The situatedness of meaning construction in Wisława Szymborska’s “Cat in an Empty Apartment”

Abstract

Abstract So far the cognitively-oriented study of literature has largely missed out on the cognitive conception of situatedness, which holds that human mental activity should be seen through the lens of its grounding in the physical, social and cultural milieu of the individual. Accordingly, the article shows the value of this approach in a Cognitive Linguistic analysis of Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Cat in an Empty Apartment”, setting out the ways in which situatedness underlies dynamic meaning construction in the production and reception of the work, giving rise to the singularity (Attridge 2004. The singularity of literature. London-New York: Routledge) of the poem. The paper concludes that situatedness can illuminate how the interplay of cognitive, linguistic, social and cultural factors might be brought to bear on the singularity of a literary work.