Sunday, July 21, 2013

Pg. 99: Patrick Colm Hogan's "How Authors’ Minds Make Stories"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: How Authors' Minds Make Stories by Patrick Colm Hogan.

About the book, from the publisher:
This book explores how the creations of great authors result from the same operations as our everyday counterfactual and hypothetical imaginations, which cognitive scientists refer to as “simulations.” Drawing on detailed literary analyses as well as recent research in neuroscience and related fields, Patrick Colm Hogan develops a rigorous theory of the principles governing simulation that goes beyond any existing framework. He examines the functions and mechanisms of narrative imagination, with particular attention to the role of theory of mind, and relates this analysis to narrative universals. In the course of this theoretical discussion, Hogan explores works by Austen, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Racine, Brecht, Kafka, and Calvino. He pays particular attention to the principles and parameters defining an author's narrative idiolect, examining the cognitive and emotional continuities that span an individual author's body of work.
Learn more about How Authors' Minds Make Stories at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: How Authors' Minds Make Stories.

--Marshal Zeringue