The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 23
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about how it operates that readers (also characters, narrators, and focalizors), guided by their
own memospheres, do not. This creates a cognitive map of the processes of consciousness that
inform the motivations (and, in turn, the focalizations) in the story. By revealing its "schemata"
as it goes, "Lull" aligns itself with both its readers and its narrators, in that their assumptions and
confirmations (or those they represent) become similar to its. When the borders between narrator
and narrated become unclear in the story, "Lull" violates this alignment, throwing its readers into
a worsened state of semantic readiness and inviting them to recognize, as it does, the gaps
between what tells a story (or consciousness) and who it is told to. As Lutz points out, culture
and individual each serve the other in the process of replicating memes and delineating
appropriate responses to perceived data.
Yet, memetics does more than simply inform literature-it is also active within in it and
so, in turn, within readers. A story like "Lull" does not simply encourage its readers to remember
that ideas theoretically determined the creation of the story's consciousnesses and consciousness-
actions-the text also demonstrates memes in action. Isolating the motivations behind
characters' or narrators' actions, when considered meta-memetically, reveal that the story does
not simply dictate its events according to its end result, running conceits, or stylistic intentions.
There are also cultural motivations behind the ideas authors group together, possibly, to effect
end results, conceits, etc. This is to say that, while stories can be-indeed, often have been
studied at the narrative level, how and why we think also informs the juxtaposition of narrative
elements.
To best examine active memes in a text, let us establish first that the memes we encounter
when reading often situate themselves in our (the readers') memospheres. After we read a story,
those memes (ideas) that successfully acquire us become part of our meaning-negotiations in the23
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Bradley, Darin Colbert. The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction, dissertation, May 2007; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3703/m1/27/?rotate=270: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .