How Authors' Minds Make Stories

Patrick Colm Hogan is a professor in the Department of English and of the programs in Cognitive Science, Comparative Literature and Comparative Studies, and India Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of fifteen books, including The Mind and its Stories and What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion, and the editor of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences.

• Introduction: from the universal to the particular; 1. Simulation: imagining fictional worlds in Faulkner and Austen; 2. Story development, literary evaluation, and the place of character; 3. A narrative idiolect: Shakespeare's heroic stories; 4. Principles and parameters of storytelling: the trajectory of Racine's romantic tragedies; 5. Argument and metaphor in Brecht and Kafka; 6. Emplotment: selection, organization, and construal in Hamlet; Afterword: if on a winter's night a narrator ….

“From his groundbreaking work on how the mind’s stories resonate with themes that occur all around the world, Patrick Hogan takes on the question of how minds make stories. His answer is that it is by the same sort of imagination that we humans use to know each other. Hogan ranges cogently through examples from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Jane Austen’s Emma to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. He ends with an afterword, inspired by Italo Calvino, of a kind you won’t find in any other academic book. Marvelous.” – Keith Oatley, University of Toronto