ANALYTIC OVERVIEW OF NARRATIVE THEORY AND NARRATIVITY: MODERN EPISTEMOLOGY OF СOGNITION

Abstract

This paper presents an analytic overview of modern narrative theories and its key notion of narrativity, which swiftly entered the scientific paradigm of modern knowledge in the end of the last century, radically changing classical understanding of narrative as a simple theory of “storytelling”.

The objective of the paper lies in disclosing the essence of narrative as a means of modeling the world through analytic generalization of the most capacious theories of narrativity in the context of dispute between “natural” and “non natural narratology” as the most irreconcilable issue of modern epistemology of cognition.

The methods. The systematic approach has been put into the basis of complex analysis of the narrative; analytical and interpretative method has been applied for analysis the theoretic approaches and hypotheses of narrativity; which combined with the historical method of research provided for tracing a historical development of the narrativity theory and shaping narratology as an independent sphere of literary studies.

Results. An analytic overview of the most capacious theories of narrativity has stated a dominating influence of the interpretative turn in social sciences on the formation of synergetic narrative discourse analysis and a narrative way of cognition as a new epistemology of knowledge. It has been proved that the synergy of scientific approaches and interaction of literary studies with psychology, semiotics, philosophy and aesthetics in the last decades of the previous century has changed the focus of analysis from the textual features of narrative to the meaning creation in sign systems as an embodiment of the category of subjectivity. This subjectivity as a purposeoriented behavior is itself the category of being, cognition and reception, incorporated in culture in the form of dynamic entity, Umwelt, as a set of reactions, associations and boundaries of cognitive receptive space, reasoning a meaning creation of a certain fictional text by the consciousness of the reader. Mainly such understanding of subjectivity put in the basis by semiotic interpretation of sign systems as self-organizing entities (V. Alenxander, P. Cobley, K. Kull, Y. Lotman, Ch. Peirce) and treating a literary text as a biological alive entity, emerging and moving in the teleologic fashion from “cause” to “purpose” as an emergent phenomenon, gave the grounds for a birth of a new branch of narrative research – biosemiotics (T. Sebeok, J. von Uexküll).

Conclusions. Modern theory of narrativity is multifacited due to integrative character of modern epistemology, created in the result of transformation of aesthetic and scientific paradigms. Correspondently, the change of forms, methods and approaches to narrativity analysis was urged by the call to reevaluate non effective structuralist approaches. The leading role in the formation of modern multifaucetednarrative theory was played by semiotics, as a study of sign systems, allowing for intergration of different disciplines (biology, linguistics, psychology and philosophy) into a quite holistic approach as a new subdiscipline of narrative reseach –biosemiotics (T. Sebiok, J. von Uexküll).