Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, ...unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.
Re-reading in stylistics Harrison, Chloe; Nuttall, Louise
Language and literature (Harlow, England),
08/2018, Letnik:
27, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Cognitive stylistics is primarily concerned with the cognitive processes – mental simulations – experienced by readers. Most cognitive stylisticians agree that experiences of reading texts are ...dynamic and flexible. Changes in the context of reading, our attentional focus on a given day, our extra background knowledge about the text, and so on, are all factors that contribute to our experience of a fictional world. A second reading of a text is a different experience to a first reading.
As researchers begin to systematically distinguish between the ‘solitary’ and ‘social’ readings that constitute reading as a phenomenon (Peplow et al., 2016), the relationship between multiple readings and the nature of their processing becomes increasingly pertinent. In order to explore this relationship, firstly we examine the different ways in which re-reading has previously been discussed in stylistics, grounding our claims in an empirical analysis of articles published in key stylistics journals over the past two decades. Next, we draw on reader response data from an online questionnaire in order to assess the role of re-reading and the motivations that underpin it. Finally, we describe an exercise for the teaching of cognitive stylistics, specifically applying schema theory in literary linguistic analysis (Cook, 1994), which illustrates the need to distinguish between readings as part of an analysis. Through these three sections we argue that our experiences of texts should be considered diachronically, and propose that the different readings that make up an analysis of a text should be given greater attention in stylistic research and teaching.
Recent investigations into ethical experiences of fictional narratives have discussed the ‘positions’ that readers adopt in relation to the author, narrator and characters . This article applies Text ...World Theory as a means of accounting for the ethical experience of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. Qualitative analysis of a sample of 150 online reader responses on the reading-based social network Goodreads reveals a range of ethical responses to the novel positioned between two interpretative ‘camps’ and the nature/nurture debate they reflect with regards to the character, Kevin. Drawing from this dataset, I explore how stylistic features of Shriver’s epistolary novel could be seen to influence readers’ ethical positioning in relation to the multiple perspectives presented at different levels of its narrative structure. As a result of the analysis, I propose that an account of ethical experience using Text World Theory may benefit from the concept of ‘construal’ in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. By modeling readers’ variable attention to multiple minds, including their own, a cognitive grammatical model of construal may support an understanding of ethical interpretation as an interpersonal experience within particular reading contexts.
Analyses of the worldviews presented by texts have identified grammatical patterns in terms of the transitivity system outlined in systemic-functional grammar (Halliday, 1994; Halliday and ...Matthiessen, 2014). While contributing to different interpretations of mind style and ideology in different contexts, these patterns and interpretative effects often bear fundamental similarities. In this article, I investigate this underlying similarity in transitivity analyses, or ‘interpretative “lowest common denominator”’ (Simpson, 1993: 105), from a cognitive stylistic perspective. This article attempts to characterise this low-level effect and test it empirically. It takes as its starting point a body of analyses in stylistics and critical discourse analysis which repeatedly link comparable sets of grammatical features (e.g. goal-less intransitive clauses and metonymic agency) to a diminished sense of intentionality, awareness and control in the human agent responsible (e.g. Halliday, 1971; Kennedy, 1991; Simpson and Canning, 2014; Trew, 1979). I argue that the shared interpretative effects of these stylistic choices can be understood in terms of cognitive grammar’s model of construal (Langacker, 2008). Specifically, I propose that the effects of transitivity choices are fundamentally effects for our attribution of mental states, or ‘mind-modelling’ (Stockwell, 2009) of participants, as part of a construal. Finally, I describe an online reader response experiment which tests this proposal among a wider sample of readers. Combining methods from experimental studies of mind attribution in psychology with a controlled alteration of texts by Conrad and Hemingway, this research reveals predictable cognitive effects of transitivity choices across contexts.
Fictional representations of the “mind styles” of characters are often valued for their realism and their ability to invite understanding and sympathy. However, the power of fictional narratives to ...influence perceptions of real-world individuals with similar experiences raises questions of accuracy and ethics with regards to mind style. This article explores the linguistic means through which impressions of “realism” and “authenticity” are invited or denied as part of a fictional mind style: specifically, that of a Second World War soldier, Robbie Turner, in McEwan's Atonement. The article outlines literary critical concerns surrounding “legitimate” war literature before introducing responses to Atonement, which reveal the significance of what is “real” for readers of this novel. Adopting a cognitive stylistic approach to mind style using Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, the article argues that the language of this text contributes to conflicting impressions of realism and authenticity on first and second readings as part of the ethical question it poses for readers.
For Palmer (2004, 2010), and other proponents of a cognitive narratology, research into real-world minds in the cognitive sciences provides insights into readers’ experiences of fictional minds. In ...this article, I explore the application of such research to the minds constructed for the vampire characters in Richard Matheson’s 1954 science fiction/horror novel I Am Legend. I draw upon empirical research into ‘mind attribution’ in social psychology, and apply Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), and its notion of ‘construal’, as a framework for the application of such findings to narrative. In my analysis, I suggest that readers’ attribution of mental-states to the vampires in Matheson’s novel is strategically limited through a number of choices in their linguistic construal. Drawing on online reader responses to the novel, I argue that readers’ understanding of these other minds plays an important role in their empathetic experience and ethical judgement of the novel’s main character and focaliser, Robert Neville. Finally, I suggest that the limited mind attribution for the vampires invited through their construal contributes to the presentation of a ‘mind style’ (Fowler, 1977) for this character.
This is the first book to present an account of literary meaning and effects drawing on our best understanding of mind and language in the form of a Cognitive Grammar. The contributors provide ...exemplary analyses of a range of literature from science fiction, dystopia, absurdism and graphic novels to the poetry of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Sassoon, Balassi, and Dylan Thomas, as well as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Barrett Browning, Whitman, Owen and others. The application of Cognitive Grammar allows the discussion of meaning, translation, ambience, action, reflection, multimodality, empathy, experience and literariness itself to be conducted in newly valid ways. With a Foreword by the creator of Cognitive Grammar, Ronald Langacker, and an Afterword by the cognitive scientist Todd Oakley, the book represents the latest advance in literary linguistics, cognitive poetics and literary critical practice.
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