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This paper offers a focalization reading of Michael Chabon's The Final Solution, attempting to uncover the way the author narrates the Holocaust with both animal and human perspectives. Drawing on the existing scholarship regarding focalization, it engages with the parrot's and the old man's points of view, and looks at their significance to the representation of the protagonist's Holocaust memories. Aided by Holocaust imagery and consciousness representation techniques, the parrot's animal and the old man's Holmesian perspectives evoke the scenes of the Holocaust and the Nazi images, and show a Holocaust that is irrational, unknowable and unspeakable, that is, Chabon reconfigures the focalization structure of Holmesian canon to demonstrate the inability of Holmesian reason to solve the mystery of the Holocaust, and the inability of human language to speak about the horror and trauma of the Holocaust. For Chabon, this unique focalization pattern helps to present the trauma and existential crisis of the protagonist, and narrate his Holocaust memories artistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars working in different areas of literary studies have recently developed an interest in how literature deals with the 'deep', evolutionary history of humankind. Cross-fertilizing this line of enquiry with accounts of consciousness representation in cognitive narrative theory, my essay explores literary figurations of prehistoric mentalities and their interpretive ramifications. Through two case studies, Jack London's Before Adam (1906) and William Golding's The Inheritors (1955), I examine how fictional texts may convey the difference between modern-day cognition and the psychological life of our hominid ancestors. By investigating the narrative strategies employed by London (first-person narration, embedded narrative) and Golding (internal focalization), I advance hypotheses about how such devices may guide readers' engagements with the two novellas' protagonists and shape their interpretations. I argue that, while London renders the cognitive specificity of proto-humans in purely negative terms - that is, by subtracting capacities that we tend to associate with Homo sapiens - Golding stages a complex trade-off between archaic and modern mentalities. In different ways, both London's and Golding's novellas can prompt reflection on the cognitive evolution of the Homo genus, potentially involving readers in the challenges of thinking about evolutionary phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the emergence of consciousness is explained in terms of interpretation and community. It draws contrasts between objects and conscious beings in order to show that differences between objects and conscious beings hinge on different types of interpretation. These differences arise from the way interpretation of a given context or scene works. Scenes in which conscious agents are present exhibit interpretive complexities not seen in those comprised solely of objects. Interpretation is further shown to be reliant upon the communicative potentials of a community. The difference consciousness makes is thus grounded in interpretations that rely upon communication communities, or more generally, in an account of points of view. In this way we see the emergence of consciousness is dependent on perspective and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The Basic Communicative Spaces Network (BCSN –) accounts for crucial semantic–pragmatic characteristics of causal relations expressed by frequently used Dutch causal connectives. BCSN integrates subjectivity theory, domain theory, and mental spaces theory to explain their linguistic categorization. Starting with the original three-way classification of content, epistemic, and speech act use, BCSN represents different uses in separate but connected and embedded mental spaces that are linked to the Subject of Consciousness (SoC), who is present as an actor or concluder in many causal relations. The analytic structure of BCSN explains the contrasts between the backward Dutch causal connectives WANT ‘because/for/since’, signaling speech act and epistemic relations in which the speaker is the implicit SoC, and OMDAT ‘because (of the fact that)’, typically expressing content relations with an explicit SoC. This division of labor corresponds to a cognitive categorization in terms of BCSN. On a more general level, BCSN offers a model for the recursive patterning that characterizes perspective alternation in natural discourse, since the BCSN represents both the author''s subjectivity and the subjectivity of other actors in the discourse (such as speakers and characters in a narration), as well as the blends between these perspectives. The analysis is illustrated with corpus examples. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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The article discusses the focalization graphic narrative which is the filtering of a story through a consciousness prior to and/or embedded within its narratorial mediation. It tackles the three ways in which focalization may be signaled in graphic narrative such as the shifts in visual vocabulary and the braiding of identical visual material. It adds that the combination of a visual and a verbal track of the graphic narrative may complicate the permutations of narration and focalization.

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others. William James Principles of Psychology [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instead of considering key concepts of narratology such as focalization (perspective) or mode of narration (teller vs. reflector, as Franz K. Stanzel has it) simply as criteria for a typology of texts, this paper intends to activate them as ‘symbolic forming tools’ or ‘means of meaning making’ in literary art. The fundamental claim is that an author can activate or apply them in various ways—experimenting with them—in order to obtain given meaning effect within one and the same text. Through analysis of examples it is shown how authors' variations on the focalization, the narrative mode, and the granularity axes produce semiotic effects amenable to systematic characterization. A recurrent concern in the paper is the representation of consciousness in literary art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the representation of consciousness in Ian McEwan's novel Saturday. It considers the ways by which McEwan explores the complexities of mental processing through the combined effects of characterisation, focalisation and conceptual metaphors. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis, using ideas from the cognitive sciences to view Saturday as a meta-text, inviting us to reflect upon the complementary roles of science and the arts in our efforts to understand the mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Playing videogames ranks among the most popular activities on the contemporary media menu. However, just what ‘play’ entails remains poorly researched and consequently little is written on the role and subject positions of the player in relation to on-screen characters. This article offers a way of thinking about the player's subject position that moves attention away from identification with on-screen characters and towards the engagement with the videogame as a simulation. In doing so, and drawing on Fuller and Jenkins (Nintendo and new world travel writing: A dialogue, Sage, 1995) and Friedman (Civilization and its discontents: Simulation, subjectivity, and space, New York University Press, 1999) for example, the author suggests that the videogame player engages not with any single element of the system such as a character or ‘avatar,’ but rather apprehends the videogame as a system — a mathematical model. This mode of engagement encourages and requires that the player ‘think like the computer’ in exploring its boundaries, scrutinizing its rules, exploiting its potentialities, and ultimately becoming part of the system itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines linguistic, cognitive, communicative approaches to metaphor and its functioning in the narrative text. Special attention is paid to the problem of iconicity and the Wittgensteinian notion of "aspect seeing" as relevant to the metaphor studies. It is shown that the extended understanding of metaphor as "trope" or "figure" in the post-structuralist literary theory allows to see metaphor as a textual "interpretation machine". In the process of interaction of narrative and figurative patterns, metaphor functions as a means of perspectivization, i.e. representation of consciousness. In the literary text, perspective changes permanently and the subsequent configurations have an impact on the previous ones: there occurs a permanent "feedback" and correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]