Narratologists have become quite comfortable with the truism that story telling is fundamental to human experience. We embrace Jerome Bruner's insight that humans constitute reality through narratives (1991) and look for support for this premise in the work of psychologists who have demonstrated that unconscious processes inform narrative experiences (Gerrig/Egidi 2003). Marie-Laure Ryan's differentiation between a text's "being a narrative" and "possessing narrativity" (Ryan 2004: 9; 2005a) allows narrativity to be used as an analytic category in any number of scenarios. Understanding narrativity as a cognitive activity rather than as a quality of verbal texts and exchanges allows narratologists to examine narrative qualities and constituents beyond their individual linguistic or non-linguistic realizations. It places the detection of story-like qualities squarely within the human mind. Yet a competing narrative of human sense making can be found in the claims of cognitive metaphor theory. On the basis of experientiality, CMT assumes that humans possess a limited number of pre-linguistic spatial and bodily metaphors which they then project by analogy onto experienced phenomena. This paper compares the claims of these two models of the basis for cognitive processing and interrogates their usefulness for the explication of visual, multimedial, and multimodal phenomena.
Greta Olson - Professor of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies - University of Giessen
BA Vassar College / University College London (Philosophy / Studio Art)
MA, PhD, and Habilitation University of Freiburg (English / American Studies / Philosophy)
