Abstract: This essay explores ways in which narrative functions as a artifact, i.e., something used by humans for the purpose of supporting or enabling cognition. The essay grows out of our ongoing attempt to blend insights from several fields, including narrative theory, discourse analysis, cognitive science, anthropology, and literary studies. Synthesizing ideas developed in these disciplines, and using Beowulf as our tutor-text, we argue that stories provide crucial representational tools facilitating humans' efforts to organize multiple knowledge domains, each with its attendant sets of beliefs and procedures. (1) Relevant domains include not only those associated with social cognition, the mode of thinking that both enables and is shaped by social experience (see Fiske and Taylor), but also a variety of problem-solving activities extending beyond those connected with social life. More specifically, our essay uses Beowulf to show how stories afford resources for thinking in five broad problem domains, to be characterized below. We focus on the cognition-enabling role of narrative in the Old English poem Beowulf for several reasons. For one thing, the text bridges Anglo-Saxon traditions of oral narration with early medieval English literature, revealing how narrative--from before the start of literate culture--has served as a support for the formulation, systematization, and transmission of communal as well as personal experiences and values. (2) Beowulf, in other words, testifies to the longlastingness of narrative as a tool for thinking. Further, with its inclusion of multiple embedded narratives; its representation of stories as a means of making promises, saving face, and navigating other aspects of social existence; its shifts between homodiegetic (or first-person) and heterodiegetic (or third-person) accounts of one and the same set of events; and its use of nearly parallel life-stories for the Danish king Hrothgar and for Beowulf as king of the Geats, the poem itself represents and thus helps illuminate the cognitive functions of storytelling). (3) What is more, we believe that our approach provides a framework for the comparative study of narrative texts belonging to different periods, cultures, and genres, nonliterary as well as literary. Our thesis is that everywhere and always stories have functioned to make the world more understandable and manageable; but in addition to having core features that make it a cognitive and communicative universal, narrative has over time supported thought in culture-, genre-, and situation-specific ways. Consequently, although a continuum stretches between modes of narrative thinking found in an early medieval epic and those at work in a police interrogation or a ludic postmodern novel, it is important to establish the location of a given story artifact on the continuum at issue. In short, while sketching general and basic principles by virtue of which narrative organizes human understanding, our essay also suggests that those principles are implemented differently in different kinds of narrative texts. A task for future research is to explore how such variation might be correlated more exactly with historical, cultural, and generic factors bearing on the design and interpretation of stories. The first part of the essay reviews recent work on cognitive artifacts and situates the study of narrative in this research context. Then, anchoring our discussion in Beowulf, we survey tire (overlapping) problem-solving activities--chunking experience into workable segments, imputing causal relations between events, managing problems with the typification of phenomena, sequencing behaviors, and distributing intelligence across groups--for which the representational tools bound up with narrative can be argued to furnish crucial support. These activities encompass but are not limited to problems entailed by social cognition. Further, the five modes of problem-solving are pertinent to narrative viewed both as product and as process; they reveal ways in which particular narratives like Beowulf can be exploited as a tool for thinking about specific situations, as well as ways in which narrative in general constitutes a fundamental resource for building, recognizing, and using cognitive artifacts across highly variable circumstances. …
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-06-22
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 10
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot