LYRICAL NARRATIVE: MYTH OR REALITY?

Abstract

This article suggests a kind of debate around the views on the notion of narrative and its main properties in various genres of a poetic text and discourse. It aims to prove the existence of lyrical narrative as a separate kind of genre in the poetic discourse. The methodology of analysis has underpinnings in: the cognitive theory of verbal image in the imagery space of a poetic text, which recognizes imagery as a dominant constituent of a poetic text and treats any poetic form as threefold cognitive construal which has pre-conceptual, conceptual and verbal planes; scientific findings of emotionology related to exploring emotional and aesthetic responses; the conceptual metaphor theory and the theory of conceptual integration or blending that provides the apparatus for revealing the hidden senses of a poetic text. A text world theory is explored for identification of text building elements of a poetic text world and showing how the specifics of the text world furnishing lead to reader’s emotional involvement in poetic discourse. M.-L. Ryan’s taxonomy of possible worlds is used for consideration of the types of the text worlds as mental representation of real or hypothetical states of affairs. E. Semino’s knowledge schemata theory is applied to verify how the interaction of different schemas give insights into the states of affairs of the text world. The main objective of this article – revealing basic features of lyrical narrative – is realized thanks to poetic-narratological analysis of various poetic texts of C. Sandburg’s Complete Poems. The elaborated methodology of poetic-narratological analysis consists of imagery space exploration and text world navigation regarded as the main cognitive strategies of poetic text interpretation. The first one envisages operations of conceptual analysis of verbal poetic images and their functions in the image space of poetic texts. The second besides various cognitive operations and procedures of restructuring text worlds (via the analysis of schemata as structures of knowledge verbalized in the poetic text) is intended on identification of a story world and its obligatory elements which testify the process of narrativization