"How was I supposed to know what he was up to?": On Cee's Mind-Reading Education in Toni Morrison's Home

IF 0.5 2区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

STYLE Pub Date : 2022-01-05 DOI:10.5325/style.55.4.0493

Yongchao Wen

引用次数: 1

Abstract

abstract :I present a new reading of Toni Morrison's Home by viewing this novel through a cognitive lens. Drawing on findings in cognitive science and developmental psychology, I argue that Cee's "theory of mind" (aka "mind-reading" capacity) going awry is behind her tragic fate of being abandoned and suffering from physical and mental trauma. I also argue that her mind-reading proficiency improves thanks to the education from the community women by means of incorporating her into their intermental unit (to use the term introduced by Alan Palmer), thus forming a social mind. This essay aims to offer new interpretations of one of Toni Morrison's later novels, on the one hand, and to prove the explanatory power of cognitive approaches to literature, on the other hand.

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“我怎么知道他要干什么?”论托妮·莫里森家中Cee的读心术教育

本文通过认知视角对托妮·莫里森的小说《家》进行了新的解读。根据认知科学和发展心理学的发现，我认为茜的“心智理论”(又名“读心术”能力)出了问题，是她被遗弃和遭受身心创伤的悲惨命运背后的原因。我还认为，她的读心术熟练程度提高了，这要归功于社区妇女的教育，通过将她纳入他们的精神单元(使用Alan Palmer引入的术语)，从而形成了一个社会心灵。本文旨在一方面对托妮·莫里森的一部后期小说提供新的解读，另一方面证明认知方法对文学的解释力。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

STYLE Multiple-

CiteScore

1.30

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Style invites submissions that address questions of style, stylistics, and poetics, including research and theory in discourse analysis, literary and nonliterary genres, narrative, figuration, metrics, rhetorical analysis, and the pedagogy of style. Contributions may draw from such fields as literary criticism, critical theory, computational linguistics, cognitive linguistics, philosophy of language, and rhetoric and writing studies. In addition, Style publishes reviews, review-essays, surveys, interviews, translations, enumerative and annotated bibliographies, and reports on conferences.