Volume 52, Issue 1

When Paul Werth invented the concept of ‘text-worlds’ (1999), he drew on existing psychological accounts of how the mind processes stimuli, such as the idea of the ‘situation model’ (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983). Yet despite the important advancements to Werth’s approach that have been made in stylistics over the years, situation-model research is rarely, if ever, referenced in what is now called Text World Theory (Gavins 2007). In this article, I consult empirical research on situation models, consequently making two significant contributions: I show how empirical situation-model research bolsters the validity of Text World Theory; I propose a new concept for Text World Theory—‘world-retrieval’—to account for how readers trace the interconnections between text-worlds and attempt to resolve processing difficulties. An analysis of the opening to Ray Loriga’s (2003) novel Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore demonstrates the value of the ‘world-retrieval’ concept.

Previous research has identified a type of nonstandard simile in which the ground is a non-salient feature of the source term (for example, the nonstandard hard as a lamp as opposed to the standard hard as a rock ), and found this type to be common in poetry and much rarer in non-poetic discourse. Since these nonstandard similes entail a fundamental semantic breach and violation of a basic convention of the simile, how can their existence be explained? Here we claim that it is the poetic context itself, the poem within which these similes appear, which is the key to explaining their existence and their unique advantage. Through a series of poetic examples, including poems by Plath, Lee, and Rukeyser, we show how the semantic difficulty of the nonstandard simile serves the poem and fulfils various functions within it.

(Sophie Hannah’s. 2009. The Other Half Lives . London: Hodder). The Other Half Lives both complies with, and departs from, the crime fiction formula or text schema. It features a mystery the specifics of which are unravelled non-chronologically, while its numerous crimes and non-ideal criminals and victims disrupt readers’ world schemas and help enable its surprising effects. Not unlike such fiction, the story’s early happenings feature late in the telling, while many happenings are given from different character perspectives. Both of these help unsettle narrative perspective, and generate suspense, mystery, and readers’ later repairing and replacing of frames. Focalisation and the working and reworking of killing characters’ early depiction are techniques also enabling foreshadowing and misdirection, for readers’ sympathies and prejudices to be manipulated accordingly, and for surprise revelations to prove effective, even when a surprise ending is – given the nature of this genre – only to be expected.

This article offers a cognitive-poetic analysis of Elizabeth Bowen’s short story “Oh, Madam . . .” (1941), a war-time story set in a London house partly damaged during the Blitz. This literary text includes numerous gaps in the form of ellipsis, dashes, and unfinished sentences, inviting the reader into filling them as a part of reading experience. The analysis critically applies Peter Stockwell’s (Stockwell, Peter. 2012 [2009]. Texture: A cognitive a esthetics of reading . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Stockwell, Peter. 2020. Cognitive poetics: An introduction , 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge) concepts of texture , resonance , and textual attractors . We stress the importance of identifying textual attractors in accounting for the dynamicity of the meaning-construction process in Bowen’s story. Arguably, the so-called resonance effect, a part of the reader’s aesthetic experience, results from their cognitive engagement during the process of gap-filling . In addition to that, the recognition of specific attractors enables the reader to grasp the social relations encoded in the text. To explain the cognitive processes involved in the reading of “Oh, Madam . . .”, we propose to expand Stockwell’s list of “features of good textual attractors” by including two additional ones: absence and repetition.

Picaresque fiction, or the so-called tale of roguery, focuses mainly on the adventures of a male protagonist. Although women characters rarely take the lead, they mark significant transitions in the narrative syntax. Mothers, wives, and lovers reject stereotypical role models and are invested with the potential of initiating the picaro to his life stages. This study will concentrate on the wife as a catalyst of semiotic value beyond her appointed role, exploring a corpus of four works published between 1554 and 1626: Lazarillo de Tormes , The Unfortunate Traveller , Guzmán de Alfarache , and El Buscón . In these narratives, wives oppose their fate of pure Objects in a conjugal contract, and become Subjects, Antagonists or Destinators, assertive “actants” (Greimas) in the semiotic grammar of narrative. My purpose is to re-evaluate, in deep-structure narrative terms, the significance of women characters in the largely male-centred, misogynist picaresque.