- LÁSZLÓ, János: Cognition and Representation in Literature. The Psychology of Literary Narratives
- Publishing House: AKADÉMIAI Kiadó Rt.
- Year of Publication: 1999
- Number of Pages: 250
- Language: English
- This book is about the psychology of literary narratives and is written from a cognitivist perspective. Cognitive psychology is about the acquisition, organization and subsequent use of experience that living organisms, among these human beings, perform while coping with their environments. The present approach is in line with those ecological conceptions of cognitive psychology which make the cognitive processes dependent on the contexts where they take place, accommodate not only the cold, emotionless, analytical cognizing, but also the emotion-driven dynamics of, and place cognition into social and cultural context. The complexity of literary phenomena itself necessitates the adoption of this broader view. The book also presents the social-cognitive approach to literary comprehension which is interested in the knowledge the readers mobilize when reading literary narratives. Using a somewhat old-fashioned word, it is content-oriented in the sense that it aims at uncovering how readers interpret the content of the narrative. It can be conceived a kind of empirical hermeneutics or empirical constructionism, where the construction of the meaning of a literary narrative is mapped in terms of social kowledge or social representations. By this way the social-cognitive approach attempts to integrate the universalistic concepts of human cognitive functioning characteristic to each human mind with phenomena that are socio-culturally constructed and particular to each social or cultural setting.
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