Cognition and aesthetics in fiction: Barth s Autobiography and Carver’s Cathedral

This study investigates if Cognitive Grammar can propose a systematic methodology for approaching literary texts. It conducts a comparative study of Barth s self-conscious, experimental Autobiography: A self-recorded fiction (1963/1978) and Carver’s neorealistic Cathedral (1981).It detects narrator s attentional windowing on five levels of genre, language, literary stylistics,narrative, and pragmatics. Extratextual pragmatics addresses narrator-reader interrelationships,while textual pragmatics leads to a personological scheme of each narrator. It contends Autobiography and Cathedral have two common points: their reliance on conceptual metaphor and their open-endedness. The methodology of the paper is analytic and comparative. CognitiveGrammar and personological insights provide a more comprehensive view of the texts cognitive pasterns. The paper accentuates the advantages of Cognitive Grammar for literary interpretation; it simultaneously emphasizes the processual nature of attentional windowing which has not received its due treatment in Cognitive Grammar.

Keywords:

Barth , Carver , cognitive , aesthetic , grammar