Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative

How do narratives draw on our memory capacity? How is our attention guided when we are reading a literary narrative? What kind of empathy is triggered by intercultural novels? A cast of international scholars explores these and other questions from an interdisciplinary perspective in Stories and Minds, a collection of essays that discusses cutting-edge research in the field of cognitive narrative studies. Recent findings in the philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology, among other disciplines, are integrated in fresh theoretical perspectives and illustrated with accompanying analyses of literary fiction. Pursuing such topics as narrative gaps, mental simulation in reading, theory of mind, and folk psychology, these essays address fundamental questions about the role of cognitive processes in literary narratives and in narrative comprehension. Stories and Minds reveals the rich possibilities for research along the nexus of narrative and mind. Lars Bernaerts is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University. He teaches literary theory at the Free University of Brussels. Dirk De Geest is a professor of modern Dutch literature and literary theory at the KU Leuven. Luc Herman is a professor of American literature and narrative theory at the University of Antwerp. Bart Vervaeck is a professor of Dutch literature at Ghent University. Together with Luc Herman, he is the author of Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Nebraska, 2005).