new book deals with Pynchon

[pynchonoid]

Fictional Minds
By Alan Palmer

Cloth: 2004, viii, 276, CIP.LC 2003019700 
ISBN : 0-8032-3743-X
Price: $45.00 
University of Nebraska Press

Fictional Minds suggests that readers understand
novels primarily by following the functioning of the
minds of characters in the novel storyworlds. Despite
the importance of this aspect of the reading process,
traditional narrative theory does not include a
complete and coherent theory of fictional minds.

Readers create a continuing consciousness out of
scattered references to a particular character and
read this consciousness as an “embedded narrative”
within the whole narrative of the novel. The
combination of these embedded narratives forms the
plot. This perspective on narrative enables us to
explore hitherto neglected aspects of fictional minds
such as dispositions, emotions, and action. It also
highlights the social, public, and dialogic mind and
the “mind beyond the skin.” For example, much of our
thought is “intermental,” or joint, group, or shared;
even our identity is, to an extent, socially
distributed.

Written in a clear and accessible style, Fictional
Minds analyzes constructions of characters’ minds in
the fictional texts of a wide range of authors, from
Aphra Behn and Henry Fielding to Evelyn Waugh and
Thomas Pynchon. In its innovative and groundbreaking
explorations, this interdisciplinary project also
makes substantial use of “real-mind” disciplines such
as philosophy, psychology, psycholinguistics, and
cognitive science.

Alan Palmer is an independent scholar living in
London, England. He has a PhD from the University of
East London.

http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bookinfo/4511.html




	
		
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