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The mind as a novel metaphor.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

When teaching novels in graduate and undergraduate courses can miss many of the complex interrelationships that occur between various elements of a story. An author's craft is to bring together divergent features to achieve an overall outcome within the mind of the reader. The subtle maneuvers employed by novelists throughout their works often defy linear analyses promoted by simply applying traditional literary devices to the study of novels. A dynamic, holistic approach to the novel is needed where the complex ebbs and flows of motives, literary elements and authorial devices are accounted for in a naturalistic way. Phillips and Huntley's (1995) "Story Mind" is a metaphorical structure that can be applied to novels to uncover the complex interactions of components that develop a complete novel. The present article offers a brief review of the theory's dimensions.

Introduction

All novels and stories possess some type of story structure. Even works that are marked by a free-flowing, stream of consciousness like James Joyce's (1922) Ulysses, William Faulkner's (1930) As I Lay Dying or, more recently, Umberto Eco's (2002) Baudolino in which stories emerge from a narrative perspective at some point in the novels, an overall structure can be identified in hindsight.

Morner and Rausch (1991) define literary structure as, "the design or arrangement of the parts of a work of literature to form a unified whole; the planned framework or 'architecture' of a literary work." (p. 213). The architecture is interpreted and most often presented chronologically or logically in narrative works. However, this paper suggests an alternative view to story that can give students of literature a more complete lens into the parts of a piece that make it whole. The approach advocated here is a metaphorical view of literature, and it proposes an exciting schema for analyzing novels to determine, most of all, if they are complete.

Metaphors in Literature

Metaphors serve a distinct purpose in organizing our mental worlds. At their essence, metaphors impose a familiar architecture upon concepts or ideas that, for various reasons, need clarification or interpretation. The process of clarifying and/or interpreting stories is a major responsibility for those who teach literature to graduate students, undergraduates and grade-school students. Oftentimes, students grasp the major theme of a novel without recognizing the contributory parts that work together to build that theme. This macro-conception of literature is insufficient, on its own, for students of literature if the goal is to teach the author's craft on an elemental level.

Conversely, students who attend to the literary devices at work within...

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