Joint attention, semiotic mediation and literary narrative

In this paper I discuss the importance for narrative theory of the concept, drawn from developmental psychology, of “joint attention”. In the first part, I explain the basic concept and its significance for the emergence of narrative in young children. In the second part I draw out the implications of this genetic approach for our understanding of the nature of narrative signification: where classical narratology is based on a chain of representational and “communicative” dyads (signifier/signified and sender/receiver), joint attention integrates these functions into a triadic semiotic by which the sign mediates between three poles: the producer of the sign, the receiver of the sign and the object of their joint attention. In the third part, taking Boccaccio’s Decameron as an example, I illustrate how this approach to the semiotics of narrative elucidates aspects of literary narrative that are obscured by the classical semiotic. Joint attention offers affordances for quasi-recursive re-contextualization, since the object of joint attention may consist of another act of joint attention: literary narrative can create complex joint attentional structures by which the story is “seen” through nested perspectival prisms of embedded narrative and character.

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