Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative

by Torsa Ghosal

Overview

What is the relationship between aesthetic presentation of thought and scientific conceptions of cognition? Torsa Ghosal’s Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative answers this question by offering incisive commentary on a range of contemporary fictions that combine language, maps, photographs, and other images to portray thought. Situating literature within groundbreaking debates on memory, perception, abstraction, and computation, Ghosal shows how stories not only reflect historical beliefs about how minds work but also participate in their reappraisal. Out of Mind makes a compelling case for understanding narrative forms and cognitive-scientific frameworks as co-emergent and cross-pollinating. To this end, Ghosal harnesses narrative theory, multimodality studies, cognitive sciences, and disability studies to track competing perspectives on remembering, reading, and sense of place and self. Through new readings of the works of Kamila Shamsie, Aleksandar Hemon, Mark Haddon, Lance Olsen, Steve Tomasula, Jonathan Safran Foer, and others, Out of Mind generates unique insights into literary imagination’s influence on how we think and perceive amid twenty-first-century social, technological, and environmental changes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814258101
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	11/08/2024
Series:	Cognitive Approaches to Culture
Pages:	234
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Torsa Ghosal is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento.

Read an Excerpt

How do we think about thinking in the twenty-first century? How do narratives construct and mediate knowledge about cognition? What are the implications of the formal techniques authors use to represent cognition and mental pathologies in response to twenty-first-century social, technological, and environmental developments? Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative addresses these questions by analyzing contemporary British and American print fictions that combine a variety of semiotic modes (photographs, maps, different styles of inscription) to represent cognitive processes.

In order to produce knowledge about consciousness and cognition, philosophers and scientists have always relied on the latest modes and media: from Aristotle’s “tabula rasa” and John Locke’s “white paper” to Alan Turing’s, John von Neumann’s, and Jerry Fodor’s versions of the “computational minds” there are numerous instances in which “mind” is modelled after what is “out[side] of mind” for heuristic purposes. Psychologist Douwe Draaisma observes that philosophical and psychological language describing memory has a “metaphorical cast” (2000, 3). Media technologies invented to store and reproduce information become the bases for generating novel models of memory. What Draaisma says about memory also rings true for other cognitive processes. Theories of cognition in general have a metaphorical cast. Out of Mind is concerned with literary narrative’s engagement with this rich history and practice of analogical thinking about the mind. It maps how semiotic modes rendering characters’ perception, comprehension, and memory in narratives are involved in the study of cognition across disciplines. While connecting cognitive-scientific and philosophical frameworks with the poetics of thought representation, this book reflects on the social, technological, and environmental conditions prompting widespread reappraisals of what it means to think in the twenty-first century.

The narratives examined in Out of Mind include Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002), Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture (2006), Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008), Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World (2005), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013), and Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting (2014). These narratives were composed in an era dominated by classical computing, and the impact of computing technologies is palpable on their approaches to thought. Besides discussing this impact, Out of Mind considers how and why semiotic modes and media—including maps and pictures—that were troped on to interpret cognitive activities well before the emergence of classical computing come to be materially incorporated in them. That twenty-first-century narratives reproduce the modes and media in their material form rather than only allude to them through language is significant. The material presence of the dominant figures so frequently invoked in metaphors explicating thought defamiliarizes these figures, directing us—the readers—to recognize the technological and cultural forces behind widely accepted truisms about the mind. At the same time, literary narratives are not composed to simply communicate knowledge about cognition or convince readers of the validity of cognitive-scientific and philosophical theories, even when how minds work is a major thematic preoccupation of a narrative. Instead, narratives reframe extant and emerging knowledge in creative ways, incorporate and transform conventions of thought representation available in literary history, and playfully hint at unresolved issues and ideas. Without losing sight of the distinction in rhetorical goals of literary artifacts from scientific and philosophical disquisitions, Out of Mind charts the co-emergence of aesthetic and cognitive-scientific conceptualizations of normative and divergent thinking.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction    Multimodality and Cognitive Literary Studies

Chapter 1        Typographic Minds: Cognitive Disabilities and Explanatory Pluralism

Chapter 2        Selfieing Minds: Picturing and Sharing Subjectivities

Chapter 3        Cartographic Minds: Spatial Thinking, Spatial Reading

Chapter 4        Anti-Archival Minds: Collecting, Deleting, and Scaling Memories

Coda    Binge Reading versus Picnoleptic Reading

Works Cited

Index

Editorial Reviews

Ghosal’s book is a wonderful example of cutting edge, interdisciplinary humanities research that has implications for future studies of the novel and the mind and ways artists engage their audiences. Summing Up: Highly recommended.” —J. J. Donohue, CHOICE


“Torsa Ghosal’s Out of Mind urges us to be more open-minded (pun intended) and embrace explanatory pluralism for how minds work.” —Sue Kim, author of On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative


“As cognitive literary studies moves more adeptly across narrative media, Torsa Ghosal’s Out of Mind admirably takes media-conscious, multimodal fictions into the fold, exploring the ways in which narrative fiction culturally and historically encodes what we think we are doing when we perceive, map, remember, and forget our own lived experiences.” —David Ciccoricco, author of Reading Network Fiction

From the Publisher