This article deals with the functioning of mental spaces in literary fiction and cinema discourse as exemplified in S. Faulks’s A Week in December and P. Auster’s In the Country of the Last Things, as well as The Simpsons cartoon series. The author distinguishes three types of mental spaces: the real past, connected with the spaces in which the characters exist; contemporary space, that is unavailable to the characters, and the virtual worlds (the Internet, other fiction works, etc., that cannot be real spaces by their nature). The connection between these mental spaces and the reality of a novel or a cartoon, as well as the means of this connection are analyzed through the study of characters’ and authors’ speech. The author considers both linguistic means of the representation of space (prepositions, conjunctions etc) as well as the discursive means of describing and anchoring spaces. The conclusion claims that the mental spaces in fiction are widely stereotypical and reflect the characters’ ideas of the world. They are included into the image of the world by the process of reclamation – mental objects are described as similar to the real ones from different aspects.

Author Name: G. V. Urvantsev

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Keywords: mental spaces, fiction discourse, cinema discourse, image of the city, spatial lexis

ISSN: 1996-7853

EISSN: 2542-0038

EOI/DOI: 10.21209/1996-7853-2016-11-5-9

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