Narrativity through the prism of literary fiction: a communicative-pragmatic aspect

Abstract

The article examines narrativity within the communicative-pragmatic aspect of the realization of literary fiction. The study aims to substantiate the communicative-pragmatic status of narrativity in the formation and functioning of literary fiction within textual-discursive space. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that, for the first time, using John Fowles’s novel “The Magus” as empirical material, the main discursive markers of first-person narrative that determine the ontological status of literary fiction in textual-discursive space are identified and described. The study establishes that narrativity facilitates the projection of the author’s worldview onto the structure of a literary text through the hero-narrator as a subject of speech. This projection largely determines the modifications of aesthetic cognition realized during the reader’s perception of the text. The evaluative nature of the narrating subject, alongside their perception of artistic reality and self within it, conditions the communicative-pragmatic potential of the narrative, which also influences the shaping of literary fiction in textual-discursive space. Defining elements in the realization of narrativity include lexical collocations and holistic syntagms, as well as comparative constructions and metaphorical contexts that objectify the playful nature of the novel’s eventfulness. Narrativity receives a dual determination by literary fiction: through the author’s intent and through the narrator’s perception of eventfulness within the literary textual-discursive space, the ultimate result of which is the destruction of the boundaries between the real and the unreal.