서사 공백 채우기와 마음-읽기를 통한 인지비평적 인물 분석: 필립 로스의 『인간의 오점』을 중심으로

초록

Drawing on the analogy between mind-reading in cognitive criticism and narrative gap-filling in narratology, this paper attempts to uncover what lies in the characters' minds by reexamining the narrative gaps scattered throughout Philip Roth's The Human Stain. To achieve the critical goal of combining cognitive criticism and narrative theory, this paper engages in interdisciplinary approaches that bridge cognitive research and literary studies. Through a cautious cognitive exploration of unreadable minds and unspoken intentions in The Human Stain, its narrative gaps can be more reliably filled. In other words, even the permanent gaps in the novel can be supplementarily filled not only by the narrative speculations of its heterodiegetic narrator—a narrative voice outside the story—but also by the reader's cognitive invention of shadow stories. Considering that the novel's four main characters are all certain types of “passers” who pretend to be something other than themselves, a fuller understanding of the multiple and distributed sources of character information will help analyze the cognitive patterns through which those characters operate their minds.

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