Blending and the Study of Narrative

Approaches and Applications

Ralf Schneider, Marcus Hartner, Ralf Schneider, Marcus Hartner

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9783110291124
• eBook ISBN: 9783110291230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Literature

The theory of Blending, or Conceptual Integration, proposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Marc Turner, is one of most promising cognitive theories of meaning production. It has been successfully applied to the analysis of poetic discourse and micro-textual elements, such as metaphor. Prose narrative has so far received significantly less attention. The present volume aims to remedy this situation.

Following an introductory discussion of the connections between narrative and the processes of blending, the contributions demonstrate the range of applications of the theory to the study of narrative. They cover issues such as time and space, literary character and perspective, genre, story levels, and fictional minds; some chapters show how such phenomena as metalepsis, counterfactual narration, intermediality, extended metaphors, and suspense can be fruitfully studied from the vantage point of Conceptual Integration. Working within a theoretical framework situated at the intersection of narratology and the cognitive sciences, the book provides both fresh readings for individual literary and film narratives and new impulses for post-classical narratology.

Table of contents

• Blending and the Study of Narrative: An Introduction
• Narrative Time, Sequence, and Memory: A Blending Analysis
• Attention, Blending, and Suspense in Classic and Experimental Film
• Constructing Literary character and Perspective: An Approach from Psychology and Blending Theory
• Fleshing Out the Blend: The Representation of Counterfactuals in Alternate History in Print, Film, and Television Narratives
• Blending in a bacyelmo: Don Quixote’s Genre Blending and the Invention of the Novel
• The Conceptual Integration Network of Metalepsis
• The conceptual integration of intermediality: Literary and Cinematic Camera-Eye Narratives
• Metaphors, Narrative Frames, and Cognitive Distance in Charles Chesnutt’s “Dave’s Neckliss”
• Conceptual Blending in The Waves: “A Mind Thinking”
• Blending and Jazz Narratives: Conceptual Integration of Music and Verbal Meaning in Eudora Welty’s “Powerhouse”
• “Allways our rush returning renewed”: Time, Narrative, and Conceptual Blending in Danielewski’s Only Revolutions
• The Conceptual Blending of Time and Space: Milan Kundera’s Slowness
• The Narrative of Nothing: The Mathematical Blends of Narrator and Hero in Shakespeare’s Henry V