The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (review)

In spite of the hustle-bustle of our everyday lives, we still take pause to read novels, short stories, and poems; watch films, television shows, and soap operas; and/or to hear someone recount a story. Storytelling in all its shapes and sizes is probably as old as the human species and continues to perform a vital function in the quotidian experiences of people worldwide. One of the main reasons for this is that narration acts on our emotions in very particular ways, some of them so important that they have contributed to humankind's survival, evolution, and development. Indeed, emotions play such a vital role because they reinforce our capabilities to feel empathy and to learn from other persons' experiences. In The Mind and Its Stories, Patrick Colm Hogan explores the universal storytelling capacities of the human mind while focusing on emotion and showing how the biological and social components of literary narrative and of emotion are equally universal. Here, he displays once more the innovative theorizing and research that has been his mark particularly in the articles and books he has been publishing since the mid 1990s, including On Interpretation (1995); Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Literature (2000); Colonialism and Cultural Identity (2000); The Culture of Conformism (2001); Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts (2003); and the forthcoming Empire and Poetic Voice.

This list of titles points to a mind possessing an encyclopedic knowledge and a boundless curiosity for the scientific and philosophical endeavors that may shed a new light on literature, Hogan's true passion and ultimate focus. However, in The Mind and Its Stories this focus has broadened to literature as a whole, that is, literature in all its variety and richness as world literature, past and present. As a result, this book serves as a trailblazer in two domains: cognitive science and global comparative literature. Thanks to Hogan's efforts, cognitive science is now in a much better position to further explore and empirically verify the universal nature of emotions, for The Mind and Its Stories is a treasure-trove of data on emotions dug out from the literary texts and the literary forms and themes developed in historical periods from around the world. At the same time, the innovative methodology Hogan has created and applied here to analyze narrative literature on many levels—thematic, structural, stylistic—shows a new way of "doing" comparative world literature and of bringing it to bear on scientific issues.

As Hogan points out in the introduction, by now quite a few authors have linked literary study with cognitive science. But none of them has embarked on a cross-cultural study of "the relation between two crucial elements of literature and the human mind—narrative and emotion" (4). Drawing on research in psychology, linguistics, neurology, Indic literary theory, and philosophy, as well as on his own seemingly all-encompassing knowledge of literature, Hogan tackles the problem of explaining how storytelling works cross-culturally, affects and is affected by the emotions, and exhibits universal structures:: both from the point of view of the author/storyteller and the reader/audience.

Hogan inscribes his study of literary universals—which may be viewed as an "anthropology of world literature"—within "an encompassing research program in cognitive science" (7). The Mind and Its Stories comprises seven chapters plus an introduction and an afterword. In chapters 1 and 2, Hogan presents the basic principles about literary universals and literary emotion. In chapter 3, he identifies two universal narrative structures: heroic tragi-comedy and romantic tragi-comedy. He argues that these structures are central because they are prominent across unrelated cultural traditions and because they are generated from "two contextually dependent universal prototypes for happiness" (11), namely the personal prototype (romantic union) and the social prototype (social domination). In chapter 4, he discusses the presence in many heroic narratives of an "epilogue of suffering" in which the story continues beyond its expected conclusion (that...