Between a Fragment and a Whole. A Cognitive Analysis of the Gothic Fragment as a Literary Genre. A Case Study of Anna Letitia Aikin’s ‘Sir Bertrand: A Fragment.’

Abstract

Drawing on the principles of cognitive poetics as proposed by Peter Stockwell (Cognitive poetics. An introduction. Routledge, London and New York, 2002), combined with the theory of Current Discourse Space in the sense of Ronald W. Langacker (Cognitive grammar. A basic introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008), the paper undertakes to analyse Anna Letitia Aikin’s “Sir Bertrand: A Fragment”, representing a literary form known as “the fragment”, popular in eighteenth century English literature. Assuming that a literary work is “open” in the sense of Umberto Eco (Lector in fabula. Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa, 1979/1994) and that reading is, effectively, a “gap filling” process performed by the reader (Kędra-Kardela. Reading as interpretation , Towards a narrative theory of fictional world construction, Lublin, 2010) or specifying the “places of indeterminacy” in the sense of Roman Ingarden (O dziele literackim, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warszawa, 1930/1988), the paper accounts for the reading mechanism of the fragment which, apart from the gaps it contains as a literary work, also lacks a beginning and an end.