Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media

This is the first single-author book to explore these questions across media, moving from analyses of literary narratives in print to those found where so much cultural and artistic production occurs today: computer screens. Published this year by the University of Nebraska Press, the book is written by David Ciccoricco, a Senior Lecturer in the department of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago, 

Amid continued concern about the impact of digital media on the minds of readers and players today, and the alarming philosophical questions generated by the communion of minds and machines, Ciccoricco provides detailed examples illustrating how stories in virtually any medium can still nourish creative imagination and cultivate critical—and ethical—reflection. Contributing new insights on attention, perception, memory, and emotion, Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media is a book at the forefront of a new wave of media-conscious cognitive literary studies.

From the book:

Stories, Minds, and Media

I entered the thought space of the octopus. It was, more specifically, a mimic octopus, a species renowned for its ability to alter its color, shape, and behavior in order to elude or repel prey— as it plays the scene as

anything from inconspicuous coral to a venomous lion fish. I myself was playing Mimesis(2012), a computationally driven narrative created by Fox Harrell and the team at his Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory at mit, and the creature in question was serving as my undersea avatar. Not a storyin any singular or conventional sense, nor strictly speaking a gamegiven the absence of winning or losing outcomes, Mimesisis certainly “an exploration of what else we might play,” to borrow from Stuart Moulthrop’s description of one of his own works of digital literature. For me, and for the conception of this book, it is also an ideal illustration of how new and perhaps unlikely forms of narrative media continue a longstanding literary preoccupation with aesthetic treatments of mind.

Through the octopus’s encounters with a number of other anthropomorphized sea creatures, Mimesisstages a series of what social psychology refers to as “microaggressions,” utterances or behaviors that may appear superficially benign but convey subtle forms of prejudice and hostility. In each encounter, the player chooses from a circumscribed number of modes of response to the comments of the other sea animals that assume that we have, for example, “foreign status” or “criminal intent.” Via a click and drag mouse input that swipes the screen horizontally, we can adjust our outward demeanor from more “open” to more “closed.” Or we can click on the avatar itself and adjust our internal stance with a

vertical swipe that moves from more “positive” to more “negative.” The various permutations of these positions make us either “oblivious,” “confused,” “suspicious,” or “aggressive” in what we say to the creatures we meet in turn, which appears as dialogue text underneath the character icons. Their reactions to you, and a brief epilogue that takes center screen at the end of the text, will change according to the choices you make and the social stances you adopt throughout.

Aesthetically, the subaquatic metaphor of Mimesisunderscores the fact that so much of social indiscretion occurs just beneath the surface, subtextually, nonverbally, or even inside our own heads as we second-guess the intentions and reactions of others (or ourselves). 

David Ciccoricco is also the author of  Reading Network Fiction.