Psychological Fiction

3 Key excerpts on "Psychological Fiction"

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  eBook - ePub

  Why Reading Books Still Matters

  The Power of Literature in Digital Times

  • Martha C. Pennington, Robert P. Waxler(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution , “The teller of a story has, in the nature of the story-telling art, direct access to the inner mental experience of the story’s characters. This access is impossible to develop in other arts – music, dance, painting, and sculpture” (Dutton, 2009, p. 118).

  The reader of a story gains this same access to the story characters’ mental experience. By portraying the “mundane imaginative structures of memory, immediate perception, planning, calculation, and decision-making, both as we experience them ourselves and as we understand others to be experiencing them” (Dutton, 2009, p. 119), literary narrative pulls the reader into the reading experience and so into the story itself.

  The Nature of Fiction

  Fiction is a category of linguistic genre, typically written, whose purpose is to move people into their imaginations and then to take them on an enjoyable – and, in the best case, enriching – psychological journey in that imaginary space created through language. A fiction writer succeeds in doing this by presenting a simulation of human life and experience in the form of a story that stimulates a reader’s imagination and guides the reader’s psychological journey. An effective simulation in a work of fiction takes readers on a mental journey that is both enjoyable and memorable as it traverses a “storyscape” which, while it has familiar resonances, offers much that is new and beckons to be explored. This is a journey leading from the beginning point of the story to its ending point via the new terrain created from the writer’s mind and experience, as linked to the vast territory of the reader’s own mind and experience.

  Fiction builds a model world within the text that has resemblances to the nontextual “real world,” that is, it has verisimilitude . In the view of Uffe Seilman and Steen Larsen, “verisimilitude seems to be a decisive feature of ‘good’ literature” (Seilman & Larsen, 1989, p. 166) that gives it “personal resonance” (p. 167) for the reader and helps distinguish literary reading from “ordinary text comprehension” (p. 166). James Wood, writing in How Fiction Works (Wood, 2008), stresses that verisimilitude is only one of two essential qualities of fiction – the other being artifice

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  eBook - ePub

  The Creative Writer's Mind

  • Nigel Krauth(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  Major literary products that study a character’s mind-work are acknowledged classics – Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway or The Waves, and many others. While a significant group of novels is now categorised as Psychological Fiction or Psychological Realism, authors across the board depict kinds of mind-activity in ways accordant to the genre they work in – from the detective’s deductive thinking in crime fiction to the heroine’s emotional thinking in romance fiction, and so on. According to Simon Kemp, ‘every novel is a novel about the mind, at least to some extent’ (Kemp, 2018: 3). But there is little special recognition that creative writers have explored and added importantly to our knowledge of mental processes. Recent critical books that may change this perception include Simon Kemp’s Writing the Mind (2018), Jason Tougaw’s The Elusive Brain (2018), Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds (2004) and David Lodge’s Consciousness and the Novel (2002). Earlier investigations of this territory were Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds (1978) and Sharon Cameron’s Thinking in Henry James (1989). Cohn’s book teased apart modes of introspective narrative used in fiction. It set up categories of monologue and discussed the relationship of psycho-narration, quoted monologue and narrated monologue (her terms) to memory, chronology, style, irony, etc. (Cohn, 1978: 11–14). Cohn compared critics’ differing perspectives and she was sympathetic to the writer’s viewpoint. She used William James (and other psychologists) as a touchstone for understanding the working of the mind. She pointed out that novelists such as Laurence Sterne: had used fragmentary syntax, staccato rhythms, non sequiturs and incongruous imagery when quoting minds in a state of agitation or reverie long before Jamesian, Freudian, Bergsonian, or Jungian ideas became fashionable

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  Literature and Understanding

  The Value of a Close Reading of Literary Texts

  • Jon Phelan(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This opening chapter has defended Friend’s claim that ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ are categories defined in terms of standard and contra-standard features. Fiction may be further divided into sub-genres such as crime fiction, science fiction or romantic fiction. I have made the case that ‘literature’ and ‘non-literature’ are super-genres that are also best accounted for in terms of standard and contra-standard features. Literature may be further divided into literary fiction and literary non-fiction. Hence, there is an intersection between the categories of fiction and literature which is known as ‘literary fiction’. Works that are classed in any of the distinguishable genres of fiction, such as science fiction, can be categorised as literary fiction as long as the work exhibits some standard features and lack of contra-standard features of literature. Literary fiction, as a sub-genre of literature and of fiction, entails that literary fiction stands in a different relation to fiction than genres such as romance or crime. One further implication is that cognitivist, anti-cognitivist and non-cognitivist arguments applied to literary fiction need to specify whether the argument applies to literary fiction as literature or as fiction, or as both.

  Notes

  1 ‘The library concept of literature’ is defended by (Pettersson 2012: 197) but remains vague over what criteria librarians use: is it book size, popularity, the publisher’s classification? Institutional accounts of fiction and literature are vague in the same way.

  2 A similar criticism of the ‘extremely schematic’ illustrations used in moral philosophy is made by Bernard Williams (1995: 217); this criticism applies whether the schematic illustration is fiction or non-fiction. For Williams, the important criterion is that the example is chosen from telling experience.

  3 This account of fiction most famously occurs in Currie, G. (1990) The Nature of Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 45; others follow viz. Lamarque, P. and Olsen, E. (1994) Truth, Fiction and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 38–34, located within the conventions of the practice of writing fictions and p. 242; Davies, D. (1996) ‘Fictional Truth and Fictional Authors’. British Journal of Aesthetics, 36, pp. 43–55; Davies, D. (2001) ‘Fiction’. In Gaut, B. and McIver Lopes, D. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. London: Routledge, pp. 263–274; Stock, K. (2011) ‘Fictive Utterance and Imagining’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary, 85, pp. 145–61.

  4 Gilbert Ryle (1968, 2009) was the first person to use the phrase ‘thick narrative’ to describe action that signifies more than mere bodily movement e.g. a wink in contrast to a blink. Bernard Williams (2010) applies the phrase to concepts in ethics that carry both descriptive and evaluative meaning such as ‘miser’ or ‘gratitude’. The most common use of ‘thick narrative’ in the philosophy of literature refers to a written or oral text that is especially rich in descriptive content (e.g. Gibson 2011: 75). Although Rafe McGregor develops the notion of thick narrative a lot more in McGregor, R. (2016) The Value of Literature

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