Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Herman's Project (intro): theorists of narrative have something to…

- - - - interplay between dimensions accounts for the structure as well as the functions and overall impact of the storyworld at issue
- - - - Mode - semiotic channesl that can be viweed for designing expredssions within a partiuclar type of discourc e, which will in turn be embedded in a spoecific kind of communicative interaction.
      - media can be viewed as a means for producing and distributing the expressive designes at issue.
- - - - claiming that processes of primary intersubjectivity lend themselves to narrativization ex post facto is very different than claiming that they depend on or are grounded in storytelling practices.
        
        importance of making a careful estimate of the explanatory scope of narrative vis-a-vis the minds of persons - claims about the power of (acts of) storytelling to scaffold person-level experiences should not be overextended.
    - - rather than describing those capacities as the result of narrative-enabled models of sense making, it seems more plausible to characterize the ability to accommodate multiple perspectives as part of a larger constellation of cognitive abilities that make stories possible (however, Nelson 2006)
    - - The experimental self that is capable of having experiences that are characterized by first-person givenness (see also Damasio) must be regarded as a prelinguistic presupposition for any narrative practice. Only a being with a first-person perspective could consider her own aims, ideals and aspirations as her own and tell a story about them (Zahavi 2007)
- - - - Interpretive power of stories in the domain for which they are optimally calibrated--namely, the domain of persons and person-level phenomena.
- - - - stance 1: physical stance (interpreter determines physical constitution of object and then uses knowledge of phsycis to predict outcome for any action involoving the object)
        
        stance 2: design stance (ignore physical constitituion and base explanations on how one assumes it was designed to perform)
        
        stance 3: intentional stance (object's behaviort is predicted as a rational agent, you determine what beliefes it ought to have given it's place in world and purpose - fraught with assumptions)
      - Herman's reframing: the intentional stance is not a default orientation when it comes to making sense of the conduct of others, but it is indeed a prodcutive and perhaps optimal stance to adopt when pre-or non-conceptual ways of engaging the world are derailed or cannot get off the ground and more deliberatiive, reasoned strategies or parsing out reasons for action are required.
      - Baker's competing view from Denett's: even if persons are constituted by material particles, that does not entail that they are reducible to such particles
        
        In this sense, the intentional stance contributes to the strategies for sense making that philosophers of mind refer to under the rubric of folk psychology
        
        at issue, then, are everyday undertandings of how thinking works, the rough-and-ready heuristics to which people resort in thinking about thinking itself.
        
        Brockmeier: folk psychology contains problematic connotations - false binary between scientific psychology and everyday undertsandings of how actions relate to reasons for acting.
- - - - post-Saussurean develops in language theory have underscored that certain features of linguistic systems can't be understood without intention (Austin, Knapp and Micaels, Ginzburg, Hopper)
      - sought to elaborate underlying code or langue of individual narrative messages - designed to focus on HOW things meant not WHAT things meant.
        
        privileging of LANGUE over PAROLE - at issue ithe way that narratives cue interpreters to engage with discourse models or storyworlds as referential targets (one assumes that a given text or discourse can be grounded in an intentional system).
        
        failed to come to grips with referential properites of narrative since reference is a communicative action performed for particular reasons thaty must be framed and parsed as such if the act itself is to suceed.
    - - inferences about communicative intentions are by their nature defeasible or potentially wrong, even as the process by which interpreters work to make sense of narrative texts is shot through with such provisional and revisable ascriptions of intention.
  - - - readers can parse the opening sentences of "Owl Creek" by assuming that Bierce intended referring expressions such as a man, the swift water, his executioners, and the Federal army...to be anchored in the storyworld rather than Bierce's environment while writing or that of the readers currently reading it.
      - readers construe past-tense verbs as cues to situaate the action prior to current moment of narration
      - intentional stance also accounts for global differences in how story recipients orient to narrative worlds anchored in different discourse genres. - orienting to the text in an appropriate manner requires making a determination of the category to which Bierce intended it to be assigned.
  - - - ex: scene-setting modes of exposition can be linked to the teller's attempt to get his or her bearings in the world in question in a way that parallels or emulates the reader's own navigational efforts. Conversely, the more such scene-setting methods figure in a narrative, the more readers will be inclined to use those textual affordances to construct a situated perspective on the storyworld and thus ascribe to the agent of the narration the perceptual profile of a characterized teller figure.
- - - - the need to rethink anti-intentionalism of formatlist and structuralist as well as poststructuralist perspectives on stories.
      - implied reader can be viewed as elements of reaction formation casued by anti-intentionalist approacehs
        
        Wimsatt and Beardsley, Booth - restrict scope of inferences about communicative intentions by displacing them onto the mock psychology of an implied author (concedes too much to the anti-intentionalists).
      - Hermans' strategy: find the boundary for legitimate ascriptions of communicative intetnion - when interpreters map textual patterns onto who, what, where, when, how, and why dimensions fo storyworlds, they do so based on the assumptions that the patterns in question emanate from reasons (for text-producing) actions - actions performed by the person or persons who designed the narrative in question.
- - - - process of making sense of experience should be viewed as a supra- or transindividual activity distributed across groups located within particular environments for action and interaction, rather than as a wholly internal process unfolding within the minds of solitary, autonomous, and desituated cognizers (Clark, Donald, Garnier, Gautrais, Theraulaz)
      - main characters co-construct a narrative as a resource for making sense of past events - represent the formation and operation of socieites of mind in storyworlds. -
        
        text's distribution of character viewpoints on events figures the transindividual dynamics of intelligent behavior--the sociomaterial ecology of minds in action.
- - - - hallmark of system: ability to propagate experiential frames - specifically, teh experience of characters across time and space.
        
        harmonize with claims that the mind is extended, or distributed, across social and material space rather than being brain-bound (Clark)
- - - - multidimensional profile (a constellation of traits, attitudes and practices that are to some extent in tension with one another -- sets up expectations for analogously complex characterizations later in the narrative
        
        interplay between characterizing information categorizing processes = even more complicated. 1.) interpreters bring to bear on the model personas not only socially grounded, literature-based, and text-specific categories of individuals, but also the more fundamental concept of person itself - ways of engaging with persons that emerge over the course of ontogenetic development 2.) characters or model persons can be more or less amenable to categorization via available models of persons, whether those models derive from social norms, from narrative texts, or from embodied engagements with others.
- - - - no one narrative can exhaustively specifcy causal connections - so, what patterns of cuasal underspecification surface?
    - - testing limits of presuppositions
    - - range of structures for mapping out emergent spatial relationships among agents, places, and objects=--for figuring potential paths of motion, or possible routes through space.
- - - - Herman imputes to Bierce th eintention to evoke a sequence of actions and events assocaited with a fictional hangingh. (nonchronological narration)
        
        Sequence allows Bierce to elaborate an extended upward counterfactual scenario in which the split second before he dies, a character fantasizes about escaping this same fate.
        
        Character's fantasy arguable subserves Bierce's intention to portray a character prone to forms of idealization and romanticiation that can be viewed as root caues of war itself (Davidson)
      - impute to Bierce the belief that (in context of his world) character plight can be explained partly through the values and attittudes that disposed him to engage in the conduct for which he is being hanged
        
        ascribe to Bierce the intention of amplifying the shock effect of the ending.
        
        witholding the conclusion enable readers to interpret escape sequence as imaginmed world located one level down from primary storyworld (Jahn)
        
        readers must reconfigure storytelling world by assigning to the escape sequence a nonactual modal status - and the cues prompting readers to make that reassignment coincide with those inviting them to treat as real rather than imagined the far more brutal concluding scene of the narrative.