Peer-reviewed article
The Role of Construal in Shaping Foreboding and Panic in Alice Munro’s “My Mother’s Dream”
Oksana Hural ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5This study applies a linguistic framework called Cognitive Grammar to Alice Munro's short story "My Mother's Dream". It examines two scenes in which the death of an infant appears, first in a dream and later as a possibility, and explains how the language creates foreboding in one scene and panic in the other. The method is close reading of a literary text. The study is a work of literary and linguistic analysis. It does not look at the well-being of real children.
Key points
- The story centres on a young woman trying to reconcile motherhood with her identity as a violinist in a post-war provincial Canadian community.
- The theme of infant death appears first in the mother's dream and is revisited as a possibility in the post-climactic scene.
- The analysis uses construal and its dimensions of specificity, prominence and perspective, plus the reference point model and action chains.
- The study explains foreboding in the early scene and panic in the later one.
- The method is qualitative and interpretive, based on close reading and manual application of the Cognitive Grammar toolkit.
Limitations
The document is a literary analysis of one fictional story, so it says nothing about the well-being of real children. The abstract also gives no link to Ukraine, so the country hint does not fit.
Abstract
This study applies the Cognitive Grammar framework to Alice Munro’s short story My Mother’s Dream, which centres on a young woman’s struggle to reconcile motherhood with her identity as a violinist in a post-war provincial Canadian community. The narrative intricately plays with the theme of infant death, presented initially as part of the young mother’s dream and revisited as a possibility in the post-climactic scene. Both scenes are analysed through the Cognitive Grammar concept of construal and its dimensions of specificity, prominence, and perspective (Langacker, 2008), complemented by the reference point model and the notion of action chains to explore how narrative meaning emerges through conceptual patterns. These tools enable a scientifically justified explanation of foreboding in the early scene and panic in the later one. Employing a qualitative, interpretive methodology based on close reading and the manual application of the Cognitive Grammar toolkit (Stockwell, 2014; Harrison, 2017a; Giovanelli, et al., 2021), this study demonstrates the framework’s potential to illuminate the processes of meaning encoding and decoding in fictional texts.