Implicit Narrativity and Cognitive Ecologies: The Case of Music

The Narrative and Cognition Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities invites you to an online and in-person talk presented by Mike Wheeler at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, on 28 November 2024 12:00 - 13:30 PM with finger buffet during the break.

The narratological analysis of music exploits the correlation between (a) the sequential organization of events in a literary plot and (b) the sequential organization of musical elements in a piece of non-texted music. It then takes the theoretical toolkit of literary narrative theory and adapts that toolkit for the study of such music. This is a well-trodden path that has given theorists novel and productive access to, for example, the relationship between the structural and expressive features of music.

The present talk will begin by taking a somewhat idiosyncratic stroll along that path - ‘idiosyncratic’ in the sense that it will be tailored to our later concerns. Those concerns will emerge from the foregrounding of two things: (i) recent psychological research on the narrative character of music listening (especially work by Margulis and her collaborators) and (ii) the potentially useful but troublesome concept of implicit narrativity. The end result will be a conception of narrativity that rejects the tempting dichotomy according to which the phenomenon is either a quality wholly present in an artwork or a gloss imposed on an artwork by the mind of a reader or listener.

Rather, the picture is this: implicit narrativity is a phenomenon distributed over brain, body, and world, in cognitive ecologies of a certain character, and narratives are enacted in such ecologies. This picture is as applicable to literature and narrative accounts of the self as it is to music.

This event is free to attend.

Zoom details will be circulated closer to the event.