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Engaging with fictional stories and the characters within them might help us better understand our real-world peers. Because stories are about characters and their interactions, understanding stories might help us to exercise our social cognitive abilities. Correlational studies with children and adults, experimental research, and neuropsychological investigations have all helped develop our understanding of how stories relate to social cognition. However, there remain a number of limitations to the current evidence, some puzzling results, and several unanswered questions that should inspire future research. This review traces multiple lines of evidence tying stories to social cognition and raises numerous critical questions for the field.

Although there is a large body of research assessing whether exposure to narratives boosts social cognition immediately afterward, not much research has investigated the underlying mechanism of this putative effect. This experiment investigates the possibility that reading a narrative increases social curiosity directly afterward, which might explain the short-term boosts in social cognition reported by some others. We developed a novel measure of state social curiosity and collected data from participants (N = 222) who were randomly assigned to read an excerpt of narrative fiction or expository nonfiction. Contrary to our expectations, we found that those who read a narrative exhibited less social curiosity afterward than those who read an expository text. This result was not moderated by trait social curiosity. An exploratory analysis uncovered that the degree to which texts present readers with social targets predicted less social curiosity. Our experiment demonstrates that reading narratives, or possibly texts with social content in general, may engage and fatigue social-cognitive abilities, causing a temporary decrease in social curiosity. Such texts might also temporarily satisfy the need for social connection, temporarily reducing social curiosity. Both accounts are in line with theories describing how narratives result in better social cognition over the long term.

In this survey Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative fiction.McEwan’s novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an economical stylist: McEwan’s readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing.Although McEwan’s later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, Dominic Head uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. Head makes the case for McEwan’s prominence - pre-eminence, even - in the canon of contemporary British novelists.

In this article we examine the critical proposition that common versions of narratology do not provide an accurate description of narrative fiction and analyze why this critique has mostly been disregarded by narratology. The theoreticians we refer to-Sylvie Patron, Richard Walsh, and Lars-Ake Skalin-do not accept the notion that narrative fiction should be understood in terms of non-fictional narratives. We label their position a \"difference approach\" in contrast to a putative \"sameness approach.\" We find their \"difference\" arguments convincing and therefore ask why they have had no apparent effect on narratology. As we discuss misreadings that the criticized approach to narrative fiction could be expected to generate and arguments that refute the existence of such misreadings, as well as suggested readings of narrative fiction by Liesbeth Korthals Altes, James Phelan, David Herman, and Gerard Genette, we make the claim, referring to Phelan's rhetorical narratology, that sameness narratology is often presented as a theory but in fact used and defended as a method or toolbox. Our suggestion is that it would be better to rework the theory of narrative fiction commonly adopted by narratologists so that the theoretical assertions become congruent with the analytical practice and with the intuitions about narrative fiction that the analytical practice implies. We thus support the difference approach.

Explores the significance of postwar German representations of violence in other places and times. Germany's twentieth-century history has made imagining and representing violence in German culture challenging, meaning that it can be difficult to locate and explore critically the significance of violence in and for the postwar German states. This volume approaches that challenge through critical analysis of \"violence elsewhere,\" that is, constructions of violence in distant, imagined, or temporally distinct times and places. Such representations have offered a stage on which to imagine violence. Moreover, German representations of \"violence elsewhere\" are simultaneously images of Germany itself, revealing something about otherwise submerged meanings and functions of violence in German culture. The essays in this volume explore selected, emblematic works from East, West, and, later, unified Germany, which imagine violence in, for example, Latin America, Vietnam, Cambodia, the USA, and the Middle East, as well as in the respective \"other\" German state and in the German past. Drawing on fields including cultural, literary, film, visual, and gender studies, it introduces multidisciplinary theoretical approaches to the topic of violence elsewhere that may be transferable beyond German studies too. As such, the volume allows us to reflect more broadly on relationships between violence, culture, community, and the creation of identities, and to look beyond binary notions of \"here\" and \"elsewhere,\" \"self\" and \"other.\" It thus expands our understanding of what German culture is and could be. Edited by Clare Bielby and Mererid Puw Davies. Contributors: Seán Allan, Martin Brady, Evelien Geerts, Katharina Karcher, J.J. Long, Ernest Schonfield, and Katherine Stone. Chapter 8, \"Problematizing Political Violence in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Hauntological Analysis of the NSU Terror and a Hyper-Exceptionalized \"9/11\" is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. The open access version of this publication was funded by the European Research Council. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Philosophers and other scholars of religion are increasingly recognizing that if philosophy of religion is to remain relevant to the study of religion, its scope must be expanded well beyond the confines of a highly intellectualized and abstract \"theism.\" Means of engendering this expansion include methodological diversification-drawing upon thickly described accounts of religious life such as those afforded by ethnographies and certain narrative artworks. Focusing on the latter, this article engages with the question of whether works of narrative fiction-literary or cinematic-can do philosophy of religion in ways that illuminate what D.Z. Phillips characterizes as the \"radical plurality\" of contemporary religion. Closely examining the examples of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and especially Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, my discussion is contextualized within broader debates over whether philosophy's purpose is to advocate certain religious and moral perspectives or to elucidate those perspectives in more disinterested terms.

