Fictional Minds Research Articles

Our Futures in Mind Uploading: Public Perceptions and Narratives

Advances in neurotechnology have immense potential but also pose significant ethical challenges. While the public is a key stakeholder, this audience is understudied. My research uses mind uploading as an exemplar for hypothetical future neurotechnology and contributes new data to an under researched field. To encourage participants to connect with mind uploading, I designed a novel data collection tool and method - a website that tells the stories of two fictional mind uploaded characters. My results showed that while awareness of mind uploading has remained relatively static over the last few years, favourability towards the concept has significantly increased, reflected in an increasing number of people who would upload if their physical body was dying and search for meaning in this new afterlife. However, while the public could identify several benefits for mind uploading, primarily a continued connection to loved ones, they were clearly concerned how neurotechnology, particularly that which would augment our existing capabilities, might develop. Public concerns reflected those of policymakers and scientists and confirmed the need for regulation to ensure neurotechnology is not discriminatory and does not create an even greater divide between the privileged and disadvantaged.

The Face of the Future: An Affective Mental Time Traveler in Saul Bellow’s “A Father-to-Be”

ABSTRACT This article focuses on a future-oriented Janus face portrayed in Saul Bellow’s short story “A Father-to-Be,” arguing that it builds an exceptional prospective fictional mind in Bellow’s writing with a great emphasis on emotion. Drawing on the “Janus hypothesis,” the article examines how the protagonist’s emotional and imaginative mind interprets the past and processes the present based on a gloomy anticipation of the future, while some previous literary studies on the memory-imagination cognition emphasize the imaginativeness of memory. Affective narratology is largely involved as the supportive explanatory framework in the analysis of the narrative style. The authors approach the structure of the entire story by regarding it as an emotion story and attempt to reveal the aesthetic value of its core narrative by taking emotion both as the force of character forming and as rhetoric.

Collective Subjectivity of Literary Characters as Exemplified by Jorge Amado’s Marginalized Figures

The potential of the use of the concept of collective subjectivity, in literary analyses, has been partially discerned by Mario Vargas Llosa, Gérard Klein, and a group of scholars inspired by Klein’s observations (Bellagamba; Picholle; Tron, 2012). Since none of them have proposed any systematic framework, the paper theorizes the concept, proposes an analysis methodology, and presents the results of a model analysis of the collective subjectivity of Jorge Amado’s marginalized characters and its relation to the hegemonic discourses of Amado’s storyworlds and of Brazil in the 1930s, respectively. The article also presents an evaluation of the concept’s usefulness for narrative scholars. As analyzing a fictional collective subjectivity requires a custom-made framework, it has been elaborated on the basis of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (2001) Discourse Theory, Discourse-Theoretical Analysis (both alarmingly absent in literary studies), the psycho-sociological framework for real-world collective subjectivity analysis (Fabris; Puccini; Cambiaso, 2019), and narratological findings related to Possible Worlds Theory and fictional minds (Palmer, 2004). The study confirms that the use of the concept as an analytical tool can shed new light on our understanding of numerous narrative art works, especially regarding such issues as focalization, perspective, ideology, narrative empathy, unreliable narration, and consciousness representation. Moreover, the framework enables us to: 1) describe precisely the particularities of the ideological profile of a fictional collectivity and the narrator’s/implied author’s attitude towards them; 2) relate this profile to the context systematically (both to the storyworld and real-world context).

Does reading about fictional minds make us more curious about real ones?

AbstractAlthough there is a large body of research assessing whether exposure to narratives boosts social cognition immediately afterward, not much research has investigated the underlying mechanism of this putative effect. This experiment investigates the possibility that reading a narrative increases social curiosity directly afterward, which might explain the short-term boosts in social cognition reported by some others. We developed a novel measure of state social curiosity and collected data from participants (N = 222) who were randomly assigned to read an excerpt of narrative fiction or expository nonfiction. Contrary to our expectations, we found that those who read a narrative exhibited less social curiosity afterward than those who read an expository text. This result was not moderated by trait social curiosity. An exploratory analysis uncovered that the degree to which texts present readers with social targets predicted less social curiosity. Our experiment demonstrates that reading narratives, or possibly texts with social content in general, may engage and fatigue social-cognitive abilities, causing a temporary decrease in social curiosity. Such texts might also temporarily satisfy the need for social connection, temporarily reducing social curiosity. Both accounts are in line with theories describing how narratives result in better social cognition over the long term.

