Stories, Meaning, and Experience

This book presents a complete reconsideration of the nature of narrative organization developed in the framework of a new and comprehensive approach to cognitive science: enaction. This new paradigm offers an understanding of human cognition based in the perception and sensory motor dynamics of an agent and a world. It argues that narrative is but one form of conceptual organization for human minds, the other being categorical organization. Complex literary narratives, as well as visual art, are instances in which both types of organization coexist, and in later chapters the model is elaborated in relation to some of those examples, specifically stories by Henry James and Gabriel García Márquez. The understanding of narrative offered by Popova thus cuts across many of the core issues in fields such as narratology, cognitive psychology, and traditional story grammars.