Stories, Meaning, and Experience: Narrativity and Enaction

by Yanna B. Popova

This is a book about the human propensity to think about and experience the world through stories. ‘Why do we have stories?’, ‘How do stories create meaning for us?’, and ‘How is storytelling distinct from other forms of meaning-making?’ are some of the questions that this book seeks to answer. Although these and other related problems have preoccupied linguists, philosophers, sociologists, narratologists, and cognitive scientists for centuries, in Stories, Meaning, and Experience , Yanna Popova takes an original interdisciplinary approach, situating the study of stories within an enactive understanding of human cognition. Enactive approaches to consciousness and cognition foreground the role of interaction in explanations of social understanding, which includes the human practices of telling and reading stories. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centred approaches that have dominated structuralist and early cognitivist views of narrative meaning, as well as pragmatic ones that view narrative understanding as a form of linguistic implicature. The intersubjective experience that each narrative both affords and necessitates, the author argues, serves to highlight the active, yet cooperative and communal, nature of human sociality, expressed in the numerous forms of human interaction, of which storytelling is one.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published December 30, 2013

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel hardly competent to comment on this book. Nevertheless, I will try. The main problem presented here was regarding what makes a narrative a coherent story. There were many opinions what the relationship between the reader and the story is, some of them included the reader being a participant in the story (according to Popova), a user, or a decoder of the story.

All good stories should be coherent and have purpose, meaning, and closure. People use stories to convey messages and organise knowledge, even when it is presented in metaphorical way. Some examples were presented and interpreted by the author, namely Marquez's ' Chronicle of a Death Foretold', Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go', and two tales of Henry James.

Overall, the book was concise and well-written. I would not recommend it for an entry-level reading about narrativity, however it should be appealing to more knowledgeable readers - their interaction with the narrator would be more fruitful.

Fun fact:
Feneon's 'novels in three lines':
'Ouch!' cried the cunning oyster eater, 'A pearl!'. Someone at the next table bought it for 100 franks. It had cot 30 cents at the dime store. (Feneon, 169)

[Roy Kenagy]

RK NARRATIVE FOLDER ANF in progress