Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution

Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution
Edited by Marina Grishakova and Maria Poulaki.
(Frontiers of Narrative Series). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

About the Book

The variety in contemporary philosophical and aesthetic thinking as well as in scientific and experimental research on complexity has not yet been fully adopted by narratology. By integrating cutting-edge approaches, this volume takes a step toward filling this gap and establishing interdisciplinary narrative research on complexity.

Narrative Complexity provides a framework for a more complex and nuanced study of narrative and explores the experience of narrative complexity in terms of cognitive processing, affect, and mind and body engagement. Bringing together leading international scholars from a range of disciplines, this volume combines analytical effort and conceptual insight in order to relate more effectively our theories of narrative representation and complexities of intelligent behavior.

This collection engages important questions on how narrative complexity functions as an agent of cultural evolution, how our understanding of narrative complexity can be extended in light of new research in the social sciences and humanities, how interactive media produce new types of narrative complexity, and how the role of embodiment as a factor of narrative complexity acquires prominence in cognitive science and media studies. The contributors explore narrative complexity transmitted through various semiotic channels, embedded in multiple contexts, and experienced across different media, including film, comics, music, interactive apps, audiowalks, and ambient literature.

“Encyclopedic in scope, Narrative Complexity surveys a dazzling variety of genres, media forms, and theories about complexity, including artistic, literary, and scientific examples. Contributions by many eminent narratologists make this an invaluable work and essential reading for anyone interested in how the conjunction of narrative and complexity can be configured and interrogated. Kudos to the editors for introducing and assembling this remarkable collection.”—N. Katherine Hayles, author of Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious

“Challenging the distinction between ‘simplicity’ as primary and primordial and ‘complexity’ as secondary and derived from simplicity, these far–ranging studies
make the case that human cultures and minds are inherently complex. They are indeterminate and uncertain. This holds particularly true for narrative discourse, which is at the heart of culture and mind. Understanding homo narrans means un- derstanding the human being in the world in its most complex forms. As a consequence, narrative studies have to refine their intellectual instruments—conceptually, empirically, hermeneutically—in the ways impressively explored in this volume.”
—Jens Brockmeier, professor of psychology at the American University of Paris

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