Bakhtin, Theory of Mind, and Pedagogy: Cognitive Construction of Social Class

Abstract

This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogic imagination to illuminate the construction of social class in the eighteenth-century novel. It offers a close reading of selected passages from Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), made possible by combining Bakhtinian and cognitive poetics. It also discusses the theoretical ramifications of this approach and demonstrates its use in an undergraduate classroom.

Don’t Be Too Good at Reading Other People's Minds

“…When such an inversion happens in a work of fiction we may want to inquire into possible ideological commitments of its author, especially if the superior capacity for complex embedment marks a whole group of characters as more aware of their own as well as of other people's feelings and thus especially deserving of readers’ sympathy. Elsewhere, I speculate about Burney's personal history and the somewhat ambiguous social standing of her family, which may have made her invested in upholding, at least in her first novel, the biased view of tradesmen as stunted in their capacity for complex social thinking and thus harmlessly amusing to their “betters” (Zunshine, 2017).…”

Evolution in the Impact of Pro-Poor Policies on Farmers’ Confidence: Based on Age-Period-Cohort Analysis Perspective

“…Why do the poor have relatively low levels of ambition? The social cognitive theory of social stratification explains that due to chronic material poverty, the poor realize that the achievement of their goals depends heavily on external factors, and over time develop a social cognitive tendency toward contextualism [24][25][26][27]. The social cognitive orientation leads the poor to exhibit psychological and behavioral characteristics that are significantly different from those of other groups in terms of social interaction and self-perception [28,29].…”