Monday, December 3, 2012

Further Exploration of the Final Paper

So far, my final paper has been broken up in three parts: 1. Exploring Theory of Mind and establishing why it is relevant to how we experience literature, 2. Pinpointing how Austen builds a complex fictional consciousness and 3. Proof through cognitive science in which I hope to find evidence and research or examples to support my thesis. 


Through the course of writing and researching my paper, I have come to realize the brilliant mind-play employed by Austen in order to provide an incredible plot twist. To quote from my paper: "Austen is known in Pride and Prejudice as intentionally misleading her readers based on the conclusions that they have drawn on their own while reading the text, playing with their minds and playing with the knowledge that humans can err when determining and associating actions with what the reader believes to be the underlying cause or motive, thus making a plot twist even more exciting. It is a fascinating ability to turn the reader on herself, thus kicking herself for reading Mr. Darcy’s intentions incorrectly." Here, I establish that Austen is clever in how she set up the reader for an effective plot twist and believe that this is a testament to Austen's talent with words and structuring her novels. I back up this idea with a quote from Lisa Zunshine in her essay called Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness: "Literary critics, in particular, know that the process of attributing thoughts, beliefs, and desires to other people may lead to misinterpreting those thoughts, beliefs, and desires”. In this case, Austen was relying on readers misinterpreting her own characters for the sake of the action to come later. This is a stroke of genius on her part, especially considering that Austen's style of narrative may have been considered experimental for her time. 

I have yet to find specific quotes within the book since I have been doing a lot of preliminary research and idea-building but I believe that will become especially important in the second part of my paper.