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 problems
of the theory of literary narrative. A new approach to the study of fictional narrative is presented from the perspective
of modern text-centered researches, in particular, it is clarified and supplemented the scientific scope of its
main categories, such as voice, temporality, spatiality and modality, as well as explained the scientific meaning
of the term “narrative strategy”. The formation of the latest linguistic-narrative tradition in the interpretation
of the literary text took place through the integration of traditional and structuralist views on a literary narrative
as 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 narrative
reality. In the modern interpretation, the narrative appears as a polycode semantic plurality, which is expressed
in the narrative structure of the fictional text by its semiotic coding. Linguistic narratology as an independent
interpretive theory has many points of intersection with cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology and
actively develops two main narrative aspects of the fictional text – cognitive and semiotic – related to such
categories 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 constructs
and semiotizes the world around him or his own experience in the categories of literary narrative.