{"title":"\"How was I supposed to know what he was up to?\": On Cee's Mind-Reading Education in Toni Morrison's Home","authors":"Yongchao Wen","doi":"10.5325/style.55.4.0493","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"55 1","pages":"493 - 511"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2022-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"STYLE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.55.4.0493","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
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.
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