LOCATION AND FOCALIZATION: SPATIAL REMOVAL AND CHANGE OF CHARACTER`S CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE PROSE BY MYKHAILO KOTSIUBYNSKY

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of readers` and characters` cognitive processes in the short story Praise life by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. A theoretical part of the research is based on the narratological aspects of Aristotle’s Poetics (the notion of peripetia, catastrophe, and catharsis); the studies of Northrop Frye about literary modes and the conception of focalization (external, internal, zero) outlined by Gerard Genette.
According to our hypothesis the readers` cognitive effects like a surprise, constraint and confusion are constructed in a short story by means of characters` transactions and translocations of the protagonist in
the space of the presented world, imaginary experience and characters` expectations. The mechanism of emergence of these effects is predefined by the combination of actors`, narrators` and focalizers` functions
in the actional field of the protagonist.
Each character`s translocation presents a separate peripetia, which is based on the principle of gradation. It ends up a catastrophe and experiencing the catharsis. The last one is characterized as a cognitive
dissonance in the terminology of cognitive narratology.
A plot configuration of the story appears by means of the models of satire that is close to the dramas of doom of man, who is in the captivity of this world and who inevitably faces with death. The main trope, in this case, is an irony. It is the most adequate to satiric representation of the reality.