Why Medieval Literature Does Not Need the Concept of Social Minds: Exemplarity and Collective Experience

Contzen, Eva von

doi:10.1353/nar.2015.0013

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…These issues are highly relevant to a diachronic approach to narratology. As both Eva von Contzen and I have argued, much premodern narrative is less invested in character portrayal than it is plot-driven (Grethlein 2015a;2015b;2017;von Contzen 2015). The current infatuation with mind in cognitive narratology has not only emerged from a focus on modern texts, it is also in danger of occluding premodern forms of narrative that do not fit the bill.…”

Section: Experience: More Than Mindsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Even so, premodern narrative poses a powerful challenge to Palmer's claim that fictional minds provide the key to narrative in general. Ancient and medieval narratives are, by and large, far less invested in the representation of consciousness processes than Palmer's modern test cases (Grethlein 2015a;2015b;von Contzen 2015). There are of course fictional minds in premodern narrative, 7 but they hardly constitute what intrigues their readers.…”

Section: Experience: More Than Mindsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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More than Minds: Experience, Narrative, and Plot

Grethlein¹

2018

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The concept of experience did not fare well during most of the second half of the twentieth century. Poststructuralists condemned experience as belonging to metaphysics; the advocates of Critical Theory scented ideology behind it; and analytical philosophers were too busy concocting impervious definitions to care about experience. 2 By the end of the century, however, the scene had changed significantly, and the idea of experience was fully rehabilitated in academic research. Together with such ideas as presence or materiality, experience was marshalled to overcome the linguistic turn (e.g. Pickering 1997; Mersch 2002; Gumbrecht 2004; Ankersmit 2005; Runia 2006). Perhaps most importantly, experience caters to the current desire to strip down the walls of constructivism and to break free from the prison-house of language. It opens up phenomenological perspectives and resonates powerfully with the current upsurge of cognitive studies. Narrative theory has not remained unaffected by this broad trend to resuscitate the idea of experience. A pioneer in the attempt to place experience center-stage has been Monika Fludernik in her Towards a 'Natural' Narratology, published in 1996. Against traditional approaches, which consider plot to be the key of narrative, Fludernik argued that narrativity is constituted by experientiality, that is, "the quasi-mimetic evocation of 'real-life experience'" (9): "In my model there can therefore be narratives without plot, but there cannot be narratives without a human experience of some sort at some narrative level" (13). 3 The notion of experience enabled Fludernik to make a move that has profoundly changed how many of us understand narrative: a shift from formalist to cognitive approaches. Pivotal as the idea of experience is in natural narratology, its significance for narrative has, I think, not yet been fully charted out. In fact, a fresh look at the tradition of continental philosophy can show us that experience need not be pitted against plot. The history of narratology makes it obvious why Fludernik emphasized that experience can center on "mental simulations," that it can be, as she puts it, "quite uneventful" (29). Eager to move away from formalist approaches, Fludernik replaced the focus on plot with a focus on 1 I wish to thank John Pier for his comments and suggestions.

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Section: Experience: More Than Mindsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experience: More Than Mindsmentioning

confidence: 99%

More than Minds: Experience, Narrative, and Plot

Grethlein¹

2018

Partial Answers

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“…Richardson concludes that ‘we’ and ‘they’ narratives are especially useful for the textualisation of social minds as they tend to be rare and so create powerful defamiliarising effects. A more critical view is presented by von Contzen (2015) who argues that the concept of social mind as proposed by Palmer (2010) does not apply so easily to medieval literature. In medieval culture, there did not exist the same kind of ego-centrism and interior consciousness that emerges later and which gives rise to the materialisation of a social mind.…”

Section: Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In medieval culture, there did not exist the same kind of ego-centrism and interior consciousness that emerges later and which gives rise to the materialisation of a social mind. Von Contzen (2015) argues that medieval culture was action-oriented rather than mind-oriented, so she suggests that the medieval mind should be viewed as collective experientiality whereby the actions taken by individuals are then mimicked by the group. The journal Style has also devoted a series of papers to discussions on the representation of the mind in narrative, specifically to what has come to be called the theory of mind.…”

Section: Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

The year’s work in stylistics 2015

Montoro

2016

Language and Literature

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Writing the 'Year's work in stylistics' is both enlightening and humbling. It is enlightening because it enables me to learn about the varied research that people have devoted time and effort to in the past year; it is also enlightening because some of that work falls off one's most immediate stylistics research radar and, thus, it is relatively easy to be unacquainted with it. It is humbling, first, because of the sheer amount and the quality of such work; but it is also humbling because it allows you to learn about the rich crossfertilisation between disciplines which most stylistics work is characterised by. In what follows I would like to share my own enlightening and humbling experience with those readers who, like me, want to learn about the abundant and varied work in stylistics in 2015. I review publications in cognate disciplines alongside those situated in the more familiar stylistics camp, and consider how the latter draw upon and expand on the former. This inter-connection can also be seen in the way I organise the following sections, which primarily has a hermeneutic function. As will be seen, some of the work described in the computer-assisted section could also be discussed under the multimodality heading, for instance, so I highlight this cross-fertilisation as much as I can. Finally, regular readers of Language and Literature will be aware of the following remark which I am, nevertheless, drawing attention to for the sake of the newcomers to the journal: the 'References' section does not list any of the articles published in this journal so that selfcitation does not have a negative effect on our impact factor. Readers are, however, strongly encouraged to check and, of course, cite these articles in their own work fully.The famous motto 'All for one and one for all' summarises the spirit of Alexandre Dumas's main characters in The Three Musketeers. If I am allowed a daring analogy, The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics (Burke, 2014) and The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (Stockwell and Whiteley, 2014), like Athos and Porthos respectively, united their voices in 2014 to 'defend' the stylistics cause. It was about time that Aramis,

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“…77See also Grethlein (2015a), (2015b) and von Contzen (2015), who detect similar challenges to claims about fictional minds and narrative in ancient and medieval texts.…”

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confidence: 91%

Homeric Motivation and Modern Narratology: The Case of Penelope

Grethlein

2018

Camb. class. j.

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Forged mostly in readings of the modern novel, the tools of narratology have allowed us to detect many features that ancient literature shares with modern texts. At the same time, they have detracted from crucial differences between ancient and modern narratives. This article argues that, while being at the origin of the classical western plot, the Odyssey also features a narrative logic that differs significantly from what the modern novel has taught us to expect. It focuses on the case of Penelope. Various theories have been advanced to explain Penelope's intervention in books 18 and 19. The difficulties that modern scholars have had with Penelope, it is suggested, are due to a special kind of motivation which is also prominent in medieval narrative.

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Why Medieval Literature Does Not Need the Concept of Social Minds: Exemplarity and Collective Experience

Cited by 9 publications

References 10 publications

More than Minds: Experience, Narrative, and Plot

More than Minds: Experience, Narrative, and Plot

The year’s work in stylistics 2015

Homeric Motivation and Modern Narratology: The Case of Penelope

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