Memento and the Embodied Fabula: Narrative Comprehension Revisited

• Authors: Steffen Hven
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Although Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) has been the subject of numerous critical examinations, the unique manner in which the film’s reverse-chronological dramaturgy interweaves the spectators’ cognitive-analytical attempts to ensure causal-linear coherency together with a corporal-affective sensation of temporal loss remains underexplored. This I believe is due to the inability of prevalent narratological terms of cutting across the current divide and uniting on the same conceptual plane the cinematic spheres of the cognitive-analytical, evaluative, and interpretative, on the one hand, with the visceral, haptic, and sensory-affective, on the other hand. As an attempt to carve out a conceptual ground where these key facets of the cinematic experience can be unified in a nonhierarchical and nonreductive manner, I propose an embodied reconceptualization of the cognitive-formalist concept of the fabula. In order to do so, however, it is necessary to dispute a series of dominant assumptions about cinematic spectatorship and narrative comprehension that automatically come with this narratological concept.

Keywords

EN

narratology; cognitive film science; embodied cognition; film-philosophy; the embodied fabula

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 93-110

Dates

published

2015-12-01

online

2016-04-06

Contributors

author

Steffen Hven

• Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Germany)

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/ausfm-2015-0017