We define our conscious experience by constructing narratives about ourselves and the people with whom we interact. Narrative pervades our lives--conscious experience is not merely linked to the number and variety of personal stories we construct with each other within a cultural frame, but is subsumed by them. The claim, however, that narrative constructions are essential to conscious experience is not useful or informative unless we can also begin to provide a distinct, organized, and empirically consistent explanation for narrative in relation to consciousness. Understanding the role of narrative in determining individual and collective consciousness has been elusive from within traditional academic frameworks. This volume argues that addressing so broad and complex a problem requires an examination from outside our insular disciplinary framework. Such an open examination would be informed by the inquiries and approaches of multiple disciplines. Recognition of the different approaches to examining personal stories will allow for the coordination of how narrative seems (its phenomenology), with what mental labor it does (its psychology), and how it is realized (its neurobiology). Only by overcoming the boundaries erected by multiple theoretical and discursive traditions can we begin to comprehend the nature and function of narrative in consciousness. Narrative and Consciousness brings together essays by exceptional scholars and scientists in the disciplines of literary theory, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how stories are constructed, how stories structure lived experience, and how stories are rooted in material reality (the human body). The specific topics addressed include narrative in the development of conscious awareness; autobiographical narrative, fiction and the construction of self; trauma and narrative disruptions; narrative, memory and identity; and the physiological and neural substrate of narrative. It is the editors' hope that the multidisciplinary nature of this collection will challenge the reader to move beyond disciplinary confines and toward a coherent interdisciplinary dialogue.DOWNLOAD http://tiny.cc/7RxEoP https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/Narrative-and-Consciousness-Literature-Psychology-and-the-Brain/id448397860
In an effort to make sense of our existence, we narratize our lives and live the narratives that result. Narratives are not only told purposefully as stories to ourselves and our acquaintances, but are also embedded unintentionally in many of our daily conversations. Our narratives serve to temporally sequence the events in our lives, coordinate people, actions, objects, and places, provide perspective, and convey meaning to our experiences. We use narratives to guide future actions, to communicate with others and develop relationships, and to fit our lives into a cultural frame within which we come to know and reaffirm who we are. We evaluate our lives by judging our stories, using as standards the narratives we were offered as models, whether they be the life narratives of others, fairy tales and folklore, fictional works of literature or film, or other story sources. Thus, narratives are both deeply personal subjective constructions and highly public objective transactions. Satisfaction with our narratized lives depends on our level of satisfaction with how we are able to make real events conform to our narrative structural expectations, expectations based on these received models. Sometimes the models that are available to us do not allow us a means to integrate life and narrative and the story breaks down; the extranarrative intrudes and disrupts our sense of control, continuity, and stability.All the articles in this issue concern broken or problematic narratives. Two of the four articles examine factors that can contribute to the collapse of the narrative, and two deal with means of recovery from disrupted narratives. Using Samuel Beckett's late prose fiction as a Received
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