Narrative Thought and Narrative Language

Narrative Thought and Narrative Language
Author: Bruce K. Britton
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2014-02-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317785878

Since before the dawn of history, people have been telling stories to each other and to themselves. Thus stories are at the root of human experience. This volume describes empirical investigations by Jerome Bruner, Wallace Chafe, David Olson, and others on the relationship between stories and cognition. Using philosophical, linguistic, anthropological, and psychological perspectives on narrative, the contributors provide a definitive, highly diversified portrait of human cognition.

A New Theory of Mind

A New Theory of Mind
Author: James A. Wise
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2016-05-11
Genre: Thought and thinking
ISBN: 1443893129

This book presents a unique and intuitively compelling way of understanding how humans think. It argues that narratives are the natural mode of thinking, that the “urge” to think narratively reflects known neurological processes, and that, although narrative thinking is a product of evolution, it enables us to transcend our evolutionary limits and actively shape our own futures. In remarkably engaging language, the authors describe how the currency of neural activity in the brain is transformed into the qualitatively different currency of conscious experience—the everyday, purposeful, story-like experience with which we all are familiar. The book then examines the nature of thought and how it leads to purposeful action, discussing, among other concerns, how memories about the past, perceptions about the present, and expectations about the future are structured as plausible, coherent narratives by causation, purpose, and time, and how errors are introduced into one’s narratives, both naturally and by other people (often intentionally), and how those errors bias one’s expectations about the future and the actions taken (or not taken) as a consequence. Each of these discussions is followed by a commentary that ties them to interesting facts and questions from throughout the physical and social sciences. The book is concluded with the argument that narrative thought is what is meant when one uses the word “mind.”

The Psychology of Narrative Thought

The Psychology of Narrative Thought
Author: Lee Roy Beach
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2010-08-10
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1453542736

This book is about how we think and how what we think shapes our attempts to manage the ongoing course of our lives. Our primary mode of thought is in the form of stories, called narratives, which help us make sense of what is going on around us and provide context for it by linking it to what has happened in the past. Moreover, narratives allow us to use the past and present to make educated guesses, called forecasts, about what will happen in the future. When the forecasted future is undesirable, we intervene to ensure that the actual future, when it arrives, is more to our liking. Narrative thought has its limits, particularly when logical rigor is required. The implications of these limits are discussed, as are the ways in which people have attempted to overcome them.

The Theory of Narrative Thought

The Theory of Narrative Thought
Author: Lee Roy Beach
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2022-02-25
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1527581632

The renowned naturalist, Loren Eisely, observed that we humans have given up the “certainty of the animal that what it senses is exactly there in the shape the eye beholds.” The big question is, what did we get in return? This book provides a convincing answer to this question, arguing that, instead of recording reality, your brain uses your experience to create a story, a narrative, about how what happened to you in the past led to what is happening to you now. This narrative is your private reality. The book continues by showing how replacing recorded reality with private narrative enabled humans to anticipate the fundamentally unknowable immediate and remote future and expose potential threats. It then shows how private narrative enabled complex thought and communication with others. Drawing upon a wide range of research, the book provides a stimulating new way of viewing human experience, thinking, communicating, and action.

Narrative and the Self

Narrative and the Self
Author: Anthony Paul Kerby
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1991-11-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780253114501

Examining the constitutive role of language and narration in key areas of human experience, Narrative and the Self articulates a view of the self as the implied subject of narrative utterances. Anthony Paul Kerby draws on the diverse insights of recent work in philosophy, literary theory, and psychology to synthesize a coherent and provocative view of narrative identity and selfhood. Invoking the writings of Benveniste, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Taylor, and other theorists, he argues that language and narration play a central role in key aspects of human experience such as emotion, values, recollection, and sense of history. Fundamental to Kerby's exposition is a defense of the quasi-narrative nature of our everyday experience. Kerby delineates a convincing narrative model of the self and offers a valuable overview of contemporary philosophical issues surrounding the place and role of narrative in human experience.

Mind, Brain and Narrative

Mind, Brain and Narrative
Author: Anthony J. Sanford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2012-12-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1139851594

Narratives enable readers to vividly experience fictional and non-fictional contexts. Writers use a variety of language features to control these experiences: they direct readers in how to construct contexts, how to draw inferences and how to identify the key parts of a story. Writers can skilfully convey physical sensations, prompt emotional states, effect moral responses and even alter the readers' attitudes. Mind, Brain and Narrative examines the psychological and neuroscientific evidence for the mechanisms which underlie narrative comprehension. The authors explore the scientific developments which demonstrate the importance of attention, counterfactuals, depth of processing, perspective and embodiment in these processes. In so doing, this timely, interdisciplinary work provides an integrated account of the research which links psychological mechanisms of language comprehension to humanities work on narrative and style.

Narratives from the Crib

Narratives from the Crib
Author: Katherine Nelson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2006
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780674023635

This classic psychological case study focuses on one talkative child's emerging ability to use language, her capacity for understanding, for imagining, and for making inferences and solving problems. In wide-ranging essays, scholars offer multifaceted linguistic and psychological analyses of two-year-old Emily's bedtime conversations with her parents and pre-sleep monologues, taped over a fifteen-month period. In a foreword written for this new edition, Emily, now an adult, reflects on the experience of having been a research subject without knowing it.

Narrative, Perception, Language and Faith

Narrative, Perception, Language and Faith
Author: E. Wright
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780230573727

Many, from a wide range of disciplines, claim that narrative is fundamental to being human. This engaging book presents a coherent thesis to that effect, connecting the Joke and the Story (with all that comedy and tragedy imply) not only with our perception of the world, with the character of faith and with our faith in each other.

Paul's Narrative Thought World

Paul's Narrative Thought World
Author: Ben Witherington
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 1994-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780664254339

It is a common belief that Paul's letters are not stories but rather theological ideas and practical advice. Ben Witherington III thinks otherwise. He is convinced that all of Paul's ideas, arguments, practical advice, and social arrangements are ultimately grounded in stories, some found in the Hebrew Scriptures and some found in the oral tradition.

Narrative Across Media

Narrative Across Media
Author: Marie-Laure Ryan
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780803289932

Narratology has been conceived from its earliest days as a project that transcends disciplines and media. The essays gathered here address the question of how narrative migrates, mutates, and creates meaning as it is expressed across various media. Dividing the inquiry into five areas: face-to-face narrative, still pictures, moving pictures, music, and digital media, Narrative across Media investigates how the intrinsic properties of the supporting medium shape the form of narrative and affect the narrative experience. Unlike other interdisciplinary approaches to narrative studies, all of which have tended to concentrate on narrative across language-supported fields, this unique collection provides a much-needed analysis of how narrative operates when expressed through visual, gestural, electronic, and musical means. In doing so, the collection redefines the act of storytelling. Although the fields of media and narrative studies have been invigorated by a variety of theoretical approaches, this volume seeks to avoid a dominant theoretical bias by providing instead a collection of concrete studies that inspire a direct look at texts rather than relying on a particular theory of interpretation. A contribution to both narrative and media studies, Narrative across Media is the first attempt to bridge the two disciplines.