Fictions of the Mind: A Psychoanalytical and Cognitive Narratological Analysis of Mediacy in D.H. Lawrence’s <i>The Fox</i>

As its main goal, this study seeks to contribute to the analysis of narrative discourse by investigating the strategies and devices provided by modern prose fictions like D.H. Lawrence’s The Fox for constructing/representing fictional minds or the consciousness of fictional characters in narrative texts. The paper is structured in two sections. Drawing from the insights of both Classical and Poststructuralist narratology, the theoretical section of this paper brings together narratological theories, methods, concepts and devices for representing textual minds and consciousness: psychonarration, free indirect discourse (narrated monologue), interior monologue, stream of consciousness, focalization, reflectorization, cognitive methods, and devices of mental states. The second is the analytical section which constitutes a practical demonstration of how the above narratological methods, concepts and devices can fulfill descriptive, interpretive and analytical functions with respect to the question of how fictional minds and consciousness are represented or manifested in modern narratives. On the whole, the paper attempts to answer the question, which narratological categories and methods are relevant for the analysis of mind-related aspects of narrative discourse? For illustrative purposes, D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox is used as staging grounds.

Mind-modelling literary personas

AbstractThis article takes its cue from David Miall’s influential 2011 paper, ‘Enacting the other: towards an aesthetics of feeling in literary reading’, in Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie (eds)The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 285–298. There, Miall considers the workings of readerly empathy with fictional people. He draws on work from philosophy, psychology, cognitive poetics, and both empirical and textual analysis to explore the complexities of how real readerly minds interact with fictional minds and the minds of real but remote authors. In this article, I revisit these arguments with the benefit of recent insights into the cognition of fictional minds. The key mechanism underlying characterisation, empathy, hostility, and engagement, I argue, is mind-modelling. With its origins in Theory of Mind, but extrapolated far from that simple phenomenon, mind-modelling captures the aesthetic and ethical relationships between minds both fictional and natural. I consider literary reading as a broader ecosystem: the reading mind as being embodied, enacted, and extended to include the imagined authorial mind. In recognition of Miall’s literary critical work, I will present a particular example from the poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats – not only for the analytical demonstration but also in order to show the echoes between Romantic notions of holistic engagement with nature and recent work in cognition and literature. The analysis suggests a solution to a literary critical debate around its ending. An approach situated in mind-modelling offers a principled exploration of both fictional, poetic minds as well as authorial positioning.

The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood ed. by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso (review)

The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood ed. by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso (review)

Cognitive Narratology and the ‘4Es’

This essay demonstrates the fruitfulness of applying a lens based on 4E-inspired cognitive narratology to David Almond’s My Name is Mina ([2010] 2016) in order to illuminate how the adult author bridges the so-called ‘cognitive-affective imbalance’ between his adult self and his child character (Nikolajeva 2018). Merging recent developments in 4E – or embodied, embedded, extended and enactive – approaches to cognition as proposed in philosophy of mind, with concepts such as ‘fictional minds’ and ‘storyworlds’ as discussed in cognitive narratology, I engage in close readings of My Name is Mina that reveal ‘kinship’ between the adult author and his child character (Gubar 2013). In order to understand how Almond imagines the ‘what-it-is-likeness’ of being Mina (Nagel 1974), I work with two premises that reflect this kinship: firstly, the shared trait of adults and children being human beings; and secondly, the inherent confabulatory nature of remembering that is understood as analogous with acts of imagining in enactivist considerations of memory across the lifespan (Hutto & Myin 2017). Both adults and children are ‘memorial fabulators’ (Chambers 2001). Ultimately, I show that 4E approaches to the cognitive study of literature can enrich the field of children’s literature studies and its considerations of adult authors’ mind depictions of child characters.

