Chapter 4. Immersed in imagined landscapes
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Catherine Emmott
Abstract
Elspeth Davie’s short story “A map of the world” provides examples of a character apparently crossing narrative borders, termed “metalepsis” (Genette 1980, 1988). The character is unable to travel in actuality due to caring for her bed-ridden mother, but her imagination allows for virtual travel, enabling her apparently to step into imagined foreign landscapes, strongly experiencing these virtual environments. This article draws on cognitive and linguistic notions to describe these metaleptic events, including contextual frames, transportation, immersion, embodiment, deictic transfer, and granularity. The type of metalepsis which occurs in this story seems likely to facilitate the reader’s immersion in the character’s imagined contexts, but these imagined worlds must also be abruptly abandoned due to the imagining character’s domestic pressures.
Abstract
Elspeth Davie’s short story “A map of the world” provides examples of a character apparently crossing narrative borders, termed “metalepsis” (Genette 1980, 1988). The character is unable to travel in actuality due to caring for her bed-ridden mother, but her imagination allows for virtual travel, enabling her apparently to step into imagined foreign landscapes, strongly experiencing these virtual environments. This article draws on cognitive and linguistic notions to describe these metaleptic events, including contextual frames, transportation, immersion, embodiment, deictic transfer, and granularity. The type of metalepsis which occurs in this story seems likely to facilitate the reader’s immersion in the character’s imagined contexts, but these imagined worlds must also be abruptly abandoned due to the imagining character’s domestic pressures.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Chapter 1. Introduction 1
- Chapter 2. The role of analogy in Charles Dickens’ Pictures from Italy 21
- Chapter 3. Listing and impressionism in Charles Dickens’s description of Genoa in Pictures from Italy 31
- Chapter 4. Immersed in imagined landscapes 45
- Chapter 5. The blind tour 61
- Chapter 6. “How Others See …” 81
- Chapter 7. The poems of Edward Thomas 95
- Chapter 8. Landscape as a dominant hero in “Bezhin Meadow” by I. S. Turgenev 123
- Chapter 9. A social landscape 153
- Chapter 10. The agency of The Hungry Tide 191
- Name index 233
- Subject index 235
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Chapter 1. Introduction 1
- Chapter 2. The role of analogy in Charles Dickens’ Pictures from Italy 21
- Chapter 3. Listing and impressionism in Charles Dickens’s description of Genoa in Pictures from Italy 31
- Chapter 4. Immersed in imagined landscapes 45
- Chapter 5. The blind tour 61
- Chapter 6. “How Others See …” 81
- Chapter 7. The poems of Edward Thomas 95
- Chapter 8. Landscape as a dominant hero in “Bezhin Meadow” by I. S. Turgenev 123
- Chapter 9. A social landscape 153
- Chapter 10. The agency of The Hungry Tide 191
- Name index 233
- Subject index 235
