- 107 - 01756 - 6 - Mind , Brain and Narrative

The overall goal of this book is to specify the kinds of psychological mechanisms that support the comprehension of narrative. In this chapter, we lay the basis for examining these mechanisms in the rest of the book. An initial question for any approach has to be: what is narrative? As we shall see, there are many opinions about this, but it is possible to specify a relatively simple set of basic features which are generally characteristic of narratives. Following this, we provide an overview of our psychological model, the Rhetorical Processing Framework, indicating how it brings together various phenomena that constitute how we come to understand narrative. In particular, our interest is in the role of stylistic devices that writers use for rhetorical purposes and we investigate the range of mental processes that these devices bring about. This framework is fully explained and developed in subsequent chapters.