Karin Kukkonen

Contemporary Comics Storytelling

How to analyze comics cognitively -- Textual traditions in comics: fables, genre, and intertextuality -- Fictionality in comics: Tom Strong, storyworlds, and the imagination -- Fictional minds in comics: 100 bullets, characterization, and ethics.

Popular Cultural Memory

Abstract Conventions of genres, types and icons of popular culture are the shared knowledge of media audiences. Becoming acquainted with them through the reception of media texts resembles a socialisation process in its own right: It constitutes a community of media readers. The context knowledge they share is their popular cultural memory. On the level of the individual reading process, this context knowledge then provides the necessary guiding lines for understanding the connotative dimensions of a popular media text. Popular cultural memory is a repository of conventions and imagery that are continually reconstructed in contemporary popular culture. Drawing on J. Assmann’s writings on the functions and processes of collective memory, the present article develops popular cultural memory as a concept to describe the workings of context knowledge for media texts, while taking into consideration both the macrolevel of audience communities and the microlevel of the individual reading process. The comics series Fables by Bill Willingham (NY: DC Comics Vertigo, 2003-) will provide the example through which the article explores the functions of popular cultural memory in media texts, which can take shapes as different as the identification of genre, the stabilisation of intertextual reference chains or the creation of round characters and complex reflexivity.

Bayesian Narrative: Probability, Plot and the Shape of the Fictional World

‘Probability’ seems to be a term forgotten by literary theory. Central to neoclassical and Augustan criticism, probability describes the inferences of readers and their developing discernment of what is likely to happen in a narrative (Patey 1984). This article proposes to bring probability back into the current debates in narratology and literary theory by drawing on recent advances in probabilistic, Bayesian approaches to different aspects of human cognition. Considering the example of Frances Burney’s novel Evelina (1778), it presents a Bayesian model for the analysis of narrative through the ways in which the encounter with the text shapes readers’ probability judgements. A narrative’s ‘probability design’ cues readers to revise ormaintain their expectations for its further development and leads readers to accept outcomes as inevitable that seemed distinctly unlikely at the beginning of the narrative (such as Evelina’s brilliant marriage to the aristocrat Lord Orville in Burney’s novel). Reconsidering narrative from a Bayesian, probabilistic point of view offers new perspectives on the emotional investments of readers in narrative, aswell as plot and verisimilitude. Karin Kukkonen, University of Turku E-Mail: karin.kukkonen@utu.fi

Flouting figures: Uncooperative narration in the fiction of Eliza Haywood

Eliza Haywood’s narrators often display what could be termed ‘uncooperative narration’ in that they defy the smooth course that fictional narration is supposed to take, and claim to be unable to narrate strongly emotional states (in Love in Excess, 2000; first published 1719) or precipitate readers’ reactions to future events (in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 1998; first published 1751). Haywood’s strategies of uncooperative narration are based on rhetorical figures which flout the cooperative principle underlying human communication according to Grice: the denial of narration, adynaton, flouts the maxim of quantity; the time-based playing with readers’ meaning-making, prolepsis, flouts the maxim of manner. This article will develop an account of uncooperative narration on the basis of Gricean pragmatics (Grice, 1989) and Tomasello’s work on communication and cooperation in human evolution (Tomasello, 2008), which extends the traditional narratological focus on unreliable narration. Uncooperative narration challenges readers to find the communicative purpose behind flouting figures like adynaton and prolepsis, contributes to the characterisation of the narrator and, in Eliza Haywood’s fiction, often holds up a mirror to readers themselves.

IntroductionUnnatural and Cognitive Perspectives on Narrative (A Theory Crossover)

This special issue presents a “crossover” between two strands of contemporary narrative theory: a second-generation cognitive approach that foregrounds the linkage of stories, mind, and the human body; and an unnatural approach, which focuses on narratives that depart from and challenge everyday cognitive parameters, including those involved in so-called literary realism. In this introduction to the special issue, we take our cue from Franz Kafka’s “Wish to Become a Red Indian” (a paragraph-long short story) to illustrate these ways of theorizing about narrative and to Poetics Today 39:3 (September 2018) DOI 10.1215/03335372-7032676 q 2018 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics The first drafts of the essays in this special issue were presented inNovember 2016 at aworkshop hosted by the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University (Sweden). The editors would like to thank Christer Johansson and Göran Rossholm for making this workshop possible, and the participants for their input on the articles. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/542780/0390429.pdf by guest on 25 November 2018 discuss the conceptual divides that separate them. From an unnatural perspective, the cognitive approach flattens narrative to real-world psychology; from a cognitive perspective, the unnatural approach ignores the way that every narrative, no matter how challenging or innovative, exploits our cognitive makeup. By examining these assumptions and by tracing the history of cognitive and unnatural models of narrative, this special issue seeks to move beyond a conceptual standoff between them. The essays collected in the issue demonstrate that it is possible to combine a cognitive approach with an interest in unnatural stories— or, conversely, an unnatural approach and attention to the cognitive and embodied dynamics of narrative. In addition to previewing the arguments advanced in the articles, this introduction explicates the innovative method of scholarly collaboration through which the articles came about, and the different results it produced in each case.

Bayesian Bodies: The Predictive Dimension of Embodied Cognition and Culture1

The embodied mind has a predictive, probabilistic dimension. The present chapter develops some implications of such Bayesian aspects of embodied cognition, the so-called ‘predictive processing model’, for reading and sense-making. As we shall see, readers might not only experience embodied resonances of a character’s actions and engage with the affordances of fictional environments, but they might also use the probabilities inscribed in these embodied actions and environments for their own sense of the development of the narrative. Such probabilities are derived from the bodily actions and affordances mentioned in the text and, at the same time, from the cultural ‘patterned practices’ of the real world (and of fictional worlds from established literary precedent). Furthermore, language emerges as an important element of embodied predictive processing in more recent accounts, shaping inferences both in the real world and, arguably, in the imaginative mode of fictional narrative. A predictive approach to embodied cognition provides, I argue, one way for integrating issues of long-standing concern in literary studies, namely, narrative, cultural practices and fictional uses of language, with e-cognition in cognitive approaches to literature.

Book reviews: Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques: A Stylistic and Pragmatic Analysis. by Massimiliano Morini, 2009, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 163 ISBN 978 0 7546 6607 3 (hbk)

an earlier example, Barack Obama’s presidential acceptance speech, which compared favourably with that of Lincoln and has been hailed as powerfully expressive. Crystal’s (2006) findings regarding the impact of the internet on language use provide a useful complement in terms of the significance he places on the development of ‘netspeak’. Despite the minor reservations I have outlined, Language and Media is a worthwhile book for first-year students for its development of systematic frameworks for analysis, the informed choice of readings and the invocation to readers to adopt a critical perspective when considering the language of the media.