From Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life, by Jerome Bruner:
Stories are like doppelgangers, operating in two realms, one a landscape of action in the world, the other a landscape of consciousness where the protagonists’ thoughts and feelings and secrets play themselves out…. It is part of the magic of well-wrought stories that they keep these two landscapes intertwined, making the knower and the known inseparable…. A narrative models not only a world but the minds seeking to give it its meanings.
Yes.
Heh – but be careful. Doppelganger relationships are usually destructive to at least one, if not both of the pair. Doppelganger eucatastrophes are rare things.
How’s the Bruner book overall?
Yeah, heh, I thought about the unfortunate meeting…. And how delightful that you too know that lovely word eucatastrophe. (Wonder, but no surprise.) That’s exactly it, though, isn’t it? We in education are trying to manage exactly this kind of doppelganger eucatastrophe in which the two realms of story augment and nourish each other. My own experience of literary criticism and theory suggests that world and meaning-seeking mind are not so easily intertwined. “We murder to dissect,” etc.
The Bruner book is deceptively simple. So far I’m awestruck at the ramifications. He takes the best insights of postmodernism while implicitly rejecting its antifoundationalism. A finely tuned sense of contingency and perspective while nevertheless insisting we are not slaves of culture. His insights into the nature, purpose, and value of ritual in the law puts me in a way of thinking about ritual in academia and how/whether that can be preserved/used in online education. When ritual and ceremony become mere process and bureaucracy, gains in efficiency can become losses in effectiveness. More on that anon….
Interesting. I might nudge that forward in my line of books to gnosh.
See you in San Diego?
PS: how many doppelganger stories can you think of with happy endings?
Frankenstein :))
Ha! Not exactly… 🙂