D. Herman: «Storied Minds : Narrative Scaffolding for Folk Psychology » (séminaire Narratologies contemporaines II)
II.Narratologies contemporaines.
Fiction et Cognition
Séminaire du CRAL(CNRS/EHESS)
Responsables :
Annick Louis (Universitéde Reims), John Pier (Université de Tours), Philippe Roussin (CNRS) etJean-Marie Schaeffer (CNRS/EHESS)
105, Bd. Raspail – 75006
SalleLombard – 15-17 heures (Attention au changement d'horaire et de salle!!!)
Recent research on narrative has examinedhow interpreting stories depends on the same processes offolk-psychological reasoning that people use in everyday life to makesense of their own and others' conduct. At issue is people's everydayunderstanding of how thinking works, the rough-and-ready heuristics towhich they resort in thinking about thinking itself. We use theseheuristics to impute motives or goals to others, to evaluate the basesof our own conduct, and to make predictions about future reactions toevents; and the same folk-psychological rules of thumb are applicablewhen it comes to interpreting the actions of characters in stories. Inthis paper, however, I invert the approach adopted by theorists whohave looked to fields such as cognitive and evolutionary psychology todiscuss aspects of mindreading in narrative contexts. Rather thanexamining ways in which narrative interpretation requires making senseof characters' minds, my paper explores how storytelling practicesafford scaffolding for folk psychology itself—that is, for the abilityto formulate appropriate, well-structured inferences about people'sreasons for acting. Using Ian McEwan's 2007 novel On Chesil Beach as acase study, I work to synthesize research on folk psychology withmodels of narrative structure, focusing in particular on accounts ofnarrative temporality. Stories, this work suggests, are a primarytechnology for understanding how things unfold in time, one that helpsreveal how actions arise, how they are interrelated, and how muchsalience they should be assigned within a given environment for actingand interacting. More generally, narrative practices like McEwan'sexploit the powerful action-modeling resources of narrative toconfigure and reconfigure characters' behavior from different temporal,spatial, and evaluative standpoints, in the way that a complex moleculeor architectural structure can be displayed and manipulated in virtualspace with the help of an advanced computer graphics program. In turn,interpreting narrative as a system for building models of actionunderscores the relevance of narratology for the philosophy of mind—andvice versa.
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Encombinant les approches de la psychologie cognitive et de l'analyse discursive,l'objectif de ce séminaire de recherche est d'étudier la façon dont la prise deperspective interne sur les états mentaux d'autrui (« mind-reading »), quicaractérise la simulation mentale dans le contexte de l'imputation agentive etplus largement intentionnelle, est « traduite » dans le récit de fiction à la3e personne par les techniques narratives de la focalisation interne. Une étudehistorique et translinguistique des anomalies logico-grammaticales (notammenten ce qui concerne la deixis spatiale et temporelle) liées au développement destechniques de focalisation interne sera d'une importance méthodologiquecapitale pour la question, plus générale, du niveau auquel le traitement mentalde la fiction narrative se dissocie de celui du récit factuel.
Combining the approaches of cognitive psychology and linguisticdiscourse analysis, the aim of this research seminar is to study how theinternal perspective taken on other people's mental states ("mind-reading")which is typical of mental simulation in the context of agentive imputation is"translated" on a linguistic level by the narrative techniques of internalfocalization in third-person (fictive) narratives. A translinguistic study(French, German, English, Japanese, Chinese) of the logico-grammaticalanomalies (concerning temporal relationships and deixis) related to thistranslation will be of central methodological import for the more generalquestion concerning the level on which the mental treatment of fictionalnarrative departs from that of factual narrative.
Programme2008–2009
1ersemestre
- Mardi 4 novembre2008 : Jean-Marie Schaeffer (CRAL/EHESS) : « Récit, Fiction,Cognition I »
- Mardi18 novembre 2008 : Brian Richardson (Université de Maryland):« The Theory of Narrative Beginnings »
- Mardi2 décembre 2008: Jean-Marie Schaeffer (CRAL/EHESS) : « Récit,Fiction, Cognition II »
- Mardi 16 décembre2008 : François Flahault (CNRS) « Sous les concepts, le récit.I »
- Mardi 06 janvier2009 : François Flahault (CNRS) « Sous les concepts, le récit. II »
- Mardi20 janvier 2009 : MagdalenaCampora (Université Catholique Argentina, Buenos Aires) « La causalitéfictive »
- Mardi 3 février 2009 : David Herman (Ohio State University):« Storied Minds : Narrative Scaffolding for Folk Psychology »