International Conference on

MINDS AND NARRATIVE

Leuven (Belgium), 16-18 June 2009

Mental processes are, by many accounts, central to the study of narrative fiction. Work on narrative has focused on various aspects of the essential connection between minds and narrative, e.g. the representation of consciousness in fiction, the mental functioning of characters and the cognitive processing of story worlds by readers. In the last two decades, developments in the cognitive sciences have brought about an important reorientation in the investigation of fictional minds. This domain of inquiry has branched out into an interdisciplinary field that appeals to insights from the philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, discourse studies and artificial intelligence. Researchers bringing narrative studies into contact with the cognitive sciences have revisited major narratological issues (such as narration, characterization, focalization and thought representation). They have launched new research strategies and alternative models for classical problems of the narrative. Thanks to this shift of focus, the latter have been reconceptualized in terms of e.g. mental schemata, metarepresentations, reader inferences, naturalization and experientiality.

This conference aims to broach theoretical and methodological issues concerning the recent developments in the study of minds and narrative fiction. We wish to offer a forum for discussion between the  empirical, narratological and hermeneutic traditions in the field, which can no longer avoid each other, and, in the most promising work, no longer do so. In this way, we not only hope to bring together various types of expertise, but also to expose some of the remaining problems and to formulate challenges for future research. Participants of the conference are invited to propose papers on the representation of mental functioning, on cognitive processing and narrative fiction, as well as on the theoretical foundations and problems involved. Please contact Lars Bernaerts (lars.bernaerts@ugent.be) for further inquiries.