PROCESSES OF CONCEPTUALIZATION AND CATEGORIZATION IN A COMPUTER-ORIENTED NARRATIVE MODEL OF LITERARY METAMODERNISM
Abstract
The article presents a comprehensive study of the processes of conceptualization and categorization within a computer-oriented narrative model of literary metamodernism. The authors focus on integrating cognitive and computational approaches to literary text analysis, selecting Julian Barnes’s philosophical and psychological novel, The Sense of an Ending (2011), as the object of study. This work serves as a representative example of the hybrid narrative, demonstrating the transition from postmodern irony to the metamodernist paradigm, characterized by oscillations between doubt and faith, the reconstruction of historical memory, and profound empathy. The theoretical framework of the research is rooted in cognitive narratology – an interdisciplinary field that synthesizes achievements in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and the philosophy of mind. Primary emphasis is placed on the mechanisms of conceptualization and categorization as fundamental mental operations that structure human experience and facilitate meaning-making in metamodern literary narratives. The implementation of these mechanisms is explored through a system of linguistic, stylistic, and compositional tools within the literary text. Scientific novelty lies in the verification of cognitive models (frames, scripts, mental maps, concepts, and image schemas) using modern data analysis software: LIWC, NVivo, CATMA, UAM CorpusTool, and Sketch Engine. The practical section of the article demonstrates the results of a cognitive-narrative analysis of fragments from Barnes’s novel, where categorical text tagging was performed via NVivo and CATMA. This enabled the identification of key concepts and cognitive metaphors, as well as tracking how a character with sensory limitations constructs a mental model of artistic reality by relying on alternative resources – memory and imagination. The conclusions substantiate the effectiveness of combining cognitive narratology with computational methods for the automated detection of narrative structures and the creation of discourse profiles. This approach opens new perspectives for the digital humanities in the study of contemporary metamodernist literature.
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