World Building: Discourse in the Mind

Description

World Building represents the state-of-the-discipline in worlds-based approaches to discourse, collected together for the first time. Over the last 40 years the 'text-as-world' metaphor has become one of the most prevalent and productive means of describing the experiencing of producing and receiving discourse. This has been the case in a range of disciplines, including stylistics, cognitive poetics, narratology, discourse analysis and literary theory. The metaphor has enabled analysts to formulate a variety of frameworks for describing and examining the textual and conceptual mechanics involved in human communication, articulating these variously through such concepts as 'possible worlds', 'text-worlds' and 'storyworlds'. Each of these key approaches shares an understanding of discourse as a logically grounded, cognitively and pragmatically complex phenomenon. Discourse in this sense is capable of producing highly immersive and emotionally affecting conceptual spaces in the minds of discourse participants. The chapters examine how best to document and analyze this and this is an essential collection for stylisticians, linguists and narrative theorists.

Joanna Gavins is Reader in Literary Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is the author of Reading the Absurd (EUP, 2013) and Text World Theory: An Introduction (EUP, 2007). Ernestine Lahey is Assistant Professor in Linguistics and Stylistics at University College Roosevelt. She has published widely on subjects relating to (cognitive) stylistics, Text World Theory and Canadian literature and culture.

This collection represents the state of the art in the study of world-building as central to the comprehension of discourse generally and literature in particular. It is innovative and diverse both in terms of theory and applications: a real treat for discourse analysts, cognitive linguists and literary scholars. -- Elena Semino, Head of Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK This fascinating volume explores the unexpected but orderly complexity of the mental construction of meaning. It shows us the cognitive poetics not just of texts but of everyday life. -- Mark Turner, Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University, USA There is a pervasive sense of coherence throughout the entire volume which makes reading the entire volume a seamless experience ... World Building: Discourse in the Mind is an immensely important contribution to the study of the interrelation between narrative, discourse, and cognition ... Needless to say, the volume will primarily appeal to cognitively oriented researchers within these fields, but I would encourage researchers and postgraduate students alike within these fields more generally to engage with the volume even if cognition is not their primary research interest. * The Linguist List *