Volume 46, Issue 2 -

The problems of making and evaluating counterfactual claims about fictional characters cannot be adequately handled without taking into account the practices of literary criticism, interpretation, and re-creation. The direct-reference theory of names explains only a subset of the phenomena of fiction and explains away the rest as irrelevant or pseudo-problems, whereas some criticisms of that theory bring in metaphysical concepts that may obscure the issue. This paper suggests that the indeterminacy of fictions and the conventions of the aforementioned practices are sufficient basis for explaining and assessing such counterfactual claims. In this view, fiction ceases to be understood as a phenomenon sui generis ; it is instead an institutionalized use of the stipulative or computational aspects of language that are at work in other areas as well. Thus, these results can be brought into line with recent ideas in the fields of the philosophy of mathematics, relevance theory, and cognitive studies.

Marked linguistic structures in E. E. Cummings’ poetry have long been an issue within literary criticism and stylistics. In this sense, critical approaches to Cummings’ style have dealt mainly with grammar, lexis and morphology, while only few works have examined his graphology extensively. Departing from these trends, in this paper I analyse the use of unorthodox capital letters in 96 of his experimental poems. My aim is twofold: to identify the processes present in Cummings’ unconventional use of capital letters and to determine the effects observable in such unusual patterns. The analysis reveals that the foregrounding of capitals is materialized by the insertion of initial caps, middle caps, final caps, all caps or mixed caps where these are not expected or required. It also suggests that these unconventional patterns mainly emphasize certain elements within the poems, produce iconic effects, generate wordplay and create chaotic scenes. To a lesser degree, they also schematize words, lines or a whole poem, and reproduce differences in the tone of some poetic voices or depict elements that are capitalized in real life.

Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey was published in 2014 and won the Costa Award for best first novel. Both humorous and sad, it has been categorised as literary fiction, detective fiction and a psychological thriller, and is thus a “hybrid” genre novel that is difficult to categorise neatly. The novel’s chief protagonist and narrator is Maud, who has dementia. As a narrator Maud is extremely unreliable and often forgets facts and events even as they are unfolding around her. Maud’s memories, however, have a much higher degree of specificity than her present day narratives: they are richer, more detailed, and therefore much more reliable, than the narrative of her current life. Consequently, the novel is characterised by a stylistic contrast between the vague and the specific, the remembered and the forgotten. In order to investigate this contrast, this paper argues that a stylistic account of Cognitive Grammar can shed further light on how Maud’s cognitive habits are represented in the novel, and are represented in the novel, and how these in turn impact upon text-world representation. The analysis draws upon Cognitive Grammar’s construal processes, in particular, to explore the fictive illustration of mind style – and of memory – in this literary context. Finally, this paper considers how one of the particular experiences of reading the narrative is dependent on the “layered construal” prevalent in the text, whereby a reader’s experience of the fictional world is continually contrasted with that of the narrator.