Narrative Form and Mentality in Contemporary Fiction.

The essay aims to offer a comprehensive survey of techniques developed in English-language narrative fiction for presenting mentality within a framework synthesizing the findings of textual, rhetorical, and cognitive approaches. Taking into account the use of focalization for presenting mentality as well as the second-person and first-person-plural narrations, we demonstrate that Dorrit Cohn's categories of narrated monologue and psycho-narration overlap and that the former should be subsumed within the latter. We further argue in favor of recognizing multimodal self-and psycho-narration, acknowledging the category of quasi-autonomous monologue (taken as a technique, not a genre), as well as complementing the list with Lodge's rhetoric of abstention and Palmer's indicative description. Finally, we discuss the neglected or omitted techniques for presenting mentality, namely, (1) self-report (the characters' report on their mental condition articulated in a social context), (2) artistic inserts and ekphrastic descriptions (the characters' works of art and their descriptions insofar as they reflect the characters' subjectivity), and (3) textual, auditory, visual, and compositional correlatives of interiority (the novelistic use of textual materiality, visual, and auditory effects as well as compositional configurations to express or reinforce the expression of subjectivity). We conclude the essay by discussing the kinds of mentality the techniques can present, their accuracy as well as the implied author's use of the techniques and the reader's likely engagement with them. Theoretical considerations are illustrated with examples adduced primarily from contemporary fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]