How is it possible to think new thoughts? What is creativity and can science explain it? And just how did Coleridge dream up the creatures of The Ancient Mariner? When The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms was first published, Margaret A. Boden's bold and provocative exploration of creativity broke new ground. Boden uses examples such as jazz improvisation, chess, story writing, physics, and the music of Mozart together with computing models from the field of artificial intelligence to uncover the nature of human creativity in the arts, science and everyday life. The second edition of The Creative Mind has been updated to include recent developments in artificial intelligence, with a new preface, introduction and conclusion by the author. It is an essential work for anyone interested in the creativity of the human mind.

The creative mind: myths and mechanisms

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

but the threat they bring to artistic culture. From his opening mockery of the literary establishment’s tendency to theorize the world in terms of desire or gender to his disapproval of those who venerate art while denying its validity in the same breath, Jonathan Dollimore has created an easily understood, albeit at times too theoretical, synthesis of the literary and the experiential in Sex, Literature and Censorship. His arguments on critical theory do not necessarily reject the concept of theory; rather, he argues that critical theorists should strive to understand the contradictions within our lives and our literature and explore the daemonic power of the subjects that offend our sense of tradition.

Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication:

What is narrative? How does it work and how does it shape our lives? H. Porter Abbott emphasizes that narrative is found not just in literature, film, and theatre, but everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives. This widely used introduction, now revised and expanded in its third edition, is informed throughout by recent developments in the field and includes one new chapter. The glossary and bibliography have been expanded, and new sections explore unnatural narrative, retrograde narrative, reader-resistant narratives, intermedial narrative, narrativity, and multiple interpretation. With its lucid exposition of concepts, and suggestions for further reading, this book is not only an excellent introduction for courses focused on narrative but also an invaluable resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including literature and drama, film and media, society and politics, journalism, autobiography, history, and still others throughout the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

Preface Introduction: The Role of the Reader I. Open 1. The Poetics of the Open Work 2. The Semantics of Metaphor 3. On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language II. Closed 4. The Myth of Superman 5. Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris 6. Narrative Structures in Fleming III. Open/Closed 7. Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness: Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs 8. Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Bibliography

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

Recent research in discourse analysis (e.g., Reichman 1981) has shown that the organization of discourse is anything but a linear process. By linear process I mean the steady and cumulative development of a topic until this topic, being exhausted, is dropped and replaced by another. This conception is currently being challenged by the view that discourse organization possesses 'depth', a dimension which allows several topics or contexts to be alive at the same time. While only one context may be developed at a given time, this context bears a specific relationship to other contexts which have been left in a waiting state. To follow discourse properly, the hearer or participant must be able to distribute the information received into several distinct 'boxes', each corresponding to a distinct context. When a topic is abandoned, he must know whether the box containing the information pertaining to that topic is being definitively or provisionally closed and which other contexts are candidates for reactivation. When a formerly active context is being reopened, its relation to the other contexts must be reassessed and its content must be appropriately updated according to the apparent consensus of the speakers. Participating in a conversation is a matter of relating information to its proper context, knowing when a new context can be introduced or an old one reactivated, remembering the sequence of contexts leading up to the current one, and keeping track of the status of the live but noncurrent contexts. Compared to conversation, narrative strikes us as a much more linear form of discourse. The reasons are twofold: first, a narrative creates a socalled narrative universe, and this universe acts as a unifying frame of reference for the entire text; second, the subject matter of narrative is a temporal succession of events and actions. For this view to hold, all narratives should follow the pattern exemplified below:

On the window structure of narrative discourse

Photo Narrative, Sequential Photography, Photonovels

Fiction and its other: How trespassers help defend the border

Transmediales Storytelling und Transfiktionalität

In: virtual reality. Out: reality. So claimed on December 31, 1994 one of those countless lists of predictions that invariably herald the coming of a new year.(1) What is out is the concept of a reality where the mind and the body encounter the resistance of matter, where the laws of gravity hold, where some events happen that you cannot take back, where you live only one life. What is in is a realm where all your wishes can be fulfilled, where you live multiple lives, where you can inhabit multiple personalities, and where nothing "counts" because it is only a game, an endlessly repeatable and endlessly variable simulation. With this pronouncement, a major theme of postmodernism has gone mainstream. As Benjamin Woolley describes the contemporary mind set: "Reality has left the physical world and moved into the virtual one" (235). For the past twenty years, what has been "in" for cultural theory was any kind of concept that opposes and challenges nature, essence, and reality: copies, fake, fiction, conventions, the artificial, make-believe and role playing. The news of "the death of reality" and of its replacement by hyperrealities did not await electronic mail td spread throughout the cultural, critical, and literary scene. In an intellectual climate that regards concepts as toys to play with and that favors consensus over correspondence theories of truth (if truth remains an issue at all), professions of radical antirealism are often more an intellectual game than a metaphysical commitment, for such a commitment would reinstate "the absence of reality" as surrogate reality: this is to say, as transcendental object of knowledge. (Hard-core postmodernists would of course reply that playing games is the only metaphysical commitment left after the death of reality.) Games may be played in a spirit of nonseriousness, but they are part of a culture, and as such they must be taken seriously. Thus, regardless of our personal position concerning the nature, existence, or epistemic accessibility of reality, we must address the theme of its crisis and the emergence of alternative concepts if we want to understand the contemporary zeitgeist. The focus of this issue of Style is a conceptual space encompassing two manifestations of what may be called "the parareal": one--possible worlds, or PW--a philosophical notion currently developing into a tool of literary criticism; the other--virtual reality, or VR--a technological phenomenon that has recently captured the public's imagination, attracting along the way theoretical attention from the academic community. The relation between postmodernism and PW theory can be described as a love-hate affair. The love part stems from the endorsement by PW theory of an ontological model consisting of a plurality of worlds. In this model, contemporary thought finds a philosophical basis for its endorsement of diversity in all its forms, from multiculturalism within society to a pluralism of coexisting individuals within the subject. According to Brian McHale, the transition from modernism to postmodernism is defined by a shift from an epistemological to an ontological dominant: "Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability" (11). McHale's assimilation of plurality with instability--a fairly typical move in postmodern thought--points, however, to the hate part of the relationship. The rallying cry of postmodern theory is the negative prefix: as Linda Hutcheon observes, the term "postmodernism" is "usually accompanied by a grand flourish of negativized rhetoric: we hear of discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentering, indeterminacy, and antitotalization" (3). Encompassing all of these notions, of course, is the almighty concept of deconstruction. This approach to diversity runs contrary to the structure assigned by PW theory to its ontological model; hence the hate component. By designating one world of the system as actual and by opposing it to the surrounding nonactual possible worlds (as Saul Kripke defines the so-called "M-model"), PW theory postulates an ontological center that dispels any chance of equality among the members of the system. …

Marie-Laure Ryan

Papers

On the window structure of narrative discourse

Photo Narrative, Sequential Photography, Photonovels

Fiction and its other: How trespassers help defend the border

Transmediales Storytelling und Transfiktionalität

Introduction : from possible worlds to virtual reality