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

Toward a competence theory of genre

The study takes a new approach to the phenomenon of narrated action in literary texts. It begins with a survey of philosophical approaches to the concept of action. In the second part, the combinatory model of action proposed is put into practice in the context of a computer-aided investigation of the action constructs logically implied by narrative texts. The third part presents a case study of Goethe's "Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten".

Computing Action: A Narratological Approach

In his article "From Narrative Representation to Narrative Use: Towards the Limits of Definition," David Rudrum argues that definitions of narrative based on what the text represents are fundamentally flawed: "As long as narratology remains tied to [a conception of narrative as representation], and tied to a philosophy of language that foregrounds signification above and before questions of use and practice, it seems that a satisfactory way of defining and classifying its subject matter will continue to elude it" (203). Here, in a nutshell, is the argument. Narrative has traditionally been defined as the representation of a sequence of events. But this definition fails to capture the distinction between a set of instructions for building model airplanes (Figure Two in the text) and what Rudrum regards as a genuine narrative, namely a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip (Figure One). To distinguish the narrative status of these two representations of sequences of events, we must take into consideration how the text is used.

Semantics, Pragmatics, and Narrativity: A Response to David Rudrum

ion? Do the deep structures posited by generative semanticists actually reach the level where the meaning of utterances is entirely and unambiguously specified or are they merely another intermediate level of representation? The simplification I propose is thus a way of using the in sights provided by generative semantics, while staying out of its controversies. 10 Adopting Prince's definition (1973:23), I will consider an event to follow another in time when the beginning of the second event follows the beginning of the first. Thus the connector indicating chronological sequence may (as in 1) or may not (as in 2) imply that the first event is over when the second begins. (1) John drank a beer. Then (= after he drank a beer) he drank a whisky. (2) John was drunk. Then (=after the beginning of his being drunk) he decided to stop drinking. 11 Generally the first argument of proposition m is animate (and consequently an argument of n is also animate). But this is not a necessary condition. Consider the story: 'The stables were dirty. Then Hercules ran a river through the stables. Then as a result the stables were clean." 12 When the option of introducing propositions before m is used, m must be linked to m-1 by a predicate indicating chronological sequence, simultaneity or causation (see rule 13). Thus on Figure 2 m should be more properly represented as shown below, and rule 3 should read: "The highest predicate of the part of proposition m that contains event m must have either a [4stative] or a [4mental operation] feature.

Marie-Laure Ryan

Papers

Toward a competence theory of genre

Computing Action: A Narratological Approach

Semantics, Pragmatics, and Narrativity: A Response to David Rudrum

Linguistic Models in Narratology: From Structuralism to Generative Semantics

Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media