Character’s mental functioning during a ‘neuro-transition’: Pragmatic failures in Flowers for Algernon

The representation of fictional minds that work in idiosyncratic ways has received significant attention in the past few decades, particularly regarding characters with some form of developmental delay or pathological disorder. The present paper attempts to investigate the mental functioning of the central character in Daniel Keyes’s widely acclaimed short-story Flowers for Algernon, which presents two versions of the same character: after being introduced as cognitively delayed and with a very low IQ, a futuristic treatment turns him into a neurotypical individual first, and into a genius later. With the unfolding of the plot, however, it soon becomes clear that the character’s mental gains are doomed to deteriorate by the end of the story, when he finds himself as cognitively delayed as he was at the beginning. By building on previous research, this paper is concerned with the effects of drastic changes in mind style in the course of the same story. More particularly, the final aim of this article is to study whether an abrupt shift in mind style may bear consequences on the character’s ability to interact with the other characters. Mental schemata and adherence/flouting of Grice’s maxims are closely investigated in the two versions of the characters, together with analyses of deictical patterns carried out by means of corpus techniques.

Dementia mind styles in contemporary narrative fiction

This article reports the findings of the first large-scale study into how dementia is depicted in the minds of fictional characters. Dementia is increasingly prevalent and, in the absence of a cure, requires better societal and cultural awareness. Literary representations offer readers the opportunity to ‘try on’ fictional minds, and better understand alternative cognitive experiences. Stylisticians have explored the ‘mind styles’ of characters with various illnesses, characteristics and behaviours, but this is the first comprehensive study of dementia mind styles, and indeed, any one syndrome. A substantial corpus of contemporary fiction depicting the internal perspectives of characters and narrators with dementia was compiled. The data is analysed qualitatively and quantitively, embracing a methodological eclecticism suited to understanding the patterns in characters’ cognitive experiences across texts. The results are presented thematically, demonstrating the enduring significance of features traditionally associated with mind style (underlexicalisation, diminished sense of cause and effect, and pragmatic difficulties), as well as a wide range of new features. These include discourse presentation, sensory descriptions and conceptualisation of the self and others. By exploring the mind styles of many characters with dementia, this research not only widens the application of the concept, but also the range of features associated with its creation and, importantly, offers a theoretical redefinition: mind style is redefined as an iconic representation of fictional cognition, offering a simulated experience for readers.

Style and Reader Response. Minds, Media, Method

Style and Reader Response. Minds, Media, Method

Developing a Choice-Based Digital Fiction for Body Image Bibliotherapy

Body dissatisfaction is so common in the western world that it has become the norm, especially among women and girls. Writing New Body Worlds is a transdisciplinary research-creation project that aims to address these issues by developing an interactive digital fiction for body image bibliotherapy. It is created with the critical co-design participation of a group of young women and non-binary individuals (aged 18–25) from diverse backgrounds, who are representative of its intended audience. This article discusses how our participant research influenced the creative development of the digital fiction, its characters and its novel ludonarrative or story-game design. It theorizes how the specific affordances of a choice-based interactive narrative, that situates the reader-player in the mind of the fictional protagonist, may lead to enhanced empathic identification and agency and, therefore, a more profoundly immersive and potentially transformative experience. This process of “diegetic enactment” is where we postulate the therapeutic value lies: an ontological oscillation between the reader-player’s mind and the fictional mind, which may induce the reader-player to reflect upon, and perhaps subtly alter, their own body image.

Minds, Mapping Minds, Mapping Minds: Reading the Complex Minds of Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker

ABSTRACT Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006) has often been praised for its psychological realism. In this article, I focus on The Echo Maker’s fictional minds to demonstrate how the novel appropriates several modernist and postmodernist themes: the instability of character, the constructed nature of the self, and a suspicion toward narrative. It does so by grounding its story in cognitive science. My approach is informed by cognitive narratology, in particular by the influential work on character identification and “theory of mind” by Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine. Theory of mind, which allows for fictional access to other minds, is an important motif in The Echo Maker, yet nothing in the novel allows for easy mind-reading – not for the characters themselves, and so also not for us readers. I argue that, rather than inviting identification, Powers’s novel narrativizes the cognitive processes by which we create meaning. I briefly refer to similar concerns in Proust, Beckett, Pynchon, and in other Powers novels along the way. The article thus: a) shows how a cognitive narratological approach to The Echo Maker subverts conventional readings of the novel, and b) identifies important continuities between Powers’s work and that of key modernists and postmodernists.

