Saturday

eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Issue 1 (2011)
has at least the potential to make cognition understandable as a concrete process
from the interior perspective of an experiencing individual.
This potential of literary fiction is in large parts due to the intertwining of the
three types of knowledge elaborated above. On the one hand, literary fiction can
stage the interplay between propositional and procedural knowledge. This interplay
demonstrates the embedding of knowledge in everyday life and its flexible applica-
tion to everyday situations. On the other hand, through the staging of this interac-
tion, narrative fiction provides the basis for the formation of narrative knowledge in
readers’ minds. This narrative knowledge is connective and process-like, not redu-
cible to its propositional content but operating in a much subtler way. In this way,
narrative fiction succeeds at once in providing the basis for the formation of know-
ledge of cognition and in representing the way in which cognition works in its natur-
al context. The narrative knowledge peculiar to narrative fiction thus provides a me-
dium for forming knowledge in action, namely knowledge of how cognition works
in a natural surrounding.
Contact Address:
Stephan Freißmann, Stephan.Freissmann@gmx.de.
Keywords:
English: Ian McEwan, Saturday; knowledge in narrative fiction; fiction of cognition;
cognitive science and literature.
German: Ian McEwan, Saturday; Wissen in Erzählliteratur; fiction of cognition;
Kognitionswissenschaft und Literatur.
eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
http://eTransfers.uni-giessen.de
http://www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/research/anglogerman/etransfers/
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