Trains of thought: narrative foreshadowing and predictive processing in Anna Karenina

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article shows how the cognitive theory known as “predictive processing” can expand our understanding of the ways in which readers are primed by textual cues in Lev Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina to predict story developments, and how this process is linked to narrative momentum and affective engagement. In turn, this study expands the applicability of predictive processing, which relies on the idea that the human brain routinely predicts and updates information in unfolding scenarios, to literary contexts, in productive combination with narrative theories of foreshadowing and schema usage. The authors examine how these systems of cues motivate and shape involvement in the fictional scenarios of Anna Karenina and how they contribute to the text’s foreboding narrative draw – most notably with regard to the redolent motif of suicide by train.