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

Our intuitive notion of time comprises tour fundamental beliefs: (1) time flows in a fixed direction; (2) you cannot fight this flow and go back in time; (3) causes always precede their effects and (4) the past is written once for all. This paper examines narratives that create alternative visions of time through the violation of one or the other of these four principles, focusing on the consequences of the violations for narrativity, The denial of (1) occurs in narrative that reverse the direction of time (Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World), but after reviewing several possible definitions of time's arrow, I argue that in order to maintain narrativity these stories should not invert the cognitive arrow. The violation of (2), constitutive of time-travel narratives, is shown to potentially result in causal loops (Audrey Nifenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife). Time travel can also lead to causes preceding their effects and rewriting the past, but here I discuss stories that create these paradoxes without the benefit of movement across time (D.M. Thomas' The White Hotel and Emmanuel Carrere's La Moustache.) Against logicians who claim that a single contradiction in a system results in the destruction of the entire system, I argue that temporal paradoxes do not completely block the construction of a fictional world, but rather, invite the reader to imagine a "Swiss cheese" world in which contradictions occupy well-delimited holes of irrationality surrounded by solid areas about which the reader remains able to make logical inferences. ********** When we confront the problem of time, most of us share the perplexity of St Augustine, who famously wrote: "What then is time? If no one asks me, [ know what it is. If I wish to explain to him who asks, I do not know" (qtd. from Morris 8). We may not be able to capture in words our sense of the nature of time, but we have a reasonably clear intuitive idea of what it is, an idea that generally includes the following beliefs: 1. Time flows, and it does so in a fixed direction. 2. You cannot fight this flow and go back in time. 3. Causes always precede their effects. 4. The past is written once for all. These beliefs correspond to life experience; but life experience, because it is limited to the perspective of an individual, is not the best guide for those who want to explore the breadth of the possible. Logic can survey a wider territory, and the imagination pushes the limits of the possible even further back, especially when its outlet is narrative. In this article I propose to examine stories that create alternative visions of time through the violation of some of the four principles listed above, focusing on the consequences of these violations for narrativity. 1. Time flows in a fixed direction As Nabokov (252) observed, "[n]obody can imagine in physical terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time is not reversible." Yet several authors have attempted to construct worlds that invalidate this claim. The most notorious are Philip K. Dick in Counter-Clock World(1967), which I will discuss here, and Martin Amis in Time's Arrow (1991). Reversed time narratives should not be confused with narrative that tell stories in reverse chronological order, as does the famous film Memento (2000) by Christopher Nolan, or the play and movie Betrayal (1983) by Harold Pinter. As narratologists know full well (Genette, Chatman), stories are subjected to a double temporal order: the order of events in the storyworld, and the order in which these events are presented by narrative discourse. In a genuine reversed time narrative, the reversal affects not the level of discourse, as it does in Memento and Betrayal, but the level of story. In other words, these texts describe a world where time actually and objectively moves backwards. Reversing the direction of time presupposes that time is something that moves, and moves in a specific direction, as do the arrow and the river, its two most common metaphors. …

Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative

My interest in the implied author (henceforth 1A) dates back to a discussion on the Narrative listserv a few years ago. I have forgotten what started the thread, but I remember that it concerned how the IA of a certain text should be constructed and that all the participants seemed to take the theoretical importance of this notion for granted. Narrative fiction, all seemed to agree, was the product of a six-participant transaction involving an author, an implied author, a narrator, a narratee, an implied reader, and a real reader, though the outermost two participants were considered of no concern for literary criticism. In my earlier work, I had dutifully appended the term "implied" to any mention of the author, partly because Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction had succeeded in convincing me of the necessity of the IA, and partly for fear of appearing theoretically unsophisticated. But now I could no longer see the justification for building the protective wall of the IA between the reader and the real author, so I butted into the discussion with a post stating my skepticism regarding the existence of this sacred cow of literary criticism. It was as if l had screamed, "God is dead," in the middle of a church service. The participants in the thread responded with a volley of posts explaining why flesh-and-blood authors must be left out at all costs from literary interpretation, and why they must be replaced by IAs if the text is to be regarded not only as the representation of individual events occurring in a fictional world (a representation which is the job of the narrator), but also as the expression of general ideas, values, and opinions whose domain of applicability extends to the real world. The main argument for attributing these ideas, values, and opinions to an IA rather than to the real author (henceforth RA) is that there is no way to tell whether RA sincerely endorses them or lives by these standards. Many cases were presented of authors being despicable in real life but admirable in their incarnations as IAs, though nobody could come up with an example of the opposite situation. Some contributors went as far as suggesting the purely hypothetical case of an author defending in a novel the exact opposite of what he believes in, not just through individuated characters, but as the global message of the text. (Why an author would want to do this remained, however, obscure: it seems a sure recipe for spreading the wrong ideas!) I thought at the time that I was the only IA-doubter in the narratological community and that my arguments were consequently original. But as I started doing research for this article, I made the partly annoying, partly reassuring discovery that the concept of IA has a long history of being under fire. Its critics include narratologists as prominent as Gerard Genette, Mieke Bal, Ansgar Nunning, Michael Toolan, Nilli Diengott, Tom Kindt, and Hans-Harald Muller, all of whom, it should be noted, come from beyond the Atlantic. The proponents of the IA, by contrast, are mainly Americans: Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, William Nelles, and Brian Richardson. The implied author wars, then, pit American narratology against the rest of the world. (See Phelan 2005 and Schmid 2009 for useful accounts of the IA controversy.)As l read through the pro- and anti IA literature, I soon discovered that the term "implied author" was like William Gibson's concept of cyberspace: "Slick and hollow--awaiting received meaning" (27)--and that the only thing that unites all the users of the term is just that: the use of the term. Every advocate of the IA seemed to have his own conception of what IAs stand for, and every opponent seemed to have different objections. As the readers of this essay know full well, the concept of IA was first proposed by Wayne Booth in 1961 as a reaction against the rigid "textualism" of New Criticism. In the textualist position, the words on the page are the sole legitimate source of meaning, and any appeal to the author's intention (otto external documents that may explain the text) is considered heretical. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.45.1.29

Meaning, Intent, and the Implied Author

Video games, which started as abstract games, have become fictitious worlds. But they raise the issue of narration: how can the creator’s desire to keep the control of the events which constitute the narration in order to preserve the integrity of its structure be reconciled with the player’s expectation of free, unconstrained action? Marie-Laure Ryan maps out a poetics of interactive narration and supplies the narratological tools to better understand it.

From Narrative Games to Playable Stories

Narrative Cartography: Toward a Visual Narratology

The notion of possible worlds has played a decisive role in postclassical narratology by awakening interest in the nature of fictionality and in emphasizing the notion of world as a source of aesthetic experience in narrative texts. As a theory concerned with the opposition between the actual world that we belong to and possible worlds created by the imagination, possible worlds theory has made significant contributions to narratology.

Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology updates the field of possible worlds theory and postclassical narratology by developing this theoretical framework further and applying it to a range of contemporary literary narratives. This volume systematically outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the possible worlds approach, provides updated methods for analyzing fictional narrative, and profiles those methods via the analysis of a range of different texts, including contemporary fiction, digital fiction, video games, graphic novels, historical narratives, and dramatic texts. Through the variety of its contributions, including those by three originators of the subject area—Lubomir Doležel, Thomas Pavel, and Marie-Laure Ryan—Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology demonstrates the vitality and versatility of one of the most vibrant strands of contemporary narrative theory.

Marie-Laure Ryan

Papers

Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative

Meaning, Intent, and the Implied Author

From Narrative Games to Playable Stories

Narrative Cartography: Toward a Visual Narratology

Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology