Narrative triggers. Metonymy and metaphor in the process of recovering temporality in atemporal representations

Abstract

This study investigates how single monophase representations function as narrative triggers, prompting recipients to construct temporally and causally organized meanings despite the atemporal character of the original representation. Drawing on the Motivation and Sedimentation Model of meaning making and Stampoulidis’ (2019) account of narrative interpretation, we focus on the reception stage of communication and examine how embodied, sedimented and situated dimensions of meaning making interact in the reconstruction of narratives. The analysis combines two case studies. The first examines media discussions surrounding the renaming of streets commemorating historical figures in Poznań, based on newspaper articles and below-the-line comments. The second investigates museum visitors’ interpretations of an unnamed sculpture by African-American self-taught artist Bessie Harvey, collected through ethnographic interviews at the Tubman Museum in Macon, Georgia. In both cases, metonymic and metaphorical processes provide access to broader historical, cultural and experiential frames, allowing recipients to develop narratives extending beyond the immediate representational stimulus. The findings suggest that the Motivation and Sedimentation Model should be expanded to account more explicitly for individual experience as a distinct source of meaning-making motivation. They also demonstrate that the relationship between a narrative trigger and the narratives it evokes is not one-to-one: a single representation may activate several independent or interconnected stories, while different recipients may construct substantially different narratives depending on their cultural knowledge and personal experience.