Narrative and Consciousness

Narrative and Consciousness PDF Author: Gary D. Fireman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190289821
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
We define our conscious experience by constructing narratives about ourselves and the people with whom we interact. Narrative pervades our lives--conscious experience is not merely linked to the number and variety of personal stories we construct with each other within a cultural frame, but is subsumed by them. The claim, however, that narrative constructions are essential to conscious experience is not useful or informative unless we can also begin to provide a distinct, organized, and empirically consistent explanation for narrative in relation to consciousness. Understanding the role of narrative in determining individual and collective consciousness has been elusive from within traditional academic frameworks. This volume argues that addressing so broad and complex a problem requires an examination from outside our insular disciplinary framework. Such an open examination would be informed by the inquiries and approaches of multiple disciplines. Recognition of the different approaches to examining personal stories will allow for the coordination of how narrative seems (its phenomenology), with what mental labor it does (its psychology), and how it is realized (its neurobiology). Only by overcoming the boundaries erected by multiple theoretical and discursive traditions can we begin to comprehend the nature and function of narrative in consciousness. Narrative and Consciousness brings together essays by exceptional scholars and scientists in the disciplines of literary theory, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how stories are constructed, how stories structure lived experience, and how stories are rooted in material reality (the human body). The specific topics addressed include narrative in the development of conscious awareness; autobiographical narrative, fiction and the construction of self; trauma and narrative disruptions; narrative, memory and identity; and the physiological and neural substrate of narrative. It is the editors' hope that the multidisciplinary nature of this collection will challenge the reader to move beyond disciplinary confines and toward a coherent interdisciplinary dialogue.

Narrative and Consciousness

Narrative and Consciousness PDF Author: Gary D. Fireman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190289821
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
We define our conscious experience by constructing narratives about ourselves and the people with whom we interact. Narrative pervades our lives--conscious experience is not merely linked to the number and variety of personal stories we construct with each other within a cultural frame, but is subsumed by them. The claim, however, that narrative constructions are essential to conscious experience is not useful or informative unless we can also begin to provide a distinct, organized, and empirically consistent explanation for narrative in relation to consciousness. Understanding the role of narrative in determining individual and collective consciousness has been elusive from within traditional academic frameworks. This volume argues that addressing so broad and complex a problem requires an examination from outside our insular disciplinary framework. Such an open examination would be informed by the inquiries and approaches of multiple disciplines. Recognition of the different approaches to examining personal stories will allow for the coordination of how narrative seems (its phenomenology), with what mental labor it does (its psychology), and how it is realized (its neurobiology). Only by overcoming the boundaries erected by multiple theoretical and discursive traditions can we begin to comprehend the nature and function of narrative in consciousness. Narrative and Consciousness brings together essays by exceptional scholars and scientists in the disciplines of literary theory, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how stories are constructed, how stories structure lived experience, and how stories are rooted in material reality (the human body). The specific topics addressed include narrative in the development of conscious awareness; autobiographical narrative, fiction and the construction of self; trauma and narrative disruptions; narrative, memory and identity; and the physiological and neural substrate of narrative. It is the editors' hope that the multidisciplinary nature of this collection will challenge the reader to move beyond disciplinary confines and toward a coherent interdisciplinary dialogue.

Narrative and Consciousness

Narrative and Consciousness PDF Author: Gary D. Fireman
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0195140052
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
The evocation of narrative as a way to understand the content of consciousness has sparked truly interdisciplinary work among psychologists, philosophers and literary critics. The research presented in this volume should appeal to the general reader and researchers enmeshed in these problems.

Emergence of Mind

Emergence of Mind PDF Author: David Herman
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803234988
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book Here

Book Description
An anthology that traces the representation of consciousness and mind creation in English literature from 700 to the present.

Narrative and Consciousness

Narrative and Consciousness PDF Author: Gary D. Fireman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781602564343
Category : Autobiographical memory
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
The evocation of narrative as a way to understand the content of consciousness has sparked truly interdisciplinary work among psychologists, philosophers and literary critics. The research presented in this volume should appeal to the general reader and researchers enmeshed in these problems.

