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Jennifer Riddle Harding
A Mind Enslaved?: The Interaction of Metaphor,
Cognitive Distance, and Narrative Framing in Chesnutt’s “Dave’s Neckliss”
H. Porter Abbott
Unreadable Minds and the Captive Reader
The Pedagogy of Literature
David L. Hoover
Text-Alteration as an Interpretive Teaching Strategy:
The Case of “The Snow Man”
Review Essays
James M. Mellard
Updike Gets His Mojo Back
David Herman
Narrative and the Minds of Others
Using a cognitive approach to metaphor and narrative, Harding examines “Dave’s Neckliss,” a “conjure story” by American dialect writer Charles Chesnutt. Harding argues that the story’s figurativity, specifically the two dominant metaphors of the “ham” and the “necklace,” interact with the story’s framed narrative structure. This structure includes an inner tale of antebellum plantation life narrated by the former slave Julius, and an outer frame with a postbellum setting narrated by the plantation’s new owner, John. After a meticulous analysis of the metaphors in Julius’s inner tale, Harding shows that the closing frame presents the listeners’ failure to grasp the inner story while encouraging a cognitive distance that prompts readers to understand Julius’s metaphors and satire. Both narrators are somewhat unreliable, further motivating the readers to find their own ethical orientation. The paper provides a cognitive reading that represents a new approach to the story’s figures and frames, while clearly situating the reading within the tradition of Chesnutt scholarship.
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H. Porter Abbott.
“Unreadable Minds and the Captive Reader”
Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine, George Butte and others have been building
the case for reframing the action of novels as a busy, collective, reading
and misreading of minds. Their work at once draws on and supports the idea
that we have an evolved craving to read the minds of others and a corollary
craving for the kind of narrative action that catalyzes this reading of
minds. In this essay, I wish to supplement this research with a focus on
intentionally created fictional minds that cannot be read, either by characters
in the storyworld or readers in the actual world. Given our evolved proclivity
for mindreading, their existence is a conundrum, and understandably, we
tend to “naturalize” them by drawing on pre-existing literary forms (Jonathan
Culler) or the larger range of our “real-world experience” (Monica Fludernik).
I’ll discuss in this essay three default ways in which unreadable minds
are commonly naturalized or under-read: as an opaque type (e.g., the lunatic),
as a catalyst in another character’s drama of mindreading, and as
a symbol. I focus on unreadable minds in works by Herman Melville, Kathryn
Harrison, Alice Munro, and J. M. Coetzee—works that, I argue, cannot be
fully appreciated unless the reader avoids naturalizing or under-reading
and accepts that peculiar combination of anxiety and wonder that is aroused
by an unreadable mind. In an extension of this position, I suggest in my
treatment of Coetzee an ethics of unreadability.
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David L. Hoover.
“Text-Alteration as Interpretive Method: The Case of ‘The Snow Man’”
This article argues that alterations of a literary text can be used
as an interpretive method, and shows some results of this method as applied
to Wallace Stevens’s well-known poem “The Snow Man.” Several different
kinds of focused alteration are used to examine the structure of the poem,
to tease out the use of sound and sight in the poem, and then to investigate
the fuction and meaning of the winter season by altering it to desert summer
and then to temperate spring. These alterations reveal connections between
parts of the poem that might otherwise easily escape notice, allow us to
probe the relationship between readers and the text, and tease out some
of the larger cultural significance of weather and climate in the poem.
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James M. Mellard.
“Updike Gets His Mojo Back”
The reviewer of the collection of essay called The Cambridge Companion
to John Updike, edited by Stacey Olster, confesses that in the middle years
of the career of John Updike, he lost interest in the author’s novels for
the paradoxical reasons that he felt they were either too predictable,
seemingly too programmatic or too unpredictable, Updike pumping up a flagging
imagination with an assortment of outré forms and subjects. But
the reviewer rejoices that the predominantly fine essays in the Companion—by
scholars such as D. Quentin Miller, Sanford Pinsker, Edward Vargo, Donald
J. Greiner, and John N. Duvall—renewed his interest in the works unread,
prompted him to do much catching up, and left him wondering, more ruefully
than ever, upon Updike’s death in January of 2009 why the novelist had
never won a highly deserved Nobel Prize for Literature.
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David Herman. “Narrative
and the Minds of Others”
To account for the assumptions and inferences that readers make about
the minds of characters in narrative worlds, theorists of narrative have
adapted research by evolutionary and cognitive psychologists (among others)
suggesting that human beings’ mind-reading ability is a biological endowment,
a capacity passed down as a phylogenetic inheritance that is acquired in
ontogeny—except for people with developmental impairments such as autism.
Challenging the underlying premises of much of this research, Daniel D.
Hutto’s Folk Psychological Narratives also constitutes a challenge for
the narrative scholarship that seeks to recruit from existing accounts
of mindreading processes and abilities. Rather than focusing on ways in
which narrative interpretation entails an attempt to make sense of characters’
minds, Hutto hypothesizes that storytelling practices are a basis for being
able to make sense of minds in the first place—that is, for the ability
to formulate appropriate, well-structured inferences about people’s reasons
for acting. Yet Hutto’s approach would itself stand to benefit from a fuller
integration of ideas developed by scholars of story. More generally, traditions
of narrative research can not only recruit from but also productively inform
debates in the philosophy of mind, among other domains of cognitive science.
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