Cognitive narratology

María-Ángeles Martínez

Associate Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Alcalá, Madrid (Spain).

My research is in the field of cognitive literary linguistics, cognitive narratology, narrative engagement, and narrative discourse analysis. I am particularly interested in the connections between the language of narratives, both fictional and non-fictional, and its potential and actual effects on readers. My work has been published in journals such as Narrative, Poetics Today, Language and Literature, and Journal of Literary Semantics, as well as in collective volumes. I am the author of Storyworld Possible Selves (De Gruyter, 2018), a monograph that explores narrative engagement within the paradigms of cognitive linguistics, cognitive narratology, and social psychology. At present I lead the research project entitled “Narratology, Linguistics and Cognition: Interdisciplinary Studies on Storyworld Possible Selves, Narrative Intersubjectivity, and Engagement” (NARRALINCOG), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ref. PID2020-114255RB-I00).

I welcome research supervision in areas related to cognitive literary linguistics and stylistics, narrative discourse analysis, narrative engagement, cognitive semantics, and pragmatics.

Daniel Candel Bormann

Full professor of English literature at the Universidad de Alcalá

I have created a cultural-semantic model for the analysis of narratives which is at present being reworked into cognitive narrative thematics. It is based on the kind of modal semantics used in possible worlds theory and connects with folk psychological assumptions and basic motivations typical of evolutionary literary theory. At its most basic, it operates with the concepts 'nature', 'society', 'the supernatural' and 'individuality', organizes them as semiotic squares and along a past-present axis which proposes basic forms of socialization (traditional, primitive, intitutional and emotive) and has been applied to all kinds of multimodal fictional narratives (e.g. literary texts, movies, comics, cartoons) and non-fictional texts (literary histories and digital humanities reports). It has been the subject of numerous articles in Poetics Today, Semiotica and English Text Construction. An early version has appeared as a monograph in German (Literatur interpretieren - ein Analyse-Tool, UTB 2013) and a more complete and updated version is being prepared for Routledge (Cognitive Narrative Thematics: A Book About What Books Are About, 2023).