La memoria narrativa. Tecniche di rappresentazione della coscienza e menti finzionali nell’ultimo romanzo di Zhang Ailing.

Zhang Ailing’s posthumous novel Xiao tuanyuan 小团圆 (Little Reunion, 2009) is a valuable subject for analysis of fictional representation of human mind. This winding narration of her childhood and youth, only thinly veiled under the fictional rearrangement of names and details, reveals the complex mental processes connected with personal memories and emotions. The new cognitive approach to literary studies provides grounds for interpreting human experience through the activity of fictional minds. Through the analysis of some narrative patterns of the novel, I argue that Zhang Ailing’s sophisticated technique in constructing fictional minds is based both on modernism and on Chinese tradition, engaging readers in a subtle task of ‘decoding’. This intersubjective technique deserves to be further investigated, in order to shed new light on – and challenge – the conventional views on Chinese narrative, demonstrating that some of its patterns can suit and even anticipate the cognitive approach.