Marie-Laure Ryan

Bio: Marie-Laure Ryan is an academic researcher from University of Colorado Boulder. The author has contributed to research in topics: Narrative & Narratology. The author has an hindex of 28, co-authored 81 publications receiving 4963 citations.

Kinds of Minds: On Alan Palmer's "Social Minds"

Abstract: It is no exaggeration to say that the work of Alan Palmer has put the study of fictional minds on a new track. That it should do so may appear surprising, because he has broken the trail through common sense much more than through reliance on new theories (though Palmer is very well informed of recent developments in cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind). This makes one wonder why anybody hadn't thought of his approach before. But it could be that many readers spontaneously thought of fictional minds in the same terms; it's just that being commonsensical was not the fashionable thing to do in literary criticism. It took an independent scholar unconcerned with approval by the collective mind of academia to take such an approach. The basic idea was quite simple. Traditional approaches to characters in novels look at the mind from an "internalist perspective," according to which the mind is an inner theater featuring a neverending film of private thoughts, images, associations, memories and desires emerging from the depth of the subconscious. This film is called stream of consciousness, and the task of narratologists is to describe the forms of discourse through which narrators allow readers to look through the skull of the character and to watch the show unfold. While recognizing that the internalist perspective plays an important role in many types of novels, especially in those of the modernist period (where the representation of the inner theater of the mind becomes an end in itself). Palmer argued in his first book, Fictional Minds, for an "externalist perspective" that views the mind as something that manifests itself externally through both intentional and non-intentional behavior, and that other people can access through inductive reasoning--what cognitive psychology calls "theory of mind." Whereas the traditional narratological approach regards the mind as a mechanism for imagining and representing, Palmer's concept of "mind in action" favored a much more strategic conception of the mind: not the mind that experiences the storyworld passively, but rather the proactive mind that reacts to situations, conceives goals, constructs other minds, takes actions, and makes the story advance. In this essay and in his second book, Social Minds in the Novel, Palmer takes the externalist perspective a step further, or rather, he fully develops an idea that was already sketched in his first book by arguing for a contrast between an intramental mind, whose operations take place within the skull, so to speak (though consciousness is always directed toward the external world), and an intermental, or social mind, "which is joint, group, shared, or collective thought." The idea of a social or collective mind is not in itself particularly new nor problematic. Literary critics have long been aware of the existence of collective ideas and of their potential for creating conflict between individuals and the groups they belong to. (Think of the many narratives that focus on the dilemma of people, such as immigrants, who are torn between individual aspirations and loyalty to the values of their native culture.) The various forms of collective thinking, beside cultural values, are stereotypes, rumors, public opinion, folk wisdom, common knowledge and what Roland Barthes calls doxa. Palmer however is not content to study the manifestations of this collective thinking in a particular novel (Middlemarch by George Eliot); he makes the stronger claim that minds are not just what exists within the skull, nor are they something that manifests itself "beyond the skin," to use one of his favorite expressions, they quite objectively encompass entities that exist outside themselves. The intermental mind not only contains representations of other minds, it fuses them together, so that a unitary mind emerges out of a plurality of connected minds. This is the mind of the town of Middlemarch, or the mind of two people who know each other so well that each of them can think for the other. …

Narratologia transmedia e transmedia storytelling

Abstract: The term fransmedia storytelling has gone viral in media studies. But to what extent does it label a truly new phenomenon, different from the older concepts of adaptation and transfictionality? What does it really mean to tell a story through different media and under what conditions is it desirable? In this article, I examine several types of projects that could be considered as ‘transmedia storytelling’, without necessarily fitting within the paradigm of ‘West Coast’ (i.e. Hollywood) fransmedia, and I look at three types of discourse associated with the phenomenon - the industry discourse, the fan discourse and scholarly discourse - in the hope of distinguishing scholarly discourse from the other two and defining some of its goals.

Response to Brian Richardson's Target Essay "Unnatural Narrative Theory"

Abstract: Never afraid of self-promotion, the founding fathers of unnatural narratology (Alber et al., "Unnatural Narratives") wrote in a 2010 manifesto: "In recent years the study of unnatural narratology has developed into one of the most exciting new paradigms in narrative theory" (113). What exactly should one understand by paradigm? Is unnatural narratology (henceforth UN) a field of investigation--a field constituted by the most experimental, innovative narrative forms--or is it a thorough rethinking of narrative theory? From Richardson's article, one can conclude that it has ambitions to be both; the question then becomes: why do experimental forms of narrative call for a revision of narratology, and more precisely, what is it about them that, as Richardson claims, cannot be accounted for by standard narratology? If UN is simply a field of investigation, it could be justified by a scalar conception of narrativity. As I suggested in "Toward a Definition of Narrative," the set of all narratives can be conceived as a fuzzy set that encompasses both prototypical forms, in which the conditions of narrativity are fully realized, and marginal forms, in which some of these conditions are not fulfilled, or where the telling of a story is subordinated to another purpose rather than constituting a focus of attention. UN could then be conceived as the study of the marginal forms, though I doubt that its advocates would subscribe to this view: Richardson makes it clear that for him experimental forms, such as Beckett's novels, are just as narrative as the genre that UN regards as the embodiment of naturalness in narrative, and that serves, consequently, as an implicit standard. Rather than relying on a scalar conception of narrativity, UN rests on a dichotomy between natural and unnatural narratives, (1) and it designates the unnatural as its territory. But in contrast to Monika Fludernik, who has given deep thought to what it means to call a type of narrative natural, and who associates this type with spontaneous, conversational narratives (Towards), UN proponents do not take the time to define, much less to scrutinize, their implicit standard. References to linguistic/discourse analytical approaches to conversational narrative are glaringly absent from their work. Through a process of inference from what our authors label unnatural, I construct this standard as "x telling y that p happened in the real world, in the hope that y will believe that p." This excludes, a priori, all forms of fiction from the domain of the natural, even though the creation of fictional worlds and stories is a universally attested and cognitively fundamental human activity. I infer, furthermore, that in order to optimize believability, the telling of p should be governed by H. Paul Grice's famous maxims of conversation: maxims such as quality (do not say what you do not believe to be true), quantity (avoid prolixity), relevance (your contribution should be related to the current topic of the conversation), and manner (make your contribution orderly). These maxims not only fail to account for literary texts, but they are also often deliberately flouted (as Grice recognizes) in conversational storytelling. Tellability often gets in the way of believability, and it is to the extent that they play freely with the maxims that conversational narrators manage to capture the interest of their audience. If there is a form of narrative that strictly follows Grice's maxims, it would be courtroom testimony, or maybe history writing, but these genres are hardly a natural, spontaneous form of narration. If UN advocates took the time to study the forms of storytelling that they regard as natural, they would discover that these forms are much richer and more sophisticated in their narrative techniques than merely informing an audience that something happened. One could admittedly argue that written forms of narrative, compared to oral ones, present medium-specific narrative devices, while fictional narratives, compared to factual ones, present genre-specific devices. …

Playing Games With the Truth

Abstract: We normally think of narrative as divided between two pragmatic kinds: factual and fictional. Their difference resides in the nature of the contract that binds sender and receiver. This chapter discusses three established narrative genres and a discourse type that involve a more complicated relation to truth than the fictional and factual contracts and therefore present alternatives to the standard dichotomy between fact and fiction: tabloid stories, whose outlandish nature can give rise to an ironic mode of reading; urban legends, whose tellability rests on the principle “reality is stranger than fiction”; tall tales, which create a gradual transition from the familiar to the unbelievable; and bullshit, illustrated in the chapter through an analysis of a campaign speech by Donald Trump, which is characterized by a fundamental disregard for the truth.

The creative mind: myths and mechanisms

Abstract: 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 Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

Abstract: 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

Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication:

Abstract: 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.

The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

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

Abstract: 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