Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 26, 03 January 2024
Open
Access | Article
Narrative Worldmaking of Temporal and Spatial Intersections: "Here" and "Elsewhere" in Life Is Elsewhere
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Milan Kundera’s novel, Life Is Elsewhere, narrates the entire life of the protagonist from pre-birth to death. The author constructs a realistic world of “here” in contrast to a dreamlike world of “elsewhere” in the novel, setting up two homologous narrative worlds that finally drift into an irreconcilable separation and opposition. Cognitive narratology’s focus on narrative worldmaking provides the readers with a pathway to analyze the dual narrative worlds in the text, creating double-scope stories represented by the personae of Jaromil and Xavier. The discrepancy between the two worlds runs throughout the narrative, and the relationship between the two independent yet mirroring worlds is evident from the beginning of their worldmaking. The implied distinction between “here” and “elsewhere” in “Life Is Elsewhere” is a metaphor for the unity of opposites in these two story worlds. The storyteller guides the interpreter’s reading activity through narration.
Keywords
Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere, cognitive narratology, narrative worldmaking
References
1. Mechraou, Sara. "Narrative Control or Aesthetic Ideal: Cognitive Narrative Reading of Milan Kundera's Life Is Elsewhere." AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies 4, no. 4 (October 2020): 17-34.
2. Herman, David. "Introduction." In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, edited by David Herman Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003: 18+20..
3. Herman, David. "Exploring the Nexus of Narrative and Mind." In Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, edited by David Herman. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2012: 25+28.
4. Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009: 105-107+112.
5. Kundera, Milan. Life is Elsewhere. Translated by Aaron Asher. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000: 3-4+47+71-75+96+403.
6. Richardson, Brian. "Character." In Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, edited by David Herman. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2012: 148-149.
7. Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman. New York: Penguin Books, 1967: 35.
8. Herman, David. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. London: The MIT Press, 2013: 57-63.
9. Kundera, Milan. The Joke. Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Penguin Books, 1982: ix.
10. Turner, Mark. "Double-scope Stories." In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, edited by David Herman. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003: 117-118+127.
11. Whitman, Jon. Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987: 263-264.
Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Authors who publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See Open Access Instruction).
- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-83558-255-8
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-256-5
- Published Date
- 03 January 2024
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/26/20232032
- Copyright
- 03 January 2024
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited