Marina Grishakova is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Tartu (Es- tonia) and the coordinator of the Nordic Network of Narrative Studies. In 2008, she worked as a visting scholar under the auspices of “Project Narrative” at the Ohio State University. Besides the book The Mod- els of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames (2006), she has published a number of articles on semiotics and intermediality. Her current research interests in- clude cognitive narratology and film theory. NARRATIVE, Vol. 17, No. 2 (May 2009) Copyright 2009 by The Ohio State University Beyond the Frame: Cognitive Science, Common Sense and Fiction According to popular definition, the subject matter of fiction is invention, whereas nonfiction relies on factual (“real-world”) data. Recent developments in cognitive narratology (Ryan, Fludernik, Jahn, Herman) considerably reduce the value of sharp distinction between fiction and nonfiction, however. The concepts of “frame”, “schema” and “script” provide a link between the “real-life” and “fictional” experience. As Pierre Ouellet observes, the “real-life” knowledge contains a signifi- cant number of propositions that are taken for granted and are employed by the com- munity or individuals either intuitively (as rules of thumb) or rationally as “shortcuts” of experience; these often do not withstand critical scrutiny and may qualify as “natural fictions” based solely on the immediacy and fullness of belief. From this perspective, fiction is continuous with accepted opinions, stereotypes and other components of folk knowledge (i.e. beliefs used as “default knowledge”) that people rely on in everyday life. My hypothesis is that certain types of modernist and postmodernist self-reflexive fiction paradoxically provoke focused schema-consis- tent reading and foreground stereotype frames to alleviate the cognitive load that schema-inconsistent information presents to the reader. In this case naturalizing reading and focusing on the commonsense frames as secure and reliable as com- pared with the strange or indeterminate data beyond the frame is provocatively sup- ported by the text itself; however, if sustained, it leads to impoverished interpretation of the events and diminishes the cognitive effect of inconsistent data. Marina Grishakova