Generational Consciousness, Narrative, and Politics

Generational Consciousness, Narrative, and Politics PDF Author: June Edmunds
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742581454
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
With the erosion of strong class theory, sociologists have recently started to look at aspects of social stratification other than class. One of the most interesting new areas of investigation is the sociology of generations. This book brings together the work of scholars who are making a major contribution to this new sociological interest. Through a combination of innovative theoretical and empirical studies, this book shows that an analysis of generations is essential to an understanding of major social, political and intellectual trends in the postwar period. Each author brings to the volume insights from their own area of specialism - with rich illustrative material spanning topics as diverse as African American identity and Spanish youth culture. Theoretical inspiration also comes from a range of traditions, including cultural and historical sociology; social interactionism; social and cognitive psychology and life course theory. However, a unifying thread emerges around questions about how generations should be conceptualized; the role of trauma generating generational consciousness; the relationship between auto-biography and generational identity and the nature of inter and intra-generational relationships. This volume, therefore, provides a lively contribution to debates about the nature of generations and a stimulating basis for further work in this area.

Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness

Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness PDF Author: Jürgen Straub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450397
Category : Consciousness
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
A generally acknowledged characteristic of modern life, namely the temporalization of experience, inextricable from our intensified experience of contingency and difference, has until now remained largely outside psychology's purview. Wherever questions about the development, structure, and function of the concept of time have been posed - for example by Piaget and other founders of genetic structuralism - they have been concerned predominantly with concepts of "physical", chronometrical time, and related concepts (e.g., "velocity"). All the contributions to the present volume attempt to close this gap. A larger number are especially interested in the narration of stories. Overviews of the relevant literature, as well as empirical case studies, appear alongside theoretical and methodological reflections. Most contributions refer to specifically historical phenomena and meaning-constructions. Some touch on the subjects of biographical memory and biographical constructions of reality. Of all the various affinities between the contributions collected here, the most important is their consistent attention to issues of the constitution and representation of temporal experience.

A New Theory of Mind

A New Theory of Mind PDF Author: James A. Wise
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443893129
Category : Thought and thinking
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents a unique and intuitively compelling way of understanding how humans think. It argues that narratives are the natural mode of thinking, that the “urge” to think narratively reflects known neurological processes, and that, although narrative thinking is a product of evolution, it enables us to transcend our evolutionary limits and actively shape our own futures. In remarkably engaging language, the authors describe how the currency of neural activity in the brain is transformed into the qualitatively different currency of conscious experience—the everyday, purposeful, story-like experience with which we all are familiar. The book then examines the nature of thought and how it leads to purposeful action, discussing, among other concerns, how memories about the past, perceptions about the present, and expectations about the future are structured as plausible, coherent narratives by causation, purpose, and time, and how errors are introduced into one’s narratives, both naturally and by other people (often intentionally), and how those errors bias one’s expectations about the future and the actions taken (or not taken) as a consequence. Each of these discussions is followed by a commentary that ties them to interesting facts and questions from throughout the physical and social sciences. The book is concluded with the argument that narrative thought is what is meant when one uses the word “mind.”

Narrative Naturalism

Narrative Naturalism PDF Author: Jessica Wahman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0739187988
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
Narrative Naturalism: An Alternative Framework for Philosophy of Mind provides an original framework for a non-reductive approach to mind and philosophical psychology. Jessica Wahman challenges the reductive (i.e., mechanistic and physicalist) assumptions that render the mind-body problem intractable, and claims that George Santayana’s naturalism provides a more beneficial epistemological method and ontological framework for thinking about the place of consciousness in the natural world. She uses Santayana’s thought as the primary inspiration for her own specific viewpoint, one that draws on a variety of sources, from analytic philosophy of mind to existentialism and psychoanalysis. This outlook, narrative naturalism, depicts sense-making as a kind of storytelling where different narratives serve different purposes, and Wahman offer a unique worldview to accommodate a variety of true expressions about the world, including truths about subjective existence. Motivated by a desire to challenge the reductionist approaches that explain human motivation and experience in terms of neuroscience and by the increasingly pharmacological interpretations of and solutions to psychological problems, Wahman’s overarching purpose is to reconstruct the issue so that neuroscience can be embraced as an indispensable story among others in our understanding of the human condition. When placed in this context, neurobiological discoveries better serve the values and practices associated with human self-knowledge and well-being. Narrative Naturalism will appeal to those interested in American philosophy, Santayana scholarship, pragmatist epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and metaphysics.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind PDF Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

Get Book Here

Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained PDF Author: Daniel C. Dennett
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316439487
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 705

Get Book Here

Book Description
Daniel Dennett's "brilliant" exploration of human consciousness — named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times — is a masterpiece beloved by both scientific experts and general readers (New York Times Book Review). Consciousness Explained is a full-scale exploration of human consciousness. In this landmark book, Daniel Dennett refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Our current theories about conscious life — of people, animal, even robots — are transformed by the new perspectives found in this book. "Dennett is a witty and gifted scientific raconteur, and the book is full of fascinating information about humans, animals, and machines. The result is highly digestible and a useful tour of the field." —Wall Street Journal