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p.189 historical narratives... If the function they serve is to foster comprehension, for example, then
they must be evaluated according to whether or not (or to what degree) they achieve this end, not according to whether
or not they correspond to what was once reality... John McCumber, for example, defines narrative for his own purposes as the
"reconstruction of a progress" that "aims at coherence" as opposed to "accuracy."
p.195 Mink argued in the late 1960s that there were three irreducible
modes of comprehension - the theoretical, the catogoreal, and the configurational. Configurational comprehension,
he argued, was the end for which storytelling was the proper means. Mink, "History and Fiction as Modes of
Comprehension," New Literary History (1969), 549ff.
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