Description: How do we read stories? How do they engage our minds and create meaning? Are they a mental construct, a linguistic one or a cultural one? What is the difference between real stories and fictional ones? This book addresses such questions by describing the conceptual and linguistic underpinnings of narrative interpretation. Barbara Dancygier discusses literary texts as linguistic artifacts, describing the processes which drive the emergence of literary meaning. If a text means something to someone, she argues, there have to be linguistic phenomena that make it possible. Drawing on blending theory and construction grammar, the book focuses its linguistic lens on the concepts of the narrator and the story, and defines narrative viewpoint in a new way. The examples come from a wide spectrum of texts, primarily novels and drama, by authors such as William Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Dave Eggers, Jan Potocki and Mikhail Bulgakov.
Brief description: Barbara Dancygier is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her publications include Conditionals and Prediction (Cambridge, 1999) and Mental Spaces in Grammar (with Eve Sweetser, Cambridge, 2005).
Review Quotes: "What I appreciated most in The Language of Stories [was] Dancygier's attention to small lexical and grammatical textual choices and her rigorous attempt to follow the effect of these details through to the macro-level of meaning construction."
Elke D'hoker, English Text Construction