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1 Human beings have a passion for plots. Stories are shared in every society, in every age, and in every social context, from intimate personal interactions to impersonal social gatherings. This passion for plots is bound up with the passion of plots, the ways in which stories manifest feelings on the part of authors and characters, as well as the passion from plots, the ways stories provoke feelings in readers or listeners. Less obviously, but no less importantly, the structure of stories and even the definition of the constituents of stories are inseparable from passion as well. The goal of this book is to explore this last aspect of passion and plots—the ways in which, so to speak, emotions make stories. Over the last two decades, there has been an enormous increase in attention to emotion as a crucial aspect of human thought and action. This attention has spanned a range of disciplines, prominently including the fields gathered together under the rubric of cognitive science—thus parts of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, and so on. Narratology has perhaps been the area of literary study most closely connected with cognitive science. However, current research on emotion has had only limited impact on narrative theory. Of course, everyone recognizes that emotion is important in stories, and theorists of narrative usually have some place for emotion in their work. However, narratological treatments of emotion have on the whole been relatively undeveloped, at least in comparison with other aspects of narrative theory. Given recent advances in research on emotion, it seems clear that any theory of narrative would benefit from a more fully elaborated treatment of emotion based on this research. In the following pages, however, I develop a stronger claim. Specifically, my contention is that story structures are fundamentally shaped and oriented by our emotion systems. Of course, other neurocognitive systems play a role in the production and reception of narrative—perceptual systems, long-term and working Introduction A Passion for Plot 2 Introduction memory systems, language systems. But in the view developed here, the distinctive aspects of stories are to a great extent the product of emotion systems. The point holds most obviously for goals that define the large trajectories of action in stories. That may seem straightforward. But in fact it is not intuitively obvious just what emotion systems there are and just how they generate goals, in combination or separately. For example, it may seem that the system for sexual desire readily generates narratives.1 Narratives based on purely sexual goal pursuit—romantic love without attachment—do occur cross-culturally. But they are impoverished in development, thus rarer than one might anticipate, for specifiable emotional reasons (as we discuss in chapter 4). As this suggests, emotion systems govern not only goals but also the ways in which stories are developed, what sorts of things protagonists do or encounter, how trajectories of goal pursuit are initiated, what counts as a resolution, and so on. In consequence, emotion systems define the standard features of all stories, as well as cross-culturally recurring clusters of features in universal genres (romantic, heroic, and so on). Beyond—or perhaps below—these larger structures, the determination of story organization by emotion systems goes all the way down to the level of events and incidents, pervading the way in which we make causal attributions. Far from being straightforward, this is highly counterintuitive, given our usual folk theories of emotion. As all this indicates, in order to formulate a systematic theoretical account of stories, we need to turn first of all to affective neuroscience and related fields of study. Before going on, it is valuable to get a preliminary sense of what is involved in emotion—what emotion is, how it operates, and so on. I therefore briefly sketch an outline of emotion, anticipating the fuller development found in chapter 1. I then turn to the place of emotion in narrative theory, in order to present some context for the present work. After this, I outline the chapter structure of the book. In the course of the following chapters, I often consider ideology as an important factor in both emotion and narrative. In order to orient the reader somewhat with respect to this aspect, I conclude this introduction with some comments on ideology. Some Preliminary Notes on Emotion The most basic elements of an emotional experience are the following. First, there are eliciting conditions. These are the situations, occurrences, [18.191.239.123] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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