To the poetics of the narrative: the challenges of linguistic narratology

Abstract

The proposed article systematizes and characterizes the most defining theoretical positions on the problemsof the theory of literary narrative. A new approach to the study of fictional narrative is presented from the perspectiveof modern text-centered researches, in particular, it is clarified and supplemented the scientific scope of itsmain categories, such as voice, temporality, spatiality and modality, as well as explained the scientific meaningof the term “narrative strategy”. The formation of the latest linguistic-narrative tradition in the interpretationof the literary text took place through the integration of traditional and structuralist views on a literary narrativeas a set of textual units united by semantic and temporal connections, and its positioning as a cognitive and,consequently, mental activity of the author and the reader, who in this case act as co-creators of a certain narrativereality. In the modern interpretation, the narrative appears as a polycode semantic plurality, which is expressedin the narrative structure of the fictional text by its semiotic coding. Linguistic narratology as an independentinterpretive theory has many points of intersection with cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology andactively develops two main narrative aspects of the fictional text – cognitive and semiotic – related to suchcategories as consciousness / thinking and artistic speech. From the point of view of linguistic narratology,the fictional text should be analyzed not in terms of what is presented in it, but in terms of how the author constructsand semiotizes the world around him or his own experience in the categories of literary narrative.