Text World Theory

This article presents a discourse-based approach to negation by applying text world theory to the analysis of negation in the novel Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (1986 [1961]), The model developed for the analysis of negation is based on Werth’s (1999) notion of negation as a subworld which modifies information which is present in the common ground of the discourse. By so doing, negation contributes to the general discourse function of updating information in the text world. Additionally, negation may form part of contradictory structures which, being self-contained units, do not contribute to the updating discourse function but, rather, seem to block the flow of information. The analysis of the functions of negation is framed within a broader framework of stylistic analysis, where the objective is to discuss how the foregrounded nature of negation as a recursive feature in Catch-22 may have a defamiliarizing effect. The argument put forward in this article is that negation plays a crucial role in the expression of a conflict between what is presented as real and what is presented as not real in the fictional world; this conflict, in its turn, has important consequences for the way the story develops and the way major themes of the novel are treated.

This article explores the complex nature of the literature classroom by drawing on the cognitive linguistic framework Text World Theory to examine the teacher’s role as facilitator and mediator of reading. Specifically, the article looks at how one teacher used visual representations as a way of allowing students to engage in a more personal and less teacher-driven transaction with a poem, and to encourage them to reflect on their own roles as active makers of meaning and knowledge in the classroom. The article shows how teachers can be mindful of the various contextual factors that can privilege and legitimise certain kinds of response in the classroom and be wary of external factors and pressures that can promote the idea of preconceived knowledge. The teacher in the case study presented was able to both facilitate the experience of reading poetry in an unmediated way and also develop her students’ metacognition in relation to the reading process itself. The article shows how Text World Theory’s status as a socio-cognitive grammar may be of benefit to teachers in understanding the nature of communicative interaction and literary transaction.

This work originates from the need to develop an integrated dynamic model of negation in discourse that is adequate for understanding the role of negation in an extensive and complex piece of discourse. Most work on negation is strongly influenced by traditional philosophical problems, but little work has been carried out in the area of discourse.

Approaches to negation within the functional-cognitive tradition tend to focus of specific areas of negation, its function as a speech act, or its cognitive model. Few attempts have been made to propose an integrated discourse model. Studies of negation with few exceptions tend to be limited to brief selections or isolated sentences. This book fills the gap in studies of negation in discourse by providing an up-to-date critical review of the state of the art in negation and by proposing a model that brings together the semantic, cognitive, and pragmatic features of negation, which are crucial for an understanding of its role in discourse.

Specialized or general dictionaries do not provide clear and distinct definitions of the most important notions derived from the concept of text: for example, intertext is often called supratext, supertext, megatext, hypertext, archetext, metatext, pretext, ontotext, transtext, etc. This denotes a poor or insufficiently settled terminological practice, but also proves that the phenomena behind these exhibit intersecting spheres and involve a multi-aspectual study. Hereby we propose a critical reading of the 50 derivates from the term of text (arranged in alphabetical order), highlighting an extremely complex problem of the terminology establishment for this domain - one of the most topical issues in humanities.

Keywords:  text, -text, the terminology of the text, context, intertext,hipertext, hypertext.

Teaching Grammar, Structure and Meaning introduces teachers to some basic ideas from the increasingly popular field of cognitive linguistics as a way of explaining and teaching key grammatical concepts. Particularly suitable for those teaching post-16 English Language, this book offers a methodology for teaching key aspects of linguistic form and an extensive set of learning activities. Written by an experienced linguist and teacher, this book contains:

· an evaluation of current approaches to the teaching of grammar and linguistic form
· a revised pedagogy based on principles from cognitive science and cognitive linguistics
· a comprehensive set of activities and resources to support the teaching of key linguistic topics and text types
· a detailed set of suggestions for further reading and a guide to available resources.

Arguing for the use of drama, role play, gesture, energy dynamics, and visual and spatial representations as ways of enabling students to understand grammatical features, this book explores and analyses language use in a range of text types, genres and contexts. This innovative approach to teaching aspects of grammar is aimed at English teachers, student teachers and teacher trainers.

Contents

1. Introduction 2. Teaching Grammar and Language: An Overview 3. Why Should Teachers be Interested in Cognitive Linguistics? 4. Embodied Cognition and Learning 5. Cognitive Linguistic Concepts for Teachers 6. Embodied Learning Activities for the Classroom 7. Conclusion

This dissertation, submitted in 2013 towards an MA in Literary Linguistics from the University of Nottingham, focuses on the application of the cognitive poetic framework of Text World Theory to the postmodernist short story ‘Matinée’ by Robert Coover. First taking a micro-analytical approach, it identifies the complex text world makeup of a section of the text which would, from a structuralist narratological position, be more simplistically described in terms of ‘levels’ or ‘frames’, revealing how one such level/frame is able to appear more ‘real’ than another. It then highlights the importance of accessibility relations in determining the ontological status of text worlds, and looks at how ambiguous focalization and the destabilisation of the narrator’s authority both severely attenuate the concept of accessibility. Moving on to a macro-analytical approach, this dissertation identifies the overarching ontological structure established by the text and explores the subsequent breakdown of this structure, which, it suggests, is aided by the aforementioned weakening of accessibility relations. Finally, this is tied into the postmodernist concept of the ‘ontological imperative’ (Bukatman, 2002, p. 162), and it is concluded that ‘Matinée’, as a postmodernist text, inscribes within itself an ontological distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’, only to reveal the arbitrariness of that distinction.

