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"Cognitive Alternatives to Interiority"
- Author(s):
- Lisa Zunshine (see profile)
- Date:
- 2012
- Group(s):
- LLC Late-18th-Century English, LLC Restoration and Early-18th-Century English, TC Cognitive and Affect Studies, TM Literary Criticism, TM The Teaching of Literature
- Subject(s):
- Culture--Study and teaching, English literature, Literature and history, Literature--Study and teaching
- Item Type:
- Book chapter
- Tag(s):
- Fantomina, Gulliver's Travels, The Female Quixote, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Cultural studies, History and literature, Literary theory, Teaching of literature
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6KK6J
- Abstract:
- [from pp. 151-52:] "Not only do we ourselves treat fictional characters as if they were capable of a broad variety of mental states (as real people are) to make sense of the story when we first read it; not only do we casually refer to these characters’ and the author’s mental states in our subsequent discussions with students; not only do we introduce more “people” into our conversation, such as Freud, Derrida, and Marx, and talk about them as if we know what they would think about the text; but we also cannot produce a single interpretation of the text without constructing ever more elaborate and/or surprising attributions of thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Every single one of our exegeses involves attribution and interpretation of mental states, and none of our classroom conversations or scholarly publications would be practicable if we had to stop every minute and issue a disclaimer to the effect that we seem to be talking about real minds but we are really talking about fictional constructs. What all this adds up to is that the cognitive perspective on fictional interiorities commits us, more than any other theoretical perspective, to historicizing."
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Book chapter
- Status:
- Published
- License:
- Attribution
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