Cognitive Mechanisms of Literary Meaning-Making and the Constructive Reader

This article examines the cognitive mechanisms by which literary texts generate meaning, and the role of the reader in stabilising that meaning into concepts. Four strands that are usually theorised separately — imagination, schema theory, conceptual metaphor, and frame-and-script semantics — are integrated here with reception-oriented accounts of interpretation and reading strategy, yielding a single four-level model of literary processing. Within this model, imagination is understood as constrained offline simulation; schemata supply its generic constraints; frames and scripts provide its situational defaults; and metaphor and blending constitute its combinatorial operations. Rather than an undifferentiated act of construction, the reader's contribution is specified as a determinate inventory of strategies. The model is then applied to C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956), a corpus constructed almost entirely from the systematic disruption of default knowledge structures. The analysis identifies three recurring operations — schema preservation, accretion, and disruption followed by accommodation — and demonstrates that each places a distinctive inferential demand on the reader. Two further arguments are advanced: that Lewis's distinction between receiving and using a literary work restates Piaget's contrast between accommodation and assimilation, and that his defence of supposal over allegory is better described by blending theory than by any theory of mapping. The article concludes that interpretation is not a supplement to textual meaning but the very mechanism through which textual cues become concepts.