Abstract
Postmodern fiction is marked by impossible worlds, the appreciation of which challenges readers and draws upon different cognitive operations. The present study reacts to the reading strategies proposed by Alber, J. 2016. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln, NB and London: University of Nebraska Press. It adopts and adapts these strategies in a case study of Saunders’s experimental novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). There is an attempt to investigate the cognitive operations that are activated in the process of communicating with and understanding such texts. The study evinces the pros and cons of Alber’s reading strategies. It proposes the cognitive operation of schematization in both online and offline forms as another reading strategy which helps readers understand impossibilities in texts.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- The Horrors of the Oriental Space and Language in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”
- Myth and Intersections of Myth and Gender in Canadian Culture: Margaret Atwood’s Revision of the Odyssey in The Penelopiad
- The Heroic Programme of Sherlock
- Freud by Numbers? – Hysteria and Transgenerational Haunting in Patrick McGrath’s Constance (2013)
- Reading Strategies and Impossible Worlds in Fiction: With Reference to Lincoln in the Bardo
- Book Reviews
- Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture
- Creating Realities: Business as a Motif in American Fiction, 1865–1929
- Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction
- Books Received
- Books Received
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- The Horrors of the Oriental Space and Language in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”
- Myth and Intersections of Myth and Gender in Canadian Culture: Margaret Atwood’s Revision of the Odyssey in The Penelopiad
- The Heroic Programme of Sherlock
- Freud by Numbers? – Hysteria and Transgenerational Haunting in Patrick McGrath’s Constance (2013)
- Reading Strategies and Impossible Worlds in Fiction: With Reference to Lincoln in the Bardo
- Book Reviews
- Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture
- Creating Realities: Business as a Motif in American Fiction, 1865–1929
- Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction
- Books Received
- Books Received