Exploring the Relationship Between Fiction Reading and Emotion Recognition.

Fiction reading experience affects emotion recognition abilities, yet the causal link remains underspecified. Current theory suggests fiction reading promotes the simulation of fictional minds, which supports emotion recognition skills. We examine the extent to which contextualized statistical experience with emotion category labels in language is associated with emotion recognition. Using corpus analyses, we demonstrate fiction texts reliably use emotion category labels in an emotive sense (e.g., cry of relief), whereas other genres often use alternative senses (e.g., hurricane relief fund). Furthermore, fiction texts were shown to be a particularly reliable source of information about complex emotions. The extent to which these patterns affect human emotion concepts was analyzed in two behavioral experiments. In experiment 1 (n = 134), experience with fiction text predicted recognition of emotions employed in an emotive sense in fiction texts. In experiment 2 (n = 387), fiction reading experience predicted emotion recognition abilities, overall. These results suggest that long-term language experience, and fiction reading, in particular, supports emotion concepts through exposure to these emotions in context.

A Review of The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities

A Review of <i>The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities</i>

The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood ed. by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso

Reviewed by: The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood ed. by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso Luke Mueller MIGUEL-ALFONSO, RICARDO, ed. The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 236 pp. $99.00 hardcover; $79.20 e-book. The story of the modernist novel usually involves an “inward turn”: against the nineteenth-century realists’ highly wrought social worlds, against their moral dilemmas and ostensibly objective descriptions, modernism (as the story goes) dramatizes private minds whose contacts with the world are perspectival, partial, and tenuous. It’s true that modernist novels are deeply concerned with the mind, but the inward turn offers a picture of mental experience that looks simplistic in the context of recent work in cognitive studies. This work examines how minds are always already in the world, and it has been the subject of seminal works such as Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds (2004), Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006), and David Herman’s collection The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English (2011). Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso brings this broader picture of mind squarely into the realm of modernist narrative in The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood, a collection of essays that thoughtfully challenges the “inward turn.” Miguel-Alfonso begins The Fictional Minds of Modernism by arguing that modernist narrative (exemplified by Gertrude Stein’s work) is fundamentally about the “continuity between mind and world” (12). Narrative is both an act of mind, giving sequence and structure to phenomena, and also an act of mind made available to other minds. In other words, narrative is fundamentally public. But Miguel-Alfonso acknowledges this publicness is problematic, contending that modernist narratives engage in “relentless questioning of the relationship between mind, language, and reality” (9). The book’s contributors take up this relentless questioning, seeking a more nuanced picture of mind that is not simplistically bifurcated into “internal” and “external” aspects. In the second essay, Jukka Mikkonen warns against too quickly accepting fictional minds as means for learning “about the workings of the mind” (18). Mikkonen recognizes the propensity of readers to ascribe realistic qualities of mind to fictional characters, but he argues that fictional minds must also obey the demands of narrative necessity. Narrative minds have both mimetic and poetic aspects, and these poetic aspects make trouble for those who would claim modernist literature can faithfully represent minds. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for example, Clarissa Dalloway’s ability to understand others borders on extraordinary, and the portrayal of the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith is haunted by the fact that Woolf may not be “a real expert of schizophrenia” (21). In other words, there is a difference between narrative minds feeling real and being real. While Mikkonen is sympathetic to those who would [End Page 192] claim “that literary narratives could widen our ‘mental universe’ or ‘the cognitive horizon of human awareness,’” he concludes that such claims “are not proportional to their supporting evidence—no matter how evidence is understood—and at times look even like dogmas” (25). While Mikkonen’s skepticism is warranted, it is somewhat tempered by two following essays that argue that normal presentations of mind are always already conceptual and linguistic—making poesis a crucial part of investigations of mental experience. Marco Caracciolo argues that metaphors for mind break down barriers between inner and outer life because they express what is “internal” in terms of “concrete things that we can directly perceive” (34). Caracciolo explores metaphors of mind in three novels: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Federigo Tozzi’s Con gli occhi chiusi (Eyes Shut), and in Mrs. Dalloway. He shows how mind is conceptualized in terms of sensory activities (perceiving, seeing, having illusions, etc.), in terms of space (Tozzi’s protagonist feels his mind is a “large hall” [42]), and in relation to physical things and processes (Tozzi’s narrator reports of the protagonist, “A familiar ache dashed his brain like a cold jet that never let him get anything done” [42]). Caracciolo believes that these metaphorical “mind styles...

