European Narratology Network (ENN) Newsletter – Issue XII – March 2015: A History of Distributed Cognition: University of Edinburgh

Narratology has offered a particularly promising and path-breaking strand of cognitive approaches in the humanities. Cognitive narratology has brought into question the very nature of the way in which narratology has traditionally been defined as an area of study. Instead of focusing on formal features, such as the role of the narrator, the emphasis has recently fallen on cognitive and phenomenological features (such as experientiality and sense-making) as contributing to or constituting narratives.The History of Distributed Cognition project offers the possibility to expand the diachronic range of the study of narrative, starting with the dawn of Western storytelling in ancient Greece and moving up to the present day. In turn, the new methods and concepts in narrative studies promise to contribute to understandings of texts’ historically situated notions of distributed cognition.