A Cognitive Approach To The Iceberg Behind The Artistic Operation Of Narrative Duration And Order

Narrating embraces two levels which are histoire and recit (story and narrative respectively in English) defined by Genette. While the term STORY is used for the signified or narrative content, i.e., those materials which are in chronological order and have not yet been represented by language; NARRATIVE for the signifier, statement, discourse or narrative text itself, which includes all the features added to by the author, especially the rearrangement of story order, and the narrator's manipulation of both length of text and readers' allocation of attention.Duration and order are traditional and classical topics of narratology. A number of studies have already been done on these issues: some are concerned with their classifications; however, many others simply regard them as narrative tools / devices / strategies, employ them to analyze just one novel, or certain writers' / directors' works, or works of various types / periods in great detail, and thus explain how these texts control the narrative rhythm and order so as to achieve special effects of aesthetics and suspense.Of course, some empirical studies are conducted cognitive psychologically. But actually rather few research on these issues is conducted cognitive linguistically. This is really a pity, considering the explanatory ability of cognitive sciences being so strong in this. These narrative strategies of temporal disorder, both the anachronic order and the constant shift of discursive speed included, are not employed arbitrarily but cognitively motivated. They, as we use them, are but the tips of the iceberg of cognition-drivenness. Much is going on behind the scene. Hence this thesis aims to examine what it is going on behind the unseen operational processes of narrative duration and order.As to duration, theoretically, comparing STORY TIME with DISCOURE TIME, we will easily get the types of duration. As a matter of fact, it is not an easy thing to measure discourse time. Thus Genette proposes to use spatial units to tackle this. Essentially, this is done through the mappings of spatial domain onto temporal domain, a kind of spatial metaphor. After such comparison occur the following phenomena: story time being shorter than, almost equal to, or longer than discourse time. Hence may arise such four types as: SUMMARY, ELLIPSIS, PAUSE and SCENE, which generally indicate the author's attentional allocation and also an iconicity of quantity. In textual field of most narrative fictions, characters are figures against the ground of settings, because they have boundaries in terms of their proper names, carry along specific psychological and personal traits and move across the ground, either spatially or temporally as the novel progresses, or qualitatively as they evolve and collect traits from their apparent psychological evolution. What's more, the uneven allocation of attention to all the events gives rise to such phenomena: in some cases only one window of attention is opened, in other cases two opened to activate the whole sequence of events, thus will occur different construal operations. This is the extension and expansion of metonymy to narratology, which rests upon man's gestalt tendency in perception and the missing information being filled in by virtue of backstage cognition.Also important is the rearrangement of the order of events. There are three kinds: chronological order, analepses and prolepses, which are classified according to the criterion whether STORY ORDER and DISCOURSE ORDER are accordant with each other or not. Thus based on sequential iconicity, this thesis analyzes these narrative strategies, judges whether they adhere to / deviate from this iconicity, and even delves into the author's intentions of such tacklings. By using such theories as Current Discourse Spaces and Given-New Contract, it explores what considerations induce the author to choose some strategies rather than others and how he manipulates the information flow for the purposes of attracting the readers' attention and enthusiasm till the end in the process of reading. In such a mental process, the prototypical and stereotypical narrative strategies such as chronological order and Given-New information structure consumes less of the readers'cognitive efforts, but non-prototypical and non-stereotypical ones, which are schema disruption, consumes more. In sum, reading is a process of construction, undergoing the twin poles of assimilation and accommodation.