Literary meaning as character conceptualization: Re-orienting the cognitive stylistic analysis of character discourse and Free Indirect Thought

Abstract This article establishes the theoretical bases for a more direct and detailed exploration of fictional minds in cognitive stylistics. This discipline usually analyzes narrative discourse in terms of how readers process language and conceptualize narrative meaning, treating literary language more or less explicitly as a window into readers’ mental experiences. However, it is also possible to treat literary language as a window into characters’ minds, which, in spite of their obvious fictionality, could enhance the potential for cognitive linguistic analysis to inform our understanding of the human mind and consciousness more generally. This article explores the nature of linguistic meaning in different speech and thought presentation techniques primarily through the lens of Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, ultimately prioritizing the representational semantics of Free Indirect Thought. It proposes a more precise understanding of the concept of ‘conceptualizer’ which would validate a type of mind style analysis that is more narrowly focused on illuminating the underlying mental activity of fictional characters instead of readers. It demonstrates this type of focus with a brief analysis of a passage from Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend.

Echoes of Contemporary Indian Francophone Literature

This article analyzes Shumona Sinha’s first novel, Fenêtre sur l’abîme (Window to the Abyss, 2008) from a cognitive perspective. As the narrator, a young Bengali woman named Madhuban, is struggling to make sense of her existence, past events and present sensations, as well as nightmares and memories unfold in an accelerating rhythm, questioning the impact of her life experience upon her mental health. Drawing on Alan Palmer’s typology of fictional minds, the aim of this work is to provide some preliminary remarks on the textual representation of the narrator’s mind, depicted on the verge of a mental breakdown triggered the by physical and emotional abuse she was subjected to by her family in Calcutta, and reinforced by her emigration to Paris.

The Multimodal Evocation of Minds in Audio Drama

This article discusses the construction of fictional minds in audio drama. Drawing upon social semiotics, cognitive narratology, and the narratology of audio drama, it starts from the premise that a character's consciousness in radio plays is shaped by the conventions, constraints, and affordances of the medium. This means that the semiotic modes of the radio play are exploited in a particular way to give listeners the impression that they are accessing a character's mind, e.g. through a voice's pitch or the verbal rendering of thoughts. In a dynamics of remediation, audio drama conventionally adopts narrative strategies associated with drama (e.g., soliloquy) as well as novelistic (e.g., thought report by a heterodiegetic narrator) and cinematic procedures (e.g., extradiegetic music as an accompaniment to characters' emotions) to evoke minds. Three adaptations will serve to illustrate this dynamics: Madame Bovary (PBS, 1986), Oeroeg (2009) and The Divine Comedy (BBC, 2014). By taking imported conventions into account alongside the audiophonic deployment of voice, music, sound, silence, and words, the article aims to further our understanding of minds in audio drama – which is relatively unknown territory in narratology – and contribute to the debate on fictional minds in cognitive and transmedial narratology.

Fictional Minds and Female Sexuality: The Consciousness Scene from Pamela to Lady Chatterley's Lover

Why have all the major novelistic innovations in representing consciousness been achieved through depicting the minds of female characters? This essay argues that eighteenth-century conduct books provided the cultural impetus and structural frame for a particular subjectivity--the self-examining heroine--that required the development of narrative techniques for rendering fictional minds. The essay traces the consciousness scene from the early novel to the twentieth century in order to demonstrate how the historical development of modes of thought representation has been synonymous with explorations of female sexual identity, played out most specifically in the relation between narrator and character fostered by free indirect discourse.