What Signs Exist to Indicate Intention in a Novel?
"We all learn, whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior reflects a character's state of mind, and every fictional story that we read reinforces our tendency to make that kind of assumption first.
It seems to me that our unease on this occasion stems from our intuitive realization that on some level our evolved cognitive architecture indeed does not fully distinguish between real and fictional people." -- Lisa Zunshine, pages 4 & 19, Why We Read Fiction
This is one of the questions that I'll be exploring in my research paper on attention and interest, especially with how a reader can follow along a character's often unspoken mental track. Zunshine's whole article on cognitive psychology and theory of mind is extremely interesting, and I'm hoping to be able to check it out to see if it will have relevance to my particular topic. Last semester, I took a Neuroscience of Child Development course, and we actually spent a fair amount of time on theory of mind, as well as reading Simon Baren-Cohen's articles. To read this article was a very nice refresher, and got me excited thinking about continuing study in a similar area. For instance, there is a point in Tristram Shandy when he laments how long it will take him to write his life story, especially since he was already at four volumes and still hadn't been born yet. How familiar would this feel to a college student at final exam time? The reader knows, intrinsically, because of their own theory of mind, that he is lamenting the brevity of time when faced with a daunting task. It is moments like these that I would like to investigate.
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