Abstracts Psychology

The Theory of Narrative Balance and its Application to High Stakes Fiction

by Adam Michael Maillet

This dissertation seeks to create a theory of narrative balance based upon the connection between economics and literary narrative, and to apply that theory to postmodern texts, which confront issues of space, economics, and narrative. I use sources in both postmodern economic and cultural theory, as well as the more modern influences of cognitive science, narratology, and evolutionary psychology. My work will build on the work of several cognitive and evolutionary scholars, including David Herman, Lisa Zunshine, Blakey Vermeule, Nancy Easterlin, and Merlin Donald, but the concept of “space” creates a gap through which I blend theories of the postmodern with cognitive psychology. I argue that narrative fictions have an “economic” quality to them and that causality becomes increasingly conflated with what some would call “meaning,” others, “literariness.”