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Abstract
A Truth Not Perfectly Visible: Cognition and Culture in the Borderline Narrative brings contemporary cognitive psychological theory together with film and literary narratology and cultural studies to describe an emerging genre, the Borderline narrative. Section One lays out a description or Primary Theory of narrative cognition. As a basic cognitive function, all persons in all cultures imagine themselves as the main characters in the story of their lives. All stories have similar features and all interpreters of stories use similar stategies. By defining these features and these strategies, we can expand existing narratology to a fuller understanding of narrative logic which is the way the mind makes choices and judgements based on narrative (not strictly logical) associations. One way narratives work is in the way a specific a culture constructs its narrative logic. In the creation of stories, a culture is narratizing its social order and social change, and when interpretations describe this process, I call it Secondary Theory. The Borderline Narrative, of which Spike Lees Do the Right Thing (1989) is a prototypical example, currently narratizes the change in American culture from an Eurocentric masculinist culture to a multi-culture. Section Two uses the tools set out in Section One to generate an evolved Primary Theory of narrative genres based on cognitive schema theory. My case studies then illustrate Secondary Theory uses of Primary Theory tools. By comparing James Fenimore Coopers The Last of the Mohicans to Michael Manns 1991 film adaptation, I demonstrate how the text contains a version of history reflective of the producing culture, not to the historical circumstance of the story-world. I then consider the way existing cultural narratives and their narrative logics shaped the reception of Roland Joffe`s 1996 adaptation of The Scarlet Letter.