Narrative Strategies

In this article, we approach narrative strategies as a way to theorize the aesthetic formation and effect of both cultural narratives and narrative cultures from a cognitive perspective. Predictive processing-based models of story processing allow us to rethink the role of narration in religious discourse. Based on these models, we suggest a nar-ratologically informed cognitive theory of religious perception, according to which religious worldviews can be understood as specific 'augmented realities', blends of narrative and experiential reality created by immersion into a narrative culture. In a first step, we argue that attracting attention is the most fundamental narrative strategy in that it is the requirement for all other cultural, partisan, or individual storytelling strategies to develop their potential. After giving a limited account of the predictive processing framework's concept of attention, we illustrate means and devices by which cultural narratives gain access to the mind. In a second step, we discuss imaginative strategies that further immersion into storyworlds. In the final step, we exemplify implementation strategies used for a lasting augmentation of reality with elements from these storyworlds.