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About Diegesis In Mind

Diegesis in Mind aims to encourage and support the use of cognitive (‘mind’) science to study ancient narrative (‘diegesis’). We intend to be an intellectual nucleus for continuing scholarly dialogue about methods, standards, prospects, and limitations of using cognitive disciplines to study ancient narrative texts and other media across disciplines.
This project is a collaboration between the University of St Andrews and the University of Bonn, supported by the British Academy and Uni Bonn Digitization Resources.

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BLOG POST | 1. March 2023

In Our Image: The Remaking of Esther in Every Age

Public lecture by Laura Suzanne Lieber (Duke University) during the conference "Characters in Mind: The Migration of Characters in Ancient Jewish, Ancient Christian & Greco-Roman Literature and Art" at the University of Bonn (Germany), 8–10 February, 2023. ...
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BLOG POST | 1. February 2023

Cognition, Prepositions, and Point of View: Interview with Rachel & Mike Aubrey

Rachel and Mike Aubrey, with SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) International, talk about their translation work and research on prepositions and point of view in cognitive perspective. ...
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BLOG POST | 1. February 2023

Thinking and Feeling like the Ancients? Studying Emotion and Cognition through Reader Response

From a cognitive viewpoint, emotions are, at least in their basic design, a pan-human, universal phenomenon, and narrative in particular is intimately bound up with emotion. If basal embodied mechanisms play a central role in readers’ processing and experiencing of narrative texts, it cannot be denied that reader responses must always be similar in certain respects, even if the readers come from very different times and cultural backgrounds. ...
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BLOG POST | 1. January 2023

Characters in Mind: How Readers Recognize Literary Persons across Narratives

Binge-watching became a habit for my kids and me long before the Covid pandemic. It has already been a few years since the four of us devoured all Shrek movies together in a single weekend, but I remember being amazed that our children, without giving it much thought, recognized among the cast Cinderella, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, and a bunch of other characters they knew from our bedtime readings. What really got ...
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BLOG POST | 1. December 2022

Cognition, Grammar, and Reading Ancient Narratives: An Interview with Steve Runge

Stephen E. Runge, author of Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament: A Practical Introduction for Teaching and Exegesis (Hendrickson, 2010), talks about how cognitive linguistics as applied to grammar can help explain how humans process ancient narratives. ...
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BLOG POST | 1. December 2022

Cognition and Point of View: An Interview with Eve Sweetser

Linguist Eve Sweetser (University of California, Berkeley) gives key points from her Society of Biblical Literature (2022) presentation about how cognitive science aids our understanding of point of view in ancient narrative texts. ...
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BLOG POST | 29. August 2022

Welcome to Diegesis In Mind

Diegesis in Mind aims to encourage and support the use of cognitive (‘mind’) science to study ancient narrative (‘diegesis’). We intend to be an intellectual nucleus for continuing scholarly dialogue about methods, standards, prospects, and limitations of using cognitive disciplines to study ancient narrative texts and other media across disciplines.
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BLOG POST | 1. November 2022

Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Emotion, and Narrative

A criticism of CMT that I regularly encounter is that its universalizing tendencies efface the cultural specificity of the phenomena it purports to explain. But this is not, I think, a criticism that stands up to scrutiny.A case in point would be the ancient Greek use of various kinds of garment metaphor for a wide range of emotions, but especially shame and grief. ...
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BLOG POST | 1. November 2022

Blending in Pindar

The quintessentially dense ancient Greek texts of the lyric poet Pindar (ca. 518-437 BCE) cannot be conceived, performed, studied, and taught without the basic human ability to create and understand networks of blends. Blending happens whenever we unconsciously connect conceptual counterparts and integrate them, so that new meanings emerge. Identifying blends not only helps us make sense of Pindar (‘Pindar’ metonymically stands for ‘Pindar’s poems’), but also of our blending-based ...
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BLOG POST | 1. November 2022

Conceptual blending and historical understanding in Polybius

Scholars often characterise Polybius’ way of writing as clunky, heavy-going and unsophisticated. I fundamentally disagree with this assessment, which reflects stereotypes and prejudices about the decline of Greek literature and style after the ‘classical’ period. In this short entry, I will show that more attention to Polybius’ style, encouraged by cognitive approaches such as conceptual blending, opens up new perspectives on how this fascinating author conceived of the process of ...
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BLOG POST | 1. October 2022

How I Became a Cognitive Narratologist: Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology

Fludernik’s study was eye-opening for me, not least because it was the first time that I encountered post-classical narratology. I was astonished by how confidently and carefully she developed her own theoretical approach; I was intrigued by her use of cognitive theories and the combination of linguistic, cognitive, and literary theories; and I was delighted to read her analyses of English medieval and early modern narratives, which she sets in ...
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