Abstract
Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the cognitive approach to literature, the results of which are a number of scholarly works contributing to this rapidly developing field. Among these are Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, Gavins and
Meaning construction is Dancygier’s central concern. She postulates that ‘if a text means something to someone, there have to be linguistic phenomena that make that possible.’ (p. 1) From her point of view, meaning construction refers to ‘the processes which yield meanings of language expressions based on the frames evoked, constructional meaning patterns, and, among others, blending. Meaning construction in this sense relies on the specific word and grammar choices’ (p. 5). To pursue this line of thought, the book is dedicated to unpacking the complicated correlations between language choices and the meanings prompted thereby.
The book begins by contextualizing the discussion of relations between language, cognition and meaning making. In doing so, the first chapter is engaged in such issues as literary analysis and linguistic analysis, literature, language and human nature, literary texts and communication, and narrative and grounding. Of particular interest is its argument that understanding narratives relies on a three-step process: ‘emergence, construction, and negotiation of meaning through specific language choices’ (p. 5).
Chapter 2 examines the relations between blending, narrative spaces, and the emergent story. Apart from differentiating mental space from narrative space and the concept of the textual world, the book relies heavily on the theory of conceptual integration to uncover the mechanisms of meaning construction. Seeing story as a conceptual construct, Dancygier argues that ‘the emergence of the story relies to a comparable degree on the frames evoked in the reader’s mind, and on the construction of double-scope blends, integrated into the mega-blend,’ therefore the story is ‘the mega-blend arrived at in the interaction with the text’ (p. 56).
Chapters 3 and 4 seek to address two much-debated narratological questions: ‘who sees?’ and ‘who speaks?’ Dancygier tries to analyse the concept of the narrator from an epistemic viewpoint, which can be viewed at both the macro level and the micro level. In her words, ‘macro-level phenomena reflect the text’s assumed epistemic viewpoint and contribute directly to the construction of the emergent story, while micro-level forms have more to do with the construction of specific events and conceptualizations’ (p. 62). Of particular importance in Dancygier’s work is her discussion of viewpoint configurations at the levels of narrative structure. She proposes that viewpoint compression and viewpoint decompression are the two primary mechanisms of story emergence.
Chapter 5 focuses on the building-up of storyworlds in terms of referential expressions. To Dancygier, reference in narratives is ‘a matter of emerging complex referential networks’ (p. 117). She intends to disclose the constructing roles played by the referential forms like pronouns, names, or role-descriptors. Particularly, Dancygier lays much emphasis on the assumption that ‘pronouns in the narrative do not only serve the establishment of referential links, but are also viewpoint devices, managing and linking various levels of narrative spaces, and also engaging the SV-space’ (p. 132).
Chapters 6, 7 and 8 substantially expand the book’s concern with meaning making via language choices. In particular, these chapters are devoted to explicating speech, thought and mind representations in literature through formal means. Dancygier believes that ‘literature develops its formal means in order to find more accurate ways of representing thoughts and emotions’ (p. 139). By making use of cognitive concepts like deictic ground, blending, viewpoint compression and mental spaces, Dancygier investigates speech and thought representations in both dramatic narratives and novelistic narratives.
In Social Minds in the Novel (2010), Alan Palmer argues that the cognitive approach to literature is not ‘simply one alternative among a range of others: historical and cultural, Marxist, feminist, rhetorical and ethical criticism,’ but ‘the basis of all the others’ (Palmer, 2010: 7). I think the value of the cognitive approach can be mainly attributed to the plurality of cognitive science, which is composed of ‘psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and the social sciences more generally, evolutionary biology, education, computer science, artificial intelligence, and ethnology’ (Wilson and Keil, 1999: xiii). With different research interests, cognitivists employ various strands of cognitive science to read and analyse literature. Cognitive linguistics, especially blending theory or conceptual integration, seems to be one of the most innovative approaches adopted by critics. For instance, Fludernik (2010: 1–27) uses blending theory to naturalize ‘unnatural narratives’. Most recently, in their co-edited collection Blending and the Study of Narrative Approaches and Applications (2012), Schneider and Hartner discuss a range of applications of this theory to the study of narrative, covering such issues such as time and space, literary character and perspective, genre, story levels, and fictional minds. The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach aptly demonstrates how literature can be fruitfully studied from the vantage point of blending theory. It charts a range of possibilities of meaning making from this perspective.
Without doubt, this book constitutes a highly relevant contribution to the cognitive study of literature and facilitates new ways of engaging with this flourishing field of research. Another strength of the book is that its arguments are all exemplified by well-chosen examples. Bearing such fine qualities as readability, intelligence, and originality, the book will become a key reference in the vast literature concerning cognitive approaches to literature, and a source of very fruitful discussion and further developments.