the concept of diegesis (telling or recounting a story) originally appeared in plato's thesis as opposed to mimesis (showing or enacting a story). plato described diegesis as the third person style of expressing a fiction mediated by an author/narrator, whereas he proposed mimesis as the first person style of presenting a story by means of characters and actions. aristotle then applied mim...

There has been considerable interest in images of medicine in popular science fiction and in representations of doctors in television fiction. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to doctors administering space medicine in science fiction. This article redresses this gap. We analyse the evolving figure of 'the doctor' in different popular science fiction television series. Building upon ...

Fiction literature has largely been ignored by psychology researchers because its only function seems to be entertainment, with no connection to empirical validity. We argue that literary narratives have a more important purpose. They offer models or simulations of the social world via abstraction, simplification, and compression. Narrative fiction also creates a deep and immersive simulative e...

morrison’s song of solomon could be viewed as a paragon of trauma fiction. since no narrative of trauma can be told in a linear way, morrison tries to depict the overwhelming power of trauma through a non-linear narrative, episodic delivery, and flashbacks. accordingly, the readers are compelled to concoct the disjointed and fragmented memories in order to solve the riddle of the text, in which...

Narrative fiction can engage readers in generating imaginative recreations of the inner worlds of doctors and patients, which are largely inaccessible through typical clinical case analysis. Fiction about medicine can yield insight into patients' subjective experience of illness and can highlight the need for an empathetic response from doctors to patients affected by illness. Mark Salzman's no...

Effective history instruction often relies on taking historical episodes and making them personally relevant to the learner. One narrative-centered technique for accomplishing this is to tell a story about the historical episode in which significant historical events are witnessed or even, to some small degree, influenced by a fictional character. Given individual differences among users, the a...

The current paradigm for synthetic reality based interactive fiction features familiar kinds of worlds realistically presented. This approach is unsatisfying in that it excludes several interesting classes of worlds, such as worlds where the user experiences the subjective reality of a character with a substantially different personality. We wish to extend the current paradigm to include classe...

When we read literary fiction, we are transported to fictional places, and we feel and think along with the characters. Despite the importance of narrative in adult life and during development, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying fiction comprehension are unclear. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how individuals differently employ neural networks importan...