Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (review)

In his editor’s introduction to Narrative theory and the cognitive sciences, David Herman presents the collection as ‘part of what might be called a broader “narrative turn” that has been unfolding over the past several decades, with narrative becoming a central concern in a wide range of disciplinary fields and research contexts’ (4). The twelve essays that follow represent the state of the art in a growing interdisciplinary field at the interface between narratology and the cognitive sciences (see also van Peer & Chatman 2001). Herman sees this field as resulting from the confluence of three main traditions in the study of narrative: the structuralist paradigm represented by narratologists such as Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, A. J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov; the contextualist paradigm that resulted from the pioneering work on oral narratives by William Labov and his colleagues; and the cognitive paradigm developed by cognitive psychologists and artificial intelligence researchers such as David Rumelhart, Roger Schank, and Robert Abelson. Contributors to the volume include psychologists, narratologists, and cognitive scientists, who share the aim of developing an interdisciplinary approach to narrative as a pervasive textual, cognitive, and social phenomenon.

The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1 (‘Approaches to narrative and cognition’) is devoted to psychological studies of the processing of narrative texts and of the uses of narrative in therapeutic settings. Part 2 (‘Narrative as cognitive endowment’) aims to show, from different perspectives, that narrative is a fundamental cognitive tool, which human beings consistently use to make sense of their experiences. Parts 3 and 4 (respectively, ‘New directions for cognitive narratology’ and ‘Fictional minds’) contain six cutting-edge essays in the new field of cognitive narratology—an approach to the study of narrative fiction that combines concepts and analytical frameworks from narratology with insights from the cognitive sciences. While Part 3 is more general in scope, Part 4 focuses specifically on the study of fictional minds in narrative prose (for similar cognitive approaches to the study of literature, see Stockwell 2002, Semino & Culpeper 2002, and Gavins & Steen 2003).

As Herman suggests in the introduction, the twelve essays can also be grouped into two main strands of research, which partly cut across the volume’s four parts: some of the contributions approach stories as tools for sense-making, while the rest are primarily concerned with how we make sense of stories in comprehension. In order to provide a brief overview of the volume, I consider each of these two strands in turn.

In Herman’s own contribution (Ch. 7), narrative is presented as a ‘domain-general’ cognitive tool, which contributes to understanding and problem-solving in many different types of activities, from literary text processing to the production of testimonies in court. According to Herman, narratives enable us to ‘chunk’ experience into manageable units, establish causal relations between events, manage the relationship between ‘typical’ tendencies and ‘atypical’ events, establish orderly sequences of actions, and manage the different perspectives of different individuals in the joint construction of knowledge and world views. In Ch. 5, Mark Turner provides an account of the ubiquity and flexibility of narratives within the theory of ‘conceptual integration’ or ‘blending’ (see Fauconnier & Turner 2002). Turner focuses particularly on the human ability to integrate elements from two different (and often mutually incompatible) stories into a single meaningful narrative (a ‘double-scope story’) and demonstrates the pervasiveness of this phenomenon from children’s imagination through myth and religion to literary narratives. Turner views double-scope stories as a defining characteristic of ‘cognitively modern’ human beings (120) and argues that these stories have the crucial cognitive function of reducing abstract and complex scenarios to ‘human scale’ (129).

Three further contributions aim to demonstrate the centrality of narrative as cognitive tools in specific contexts. In Ch. 6, H. Porter Abbott puts forward the intriguing argument that Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection has failed to gain general acceptance largely because, unlike...