Projected mediacy and rendered mediacy in Henry James’s notebooks: a cognitive perspective

• Álvarez-Amorós, José A. ^[1]
  1. [1] Universitat d'Alacant

     Universitat d'Alacant

     Alicante, España

     
• Localización: Storyworld possible selves and narrative intersubjectivity / coord. por María-Ángeles Martínez, 2025, ISBN 978-3-11-148095-4, págs. 153-173
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Informed by the conceptual framework of cognitive narratology, this chapter attempts to offer a critical refinement of Franz K. Stanzel's view of narrative mediacy - as well as of its absence - and use it to map out the modes of this phenomenon in Henry James's notebook entries as it takes early shape in them. To this purpose, and after briefly reviewing a number of models of mediacy developed by Stanzel himself, Yacobi, Meister and Schonert, Fludernik, and Walsh, I propose a metarepresentational interpretation of narrative mediacy with an emphasis on its capacity to metamorphose authorial, disembodied facts into mental states ascribed to the storyworld participants. Looking at James's notebook sketches through the resulting theoretical grid uncovers a finer complexity than generally acknowledged by Stanzel's discussion. Two interlocking conclusions suggest themselves - first, the analysis of (emergent) mediacy, as Stanzel conceives of it in his account of the said notebooks, arguably surpasses the mere quantitative dimension related to the perceptual and phenomenological issues of textual salience, thus calling for a further qualitative distinction between what might be understood as projected and rendered mediacy; second, it is only through the interplay of both qualitative and quantitative axes that a comprehensive description of the modes of early mediacy in James's notebook material can be actually provided.