developing the consequences of the principle. Although I am not aware of
any cognitive theorist explicitly endorsing this larger vision of narrative, cog-
nitive theory does assume that there is a mind behind the text and that inter-
preters attempt to read that mind (often by reading the minds of characters).
David Herman argues that the interpretation of narrative needs to be built on
the assumption that “stories are irreducibly grounded in intentional systems”
(“Intentional” 240). Lisa Zunshine contends that even post-structuralist proc-
lamations about the death of the author and the birth of the reader implicitly
assign some agent as the begetter of the communication and thus indicate “the
tenaciousness with which we cling to the idea that there must be some source
(e.g., an author, a reader, multiple authors, multiple readers) behind a narra-
tive” (Why 67). In other words, regardless of where we locate the source, we
assign it an authorial function.
Principle 2: One important task of narrative theory is to offer insights
into the general conditions and mechanisms governing that exchange between
authors and readers. At this stage in the progression of this book, I worry that
I’m annoying my readers with repetitions of this point. To take just one illus-
tration from cognitive theory, Palmer analyzes differences between internal-
ist and externalist views of consciousness as part of his effort to explain the
ways authors construct and readers understand fictional minds (Social Minds
39–42). More generally, both rhetorical and cognitive theorists often seek to
transform tacit understandings that underlie our experience as writers and
readers into articulate knowledge that in turn can enrich our appreciation of
those experiences.
Common Mode of Inquiry: Both approaches conduct interpretations in
order to demonstrate how individual narratives deploy those general condi-
tions and mechanisms and, where appropriate, to show how those deploy-
ments can lead to revisions in our understanding of those general conditions
and mechanisms. To take an example beyond this book, Peter J. Rabinowitz’s
efforts to understand the details of different kinds of passing in Nella Larsen’s
Passing led him to propose the initially counterintuitive idea that some nar-
ratives have multiple authorial audiences (“Betraying”). Zunshine’s efforts to
analyze source monitoring in the genre of the detective story led her to offer
a much more nuanced view of the dictum that detective plots and romance
plots don’t mix. To be sure, narrative theorists with different projects from
those of rhetorical and cognitive theorists also engage in this mode of inquiry,
so my claim is not that rhetoricians and cognitivists are unique in this prac-
tice. Instead, my claim is that this shared practice provides another reason
why the two groups should be looking to each other’s work more than they
152 • CHAPTER 8