Keywords
Abstract
This paper examines the construction of cognitive-artistic space in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicle through the lens of cognitive poetics, Text World Theory, and possible-worlds narratology. Four interrelated features are identified: naming as a fusion of cognitive linguistics and world-building; the frame narrative as a generator of layered text-worlds; the magic of “sympathy” as a dramatization of mental models; and the motif of silence as a cognitive-poetic structuring device. It is argued that Rothfuss’s artistic space is distinctive because the text reflexively foregrounds cognition itself — naming, belief, attention, and silence function simultaneously as plot mechanisms and as the means by which the reader builds and inhabits the secondary world.
References
Stockwell, P. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2019.
2. Gavins, J. Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
3. Ryan, M.-L. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
4. Ryan, M.-L. Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
5. Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories.” In Tree and Leaf. London: Allen & Unwin, 1964 [1947].
6. Pulvermüller, F. Studies on embodied semantics and the cortical grounding of word meaning. (See his work on lexical activation and sensorimotor representation.)
7. Tomková, J. Implications of Names in The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Thesis, Masaryk University, Brno, 2016. Available at: https://is.muni.cz/th/hr22v/.
8. Dancygier, B. The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
9. Oatley, K. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. See also Zunshine, L. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.
10. Mendlesohn, F. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008; Attebery, B. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992; Dellinger, W. A Transmutation of the Genre: Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle in Relation to Tolkien and Martin in Secondary World Fantasy. Master’s Thesis, 2020. On local scholarship, see the cognitive-linguistic works of Sh. Safarov and D. U. Ashurova on artistic space (badiiy makon).