GROUP MINDS IN ANCIENT NARRATIVE

Introduction

Social cognition is a crucial category of both life and narratives. We read stories about people who engage in social interactions, act on shared emotions and thoughts, and often view themselves as part of specific groups. But how does narrative representation of collective consciousness serve as a mode of coming to grips with everyday social and distributed cognition?

Project Aim

My project aims to build a bridge between narrative theory and a phenomenological take on cognition as socially extended and distributed among a set of individuals, in order to provide new answers to the question of narratives' function in humans' understanding of the social world.

Research Hypothesis

Ancient literature offers precious material for such an approach. The research hypothesis of this project is that Greek and Latin narratives thematize processes of group cognition in ways hitherto undetected. A detailed analysis of these processes offers new insights into the way narrative cognitively affects both reading experience and real-life experience of intersubjectivity.

Methodology

In order to be able to test this hypothesis, the project adopts an interdisciplinary methodology that brings together:

1. Structuralist narratology
2. Cognitive narrative studies
3. Research on social cognition in philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences

Objectives

The project envisages the following objectives:

1. To analyze the techniques by which group minds and intermentality are narrativized, thus offering the first narratology of collectives.
2. To investigate the cognitive responses that are evoked in the audiences during story reading.
3. To illuminate the ways and extent that thinking about collective narrative minds feeds into thinking about human minds, cognitive interaction, and intersubjectivity in the real world.

Contribution

The project offers a groundbreaking contribution to the narratological analysis of (ancient) texts, the study of narratives' social, cognitive, and psychological effects on readers, the history of social cognition, and all disciplines that study group minds.