LITERARY AND LINGUISTIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF FICTIONAL PLOTS

Abstract

The article is dedicated to outlining the literary and linguistic approaches to studying the literary plots. A plot is generally defined as a sequence of events in a story with character motivations and cause-and-effect relations. The study of plots is being carried out in various fields, including narratology, cognitive narratology, literary criticism and cognitive poetics. The shift in analyzing plots was marked by the theory of M.M. Bakhtin who proposed the idea of chronotope being the center of the events in the story. As M. Bakhtin noted, chronotope has the plot-forming function: the statement which was never fully explicated. In this regard, the aim of the article is to contrast the existing approaches and methods of literary plot analysis in the aspect of utilizing M. Bakhtin’s idea in contemporary research. The article also focuses on the different viewpoints of studying the phenomenon of ‘eternal plots’ and the reasons for their emergence. Based on the analytical review of the contemporary theories of plot, it is concluded that the mentioned approaches to analyzing plot do not fully depict the idea of chronotope as of a plot-forming entity, which points at the necessity of further research in this field. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the statement about the necessity of studying plot as an event component in the conceptual structure of chronotope Space-and-Time-Continuum. Theoretical and practical significance of the study lies in revealing the further perspective of research in this field from the standpoint of cognitive linguistics and cognitive stylistics, along with the possibility of using research results for academic purposes.