(Od)tworzenie porządku : narracyjność i światopoglądy ukryte w obrazach

The philosophical debate on the nature of narrative has been mainly concerned with literary narratives, whereas forms of non-literary and especially pictorial narrativity have been rather neglected. Within traditional art history, however, the narrative potential of the visual arts has usually been taken for granted, though rarely by attempting to elucidate any deeper cognitive, semiotic, and philosophical aspects involved. Now, generally speaking, narratives contribute to the human endeavour to reduce the unpredictability of worldly changes, and human existence in particular, attempting to establish order in our experiences of transitoriness and existential vulnerability. The paper discusses some possible criteria of narrativity with regard to their applicability to pictorial objects. It demonstrates thatpictorial works may express or imply high- -level narrative structures or, put in another way, wider world views or schemata, and that our comprehension of and need for these schemata can be explained by taking recent research within cognitive psychology, schema theory, and narratology into account.