The study of mind-relevant aspects of storytelling practices. It is transmedial in scope; it encompasses the nexus of narrative and mind not just in print texts but also in face-to-face interaction, cinema, radio news broadcasts, computer-mediated virtual environments, and other storytelling media. In turn, “mind-relevance” can be studied vis-à-vis the multiple factors associated with the design and interpretation of narratives, including the story-producing activities of tellers, the processes by means of which interpreters make sense of the narrative worlds (or “storyworlds”) evoked by narrative representations or artifacts, and the cognitive states and dispositions of characters in those storyworlds. In addition, the mind-narrative nexus can be studied along two other dimensions, insofar as stories function as both (a) a target of interpretation and (b) a means for making sense of experience—a resource for structuring and comprehending the world—in their own right.
