rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">8.1 Introduction
8.2 Group Formation and Intermentality in Arms and the Man
8.3 Group Formation and Intermentality in Candida
8.4 Group Formation and Intermentality in You Never Can Tell
8.5 Group Formation and Intermentality The Man of Destiny
1 A Doll’s House
8 The Importance of Being Earnest
LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES,
THEORY AND THE (NEW) MEDIA
Edited by Monika Fludernik and Sieglinde Lemke
VOLUME 4
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Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Topic and Major Questions
Within the rapidly expanding field of cognitive studies, how are we able to incorporate a useful study of the consciousness of characters in drama? I would like to propose a cognitive approach to analysing playscripts. My main focus is the rendering of characters’ minds and their intersubjectivity in drama in particular. In this study I am primarily concerned with the construction of mentalities and intermental thought of characters in playscripts, that is I will analyse the constructions of minds, examine instances of collective thought and explain groupings of characters in drama. In this study I will work with a selected corpus of plays by Ibsen, Wilde and Shaw, but as I will explain in later chapters I do not see any hindrance in expanding the study to other plays and other literary periods.
Cognitive sciences are focused on the study of the mental states and the relationship between minds that are involved in any cognitive interaction. This outlook makes it well suited to the analysis of the consciousness of groups of character within different storyworlds of drama.
Ever since there were discussions about the dichotomy of the mimetic versus the diegetic, the status of drama as narrative has been a point of dispute among narratologists. Only with the advent of postclassical narrative studies have more scholars started to agree that drama can be regarded as narrative. Nonetheless there is a general disagreement on the telling versus showing problematics. One might argue that with playscripts this debate is superfluous, since the object of analysis is still, very much like the novel, a verbal manifestation of a storyworld and its inhabitants and what happens to them. Thus, the argument that in a novel there is a narrator mediating between the fictional world and the reader, which is normally missing from drama, is not valid. In any type of narrative, with or without an overt narrator – novels as well as playscripts – we are given information about the storyworld and the characters. Fludernik, who defines narrativity as based on experientiality rather than story or plot, even argues: “[a];ll drama, in fact, needs to have characters on stage, and from this minimal requirement, narrativity is immediately assured” (2008: 360). As Fludernik in her article “Narrative and Drama” further states, the reading process and staging the pictures while reading drama is different from that of reading fiction on account of “the explicit staging information in the stage directions” (363). I do not disagree with this difference between reading drama and fiction; however, I find the ←13 | 14→following similarity between the two to be more significant: the fact that readers create a mental picture of fictional characters and minds in action. The more information on the characters’ disposition, mood and state of mind the reader is given, the richer this mental picture becomes. From both novels and drama readers generate a mental picture of the characters. The obvious differences in drama are that the characters are presented in action and that the so-called lack of descriptive information only invites readers to make more use of their imagination, regardless of whether the information is provided by a narrator or not. There is no need to exclude drama from narrative on the grounds of its lack of narratorial mediation in its traditional sense.
One of the main proponents arguing against drama being excluded from narrative fiction is Chatman. In his Coming to Terms he argues:
Is the distinction between diegesis and mimesis, telling and showing, of greater consequence (higher in the structural hierarchy) than that between Narrative and the other text-types? I find no reason to assume so. To me, any text that presents a story – a sequence of events performed or experienced by characters – is first of all narrative. Plays and novels share the common features of a chrono-logic of events, a set of characters, and setting. Therefore, at a fundamental level they are all stories. (1990: 117)
Jahn applies a slightly different terminology. He uses “genre” instead of “text-type” and starts with the division between narratives and non-narratives. And then, within the category of narratives, he makes the distinction between the written and the performed; this distinction is a very important one, especially for this study. Here, the focus will be on the written form of drama, what Jahn repeatedly calls the “playscript mode” (2001: 673).
Since drama is a character-driven genre, one would assume that considerable work and research have been done on characterisation and characters’ consciousness
