives can also be said to stimulate the viewer’sengagement with the minds of characters and narrators: the mimetic aspect of the graphic image; the problem of the narrative agent; and the interaction between visual focalization, verbal focalization and verbal narration. Graphic narratives pose a challenge to common narratological analytical categories concerning narratorial authority, enunciation and control in that they display diverse and shifting relationships between verbal narration and visual presentations. The analysis of the graphic means of thought and mind presentation aims to illuminate some of the challenges that narrative theory meets in its transmedial extension. The main examples include first-person autobiographical narratives as well as third-person historical fiction that uses various focalizers and “behaviorist” graphic narratives that are structured around dialogue and action.

 

June 2008: Kai Mikkonen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki. His current research and teaching interests include travel writing, graphic novels, and narrative theory. He is the author of Kuva ja sana (Image and Word; Gaudeamus, 2005); The Plot Machine: the French Novel and the Bachelor Machines in the Electric Years 1880--1914 (Rodopi, 2001) and The Writer’s Metamorphosis: Tropes of Literary Reflection and Revision (Tampere University Press, 1997) as well as of articles in periodicals such as Style, Narrative, Word & Image, Marvels & Tales, and European Review.

 

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Karttunen, Laura . 2008. A Sociostylistic Perspective on Negatives and the Disnarrated: Lahiri, Roy, Rushdie. Partial Answers 6(2): 419-441. . Publisher's Version

The “disnarrated” (Gerald Prince) means textual elements that consider (in a negative or hypothetical mode) what did not happen but could have. The scope of the term is inconveniently wide at present, ranging from explicit denials to lengthy passages of imagined or otherwise hypothetical events. This essay seeks to clarify the concept by relating it to the pragmatic and rhetorical functions of negatives in language and literature.

A statement of what could have happened but did not may often be rephrased as what should have happened but did not. Negatives reveal what is expected in a given situation and of a particular person or ethnic group. They thus render social and literary norms visible and subject to resistance, which makes them valuable for feminist and postcolonial criticism. Negatives do not record a neutrally observable reality but must be attributable to a narrative agent with her own set of cultural and individual norms. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s bicultural story “Interpreter of Maladies”, the descriptive focus inhering in (negative) phrases sometimes conflicts with the focalization indicated by contextual cues.

Salman Rushdie frequently evokes the voice of local gossips but renders their narrative hypothetical by using negatives. This may be regarded as one way of standardizing the expectations of a multicultural readership. Both Rushdie and Arundhati Roy invite the reader to make certain kinds of inferences concerning the events only to disappoint them by switching to disnarration at a climactic juncture. In making the reader conscious of the cultural stereotypes guiding her inferencing, negatives and the disnarrated serve ethical and political ends. They direct the reader’s attention to the discursive context of the text, urging her to read metonymically.

 

 

June 2008: Laura Karttunen is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her dissertation will be a sociostylistic and socionarratological study of the fiction of Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, and other Indian writers. She recently published an article on scapegoating in The God of Small Things in Taide ja taudit [Art and Illness, 2007], which she co-edited. She has also written (in Finnish) on David Sedaris’s humor.

 

Mildorf, Jarmila . 2008. Thought Presentation and Constructed Dialogue in Oral Stories: Limits and Possibilities of a Cross-Disciplinary Narratology. Partial Answers 6(2): 279-300. . Publisher's Version

The disciplinary rapprochement between various disciplines across the arts and social sciences that have had an interest in narrative forms and functions has been slow and is still far from being completed. An area which has not been extensively covered yet is the question whether certain forms of third-person consciousness, i.e. the representation of the consciousness of a third party, are at all possible in oral narratives. One mode of depicting third-person consciousness in literary narratives is free indirect discourse (FID), which is commonly viewed as a dual-voiced narrative technique that entails both a reference to the thinking subject and to the narrating instance. The evaluation of FID as a literary narrative technique that is deemed less possible in oral stories results from the attribution of qualities of fictionality and factuality to the respective narrative genres and modes, whereas claims of truth-commitment and sincerity are made for spoken language. This paper discusses the methodological implications of FID for a cross-disciplinary narratology by looking at oral narratives from a sample of illness narratives on the UK’s DIPEx website. While FID can hardly be found in the spoken data, third-person consciousness is still made possible through the use of hypothesizing discourse markers and through devices such as constructed dialogue, which can be used to ascribe thoughts and feelings to other people in an indirect way. The paper demonstrates how third-person consciousness is used by speakers to come to terms with the motives behind other people’s actions. On a more abstract level, the paper explores the limits of a cross-disciplinary narratology when it comes to rigid methodological frameworks while at the same time arguing for a re-conceptualization of defining criteria such as fictionality and truth-commitment that allows for more flexibility.

 

Jarmila Mildorf received her PhD in sociolinguistics from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and is now a Senior Lecturer of English language and literature at the University of Paderborn (Germany). She is the author of Storying Domestic Violence (2007) and has co-edited six collections of essays: Imaginary Dialogues in English: Explorations of a Literary Form (2012), The Writing Cure: Literature and Medicine in Context (2013), Magic, Science, Technology, and Literature (2nd ed. 2014), Imaginary Dialogues in American Literature and Philosophy (2014), Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative (2016) and Dialogue across Media (2016). She was also a guest co-editor of a special issue on Narrative: Knowing, Living, Telling (Partial Answers 6.2). Her research interests are dialogue studies, conversational storytelling, second-person narration, the medical humanities, and radio drama.

updated in January 2019

 

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Korhonen, Kuisma . 2008. Towards a Post-Levinasian Approach to Narrativity: Facing Baudelaire's "Eyes of the Poor". Partial Answers 6(2): 459-480. . Publisher's Version

In spite of Emmanuel Levinas’s famous criticism of narratives as artistic representations, the essay argues that we should construct a “post-Levinasian” approach to narrativity that would both respect the ethical priority of the Other, and go beyond Levinas by taking into account narrative techniques, as well as the historical and political contexts. As an example, the essay analyzes different encounters that take place in Baudelaire’s prose poem “The Eyes of the Poor.” In the narrator’s inevitable failure of reading the face of the Other we can perhaps hear the singular way in which, to quote Levinas, “across all literature the human face speaks -- or stammers, or gives itself a countenance, or struggles with its caricature.”

 

June 2008: Kuisma Korhonen is currently a docent of Comparative Literature and a research fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter from Plato and Montaigne to Levinas and Derrida (Humanity Books, 2006), and numerous essays, in Finnish, English, and French, on literature and philosophy. He is also the editor of Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History / Literature Debate (Rodopi, 2006), the guest-editor of the special issue Layers of the Past: Life, Death, Memory of the e-journal Protocols: History and Theory (7, 2008), and co-editor of Chiasmatic Encounters: Art, Ethics, Politics (Lexington Books, forthcoming).Starting with August 2008, he will be a professor of Literature at the University of Oulu, Finland.