Reconciling narrative spaces : conceptual blending in Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince and Calvino's Invisible Cities

Narratologists define narrative as a chronological series of events, and thus focus on temporality in their definitions of narrative form, neglecting the crucial role that space and spatiality may play in some narratives. In this project, I use cognitive linguists Fauconnier and Turner's theory of conceptual blending to analyze two very different pieces of literature, Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the former a children's story and the latter a postmodern experimental work of fiction. While many narratologists and literary theorists focus on the destabilizing aspects of postmodern fiction and claim that it is "anti-narrative" because it resists assumptions about temporal linearity, conceptual blending analysis reveals that some such texts may be dependent for a feeling of coherence or "storiness" on the very cognitive frames and spatial structures that they deconstruct. The affinity between Saint-Exupèry's and Calvino's works suggests that there may be a particular corpus of texts, which I term "spatialized narratives," that maintain in the mind of the reader their own kind of coherence despite their ostensible non-referentiality or fragmentation — a kind of coherence that lies more in spatiality than in temporality.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts - MA

Level thesis:degree_level

master's

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor dc:publisher

University of British Columbia

Year dc:date

2008

Author dc:creator

• Shanks, Rhonda

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language

eng

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/897

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/897