How Authors' Minds Make Stories

This book explores how the creations of great authors result from the same cognitive processes as our everyday counterfactual and hypothetical imaginations.

Patrick Colm Hogan (Author)

9781107475892, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 December 2014

250 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.37 kg

"...This engaging and thoughtful written account, [however], goes beyond traditional approaches of literary criticism.... Drawing on recent work in neurophysiology, primed memories, childhood experiences, and theories of mind, Hogan makes a significant contribution to both cognitive and literary studies.... sheds light on the uniquely human mental faculty of authors to entertain counterfactual situations and render them in well-crafted, descriptively precise word.... Highly recommended..."
--R.M. Davis, emeritus, Albion College, CHOICE

This book explores how the creations of great authors result from the same operations as our everyday counterfactual and hypothetical imaginations, which cognitive scientists refer to as 'simulations'. Drawing on detailed literary analyses as well as recent research in neuroscience and related fields, Patrick Colm Hogan develops a rigorous theory of the principles governing simulation that goes beyond any existing framework. He examines the functions and mechanisms of narrative imagination, with particular attention to the role of theory of mind, and relates this analysis to narrative universals. In the course of this theoretical discussion, Hogan explores works by Austen, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Racine, Brecht, Kafka and Calvino. He pays particular attention to the principles and parameters defining an author's narrative idiolect, examining the cognitive and emotional continuities that span an individual author's body of work.

Introduction: from the universal to the particular
1. Simulation: imagining fictional worlds in Faulkner and Austen
2. Story development, literary evaluation, and the place of character
3. A narrative idiolect: Shakespeare's heroic stories
4. Principles and parameters of storytelling: the trajectory of Racine's romantic tragedies
5. Argument and metaphor in Brecht and Kafka
6. Emplotment: selection, organization, and construal in Hamlet
Afterword: if on a winter's night a narrator ….

Subject Areas: Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Philosophy of mind [HPM], Psycholinguistics [CFD]