Why do some surprises delight—the endings of Agatha Christie novels, films like The Sixth Sense, the flash awareness that Pip’s benefactor is not (and never was!) Miss Havisham? Writing at the intersection of cognitive science and narrative pleasure, Vera Tobin explains how our brains conspire with stories to produce those revelatory plots that define a “well-made surprise.”
By tracing the prevalence of surprise endings in both literary fiction and popular literature and showing how they exploit our mental limits, Tobin upends two common beliefs. The first is cognitive science’s tendency to consider biases a form of moral weakness and failure. The second is certain critics’ presumption that surprise endings are mere shallow gimmicks. The latter is simply not true, and the former tells at best half the story. Tobin shows that building a good plot twist is a complex art that reflects a sophisticated understanding of the human mind.
Reading classic, popular, and obscure literature alongside the latest research in cognitive science, Tobin argues that a good surprise works by taking advantage of our mental limits. Elements of Surprise describes how cognitive biases, mental shortcuts, and quirks of memory conspire with stories to produce wondrous illusions, and also provides a sophisticated how-to guide for writers. In Tobin’s hands, the interactions of plot and cognition reveal the interdependencies of surprise, sympathy, and sense-making. The result is a new appreciation of the pleasures of being had.
Thomas Pavel has written extensively on poetics, linguistics, and narratology. In this book he proposes an original theory and methodology of plot analysis—a reading that draws upon the most fruitful aspects of literary structuralism and upon contemporary linguistic models (specifically generative grammar). Theorists have tended to use formal plot analysis to examine relatively simple literary artifacts, like folk tales and short stories; Pavel, however, applies his model to a group of English Renaissance tragedies and demonstrates that plot analysis can make a major contribution to the understanding of sophisticated literary texts.
Pavel leads the reader through step-by-step analyses of increasingly complex plot structures as he explicates Marlowe’s Tamburlaine I, the Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus and Edward the Second; Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy; The Arden Feversham; and, finally, Shakespeare’s King Lear. He has chosen these plays for their chronological proximity, yet their diversity allows for contrasts and typological considerations. The inclusion of most of Marlowe’s tragedies enables Pavel to gain new insights into a single writer’s strategies of plot construction.The Poetics of Plot moves beyond the establishment and application of a new theory of plot to address broader issues in cultural studies: the role of linguistic models in literary studies, the nature and function of agency in plot advancement and history, the universal features of plot organization, and the relation of plot patterns to period styles and dominant modes of organized knowledge. In his foreword to The Poetics of Plot, Wlad Godzich sketches the historical context in which Pavel’s discussion of plot appears and makes explicit the way that the study of plot challenges both the presuppositions of linguistic analysis and the status of action in philosophical thought.READERS
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