In the 1990s postmodernism as a literary phenomenon led to the development of a lively literary discourse in Afrikaans. However, in contemporary narrative criticism postmodernism rarely features as a theoretical framework for studies of new Afrikaans writing. In poetry criticism postmodernism still enjoys some currency, whereas some critics hold the position that there should be stronger acknowledgement of modernist elements in the development of Afrikaans poetry. In an effort to grasp the manifestation of postmodernism in contemporary Afrikaans prose, this article focuses on globalisation and modernism as two unique challenges to thinking about postmodernism that prevail in Etienne van Heerden’s novel In stede van die liefde (In Cities of Love, 2005). The article identifies three problems in theoretical reflections about postmodernism, namely a too narrowly conceived view of postmodernism, a lack of recognition of the continuities between modernism and postmodernism, and the resulting neglect of modernism. Furthermore, the article offers a critical interrogation of globalisation in its guise as a new master narrative in the light of recent developments in the postmodern era. Through a reading of Van Heerden’s novel, the interrogation focuses on the motifs of slippage and substitution in In stede van die liefde. The representation of space in the novel includes both the urban and the rural and points to ‘glocalisation’, a term that refers to the interconnection between the local and the global. The author proposes that globalisation in the guise of a diffuse and multidimensional master narrative, produces a yearning for older master narratives leading to the reaffirmed presence of modernist elements in a manifestly postmodernist novel such as In stede van die liefde. The challenge is to acknowledge modernist elements in contemporary literature using a theoretical approach that exhaustively accounts for the link between postmodernism and globalisation – new manifestations of modernism can no longer be examined with outdated theories about modernist literature. 

The paper examines different degrees of the subjectivity of speakers who act respectively as a narrator, a character in the story, and the author in narrative fictions. According to the speaker’s four different cases of being on stage, off stage, whether serving as a reference point and cross-world identification, eight types of construal configurations of speaker’s subjectivity have been summarized. Findings show that the speaker is characterized to be maximally subjective when he/she is an author, and minimally subjective when he/she is a character in the story. The degree of speaker’s subjectivity is greater outside the story than that inside it, and it is also greater when he/she is being weakly perceived than that being strongly perceived. Overall, each configuration is a particular narrative strategy adopted by the author to achieve certain effects, and these configurations, to some extent, provide some cognitive interpretations for these achieved narrative effects.

This study examines the works of Dostoevsky as construed by Julia Kristeva in her recent book (Buchet-Chastel, « Les auteurs de ma vie », 2019). Julia Kristeva places the concept of inner experience developed by Georges Bataille in the 1940s at the core of her interpretation and builds on literary psychoanalysis methodology to offer an original interpretation of the Russian writer’s works, that lends itself to discussion. Cette étude se penche sur la lecture de l’œuvre de Dostoïevski, proposée par Julia Kristeva dans un livre récent (Buchet-Chastel, 2019, « Les auteurs de ma vie »). Ayant mis au centre de son interprétation la notion d’expérience intérieure, élaborée par Georges Bataille dans les années 1940, la chercheuse, suivant aussi la méthode de la psychanalyse littéraire, présente une interprétation originale de l’œuvre de l’écrivain russe, qui prête à discussion.