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This article examines Muriel Spark's first novel, The Comforters, in the light of her autobiographical account of the hallucinations she experienced prior to writing the novel. In particular, it focuses on how Spark represents hallucinatory experience through the use of experimental metafictional devices, such as the metaleptic intrusion of the narrative voice into the storyworld. These devices, it is argued, can be viewed as carrying out two distinct yet integrated functions, on the one hand conveying aspects of the phenomenology of auditory verbal hallucinations by eliciting a certain type of readerly response, while on the other serving to represent the destabilization of the protagonist's senses of self and agency which is attendant upon her hallucinatory experiences. KEYWORDS: AVHs, hallucinations, self, auditory imagery, audionarratology, cognitive literary studies, experientiality, metafiction, reader response, agency, metalepsis, phenomenology, Muriel Spark, The Comforters, ''[T]he mechanics of the hallucinations are well managed''--so said Evelyn Waugh in his reply to Alan Barnsely, Spark's literary agent, upon reading proofs of The Comforters prior to its publication [...]

abstract:In recent years, cognitive narratology has drawn on insights from cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind in order to revise the debate around authorial intention. These theoretical approaches often necessarily take into account the phenomenology of narrative creation, yet for the most part, this phenomenology is either derived from a selective sample of anecdotal accounts or else is essentially taken for granted. This article attempts to redress this balance somewhat by attempting an integration of the theoretical and the empirical, and evaluating the theoretical claims made by narratologists in the light of recent phenomenological data on writers’ experiences of their characters (Foxwell et al. 2020). This article suggests that incorporating empirical data in this fashion potentially allows for challenging and refining some previous theories, while also highlighting areas that have been somewhat neglected: most significantly, the role of inner speech in narrative production. Moreover, this article argues that recognizing how inner speech a ects both agency and social cognition allows for the reincorporation of valuable insights from “strong” anti-intentionalism while still allowing for the more moderate position advanced within cognitive narratology.

In 1997, Oregon enacted rules that define an unacceptable population-level risk as a >10% chance of >20% of the total local population receiving an exposure greater than the toxicity reference value. This rule applies to populations of plants and animals not listed as threatened or endangered. An operational procedure was developed to perform such population-level ecological risk assessments. This case study describes how this procedure was used to develop site-specific groundwater remedial action objectives for resident aquatic populations at a site in Northwest Oregon, where an upland petroleum pipeline released gasoline-range hydrocarbons (TPH-G) into soils and groundwater immediately upgradient of the Tualatin River. With an interim response in place, the goal was to proactively establish a remedial action objective that would equate to an acceptable risk level for populations of aquatic receptors potentially threatened by future groundwater discharges to the river. Approximately 10 and 32% dilutions of the water-soluble fraction of pure product produced an acceptable risk level for zooplankton and forage fish populations, respectively. The proposed population-level remedial action objective, based on zooplankton as the most sensitive receptor, was a TPH-G groundwater concentration of 17.4 mg/L.