Marvellous Cognition: Why Fictional Worlds Are Incoherent (And Why It’s Good)

Bartosz Stopel

doi:10.31261/errgo.17109

Published: 2025-06-30

No. 50 (2025)

Marvellous Cognition: Why Fictional Worlds Are Incoherent (And Why It’s Good)

Bartosz Stopel

Section: studies and essays

https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.17109

Abstract

It is well-established in cognitive narratology that all fictional worlds are necessarily incomplete and are only modelled in more detail by the story consumer’s mental operations. In addition, I argue that the mental models prompted by narratives are typically incoherent, too. Interestingly, neither poses a serious problem for cognition or appreciation of narratives, but contrary to popular belief, this does not happen due to conventional suspension of disbelief. Since our cognitive capacities for creating representations and drawing inferences involve the same processes for cognizing fiction and for mapping the real world, appealing to conventions is a hasty answer underneath which are hidden certain facts about human cognition: that in both cases the constructs tend to be similarly illusory and incoherent and that cognition itself tends to be messy and limited to the most important tasks at hand, guided by a narrowly understood practicality. I argue that in the end, we do not really have to imagine the fictional fantastic in detail, because the fantastic (or the marvellous) enters all cognition.

Keywords:

cognitive narratology , incompletness , incoherence , fictional worlds , cognition , the fantastic

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Stopel, B. (2025). Marvellous Cognition: Why Fictional Worlds Are Incoherent (And Why It’s Good). Er(r)go. Theory - Literature - Culture, (50), 71–87. https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.17109

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Bartosz Stopel

bartosz.stopel@gmail.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2100-2182

Affiliation:

University of Silesia in Katowice Poland

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Bartosz Stopel is Associate Professor of literary studies at the University of Silesia, Poland. His current research focuses on cognition and emotion in the experience of narratives in various media. He has recently published in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion, as well as in journals such as Style, Projections and the Journal of Literary Theory, after earlier publications on literary theory and aesthetics. His first book, From Mind to Text (Routledge, 2018), explores the affective underpinnings of the aesthetic interpretation of literature.