This paper was accepted for publication in The Journal of Literary Semantics, but remains unpublished due to later being published as part of a research monograph.

Text World Theory (Werth 1995a, 1995b, 1999) has undergone radical and innovative changes during the last decade, most notably in the work of Gavins (2001, 2005, 2007). This paper builds on Gavins’s substantial revisions to Werth’s treatment of modality at the level of the sub-world and develops a model for differentiating between dreams and desire worlds within the Text World Theory framework. Using Hartmann’s (1998) continuum of mentation states and insights from cognitive linguistics (Johnson 1987; Talmy 1988; Langacker 2008), I suggest a modified model for categorising and exploring notions of desire and dream within text world theory. I then use this to explore the literary effect of the interplay of dream and dream worlds in John Keats’ poem The Eve of St Agnes, and suggest that this augmentation to Text World Theory allows better and more systematic analyses of mentation states in literary and non-literary texts.

[pdf of first page as preview only; open access link provided]
Autofiction is a genre in which the author appears as a character, the nonfiction of their autobiographical life combining with the fiction of invention and fabrication. Critical discussions of autofiction are dominated by arguments concerning their dual narrative structure evoking a duet of imaginative visions which, in turn, requires reading strategies that shift between fact and fiction. These critical intuitions are perceptive, yet they remain unfounded since they make claims about reading and interpretation that can only be explained by recourse to cognitive frameworks and substantiated by empirical research. To rectify this, I propose a cognitive model of the processes involved in reading autofiction, combining the storyworld, Text World Theory, conceptual blending, and the person model. My cognitive model includes two new concepts: the ‘author model’ and ‘ontological dissonance’. Analysis of Michelle Tea’s autofiction Black Wave alongside reader responses tests my proposed model and ultimately validates it.

In: Natalia Igl / Sonja Zeman (eds.): Perspectives on Narrativity and Narrative Perspectivization. (Linguistic Approaches to Literature 21) Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins, p. 91-114.

The book-chapter aims to illustrate the dynamic functioning of the recursive double-layered structure – which this volume sets as constitutive for the narrative discourse – by means of exemplary analysis of complex strategies of perspectivization in narrative texts. The focus of the chapter thus lies on the narrative macrostructure on the one hand and the relation between narrative micro- and macrostructure on the other.
The key premise of this chapter is the proposition that meta-discursive strategies reveal the underlying double structure of narrative discourse, since they are based on the constitutive distance between the narrator- and character-level (cf. Zeman, this volume). In order to display the recursive embedding of perspectives and the crucial function of the narrator as a dynamic instance of mediation, evaluation and perception, the chapter introduces a three-staged model of narrative communication. This model builds the foundation for the two exemplary analyses of narrative texts which show a very distinct presence and manner of their respective narrator: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Romantic-era novella The Golden Pot (orig. Der goldne Topf, 1814) and Wolf Haas’ contemporary series of detective novels.

Keywords: perspectivization, macrostructure, metanarration, metafiction, metalepsis, distance, mediation, perception, oberver, dynamic relation, modernism, irony, text-world, storyworld, cognitive poetics

The aim of this keynote paper is to discuss some landmarks in
text linguistics (TL) development and focus on one discipline in particular,
in which my research work takes place: text theory. This presentation is
organised into three parts, which are ordered by either time or space: (i)
the initial phase of TL in the 1970s; (ii) francophone TL; (iii) the text
theory being developed at NOVA-FCSH.

Text World Theory provides a framework for considering how we conceptualise video game worlds. Text World Theory uses the ‘worlds’ metaphor to describe how we visualise discourse in our minds.

This dissertation explores the ways players build text worlds from the discourse of the game BioShock Infinite. It also uses Gerrig’s metaphor of transportation when considering the conceptualisation of text worlds in the game, which is closely related to the idea of immersion.  This dissertation will explore the relationship between building text worlds and the feeling of immersion.

Firstly, it will use stylistic analysis to identify features within the game discourse that point towards world-building properties as stated by the Text World Theory framework. Here, it identifies that hypothetical text worlds are built by deictic language, but non-hypothetical text worlds are aided considerably by multimodal features of the game, such as visual information. It also identifies problems in determining the accessibility of the game, i.e. the significance of the protagonist as a first person narrator versus our access to visual information, which could impact the way we build text worlds. The dissertation then uses ethnographic data of gaming reviews and articles as a resource of player response, using a corpus linguistic method and subsequent stylistic analysis to determine the significance of those responses.

Seeking evidence of immersion and engagement with language relevant to Text World Theory, it will conclude that players regularly describe immersive experiences in their response to BioShock Infinite. Their use of the words ‘world’, ‘story’ and ‘lost’ particularly support the stylistic analysis which identified the creation of hypothetical text worlds, and ultimately support that players describe an immersive experience through a metaphor of transportation.

Overall, this dissertation shows that video game worlds raise new questions for the conceptualisation of fictional worlds, opening a door to further research.

Theoretically influenced by Bakhtin’s (1986) concept of dialogism – according to which any discourse is both permeated by and directed towards other discourses (i.e., backward and forward orientation) –, this thesis seeks to investigate the interweaving of voices surrounding Julian Barnes’s Booker-prize winning The Sense of an Ending (2011). In keeping with the double orientation of discourse, chapter I explores Barnes’s novel and Chapter II focuses on readers’ responses to it. Two questions drive the research: (i) What is the nature of dialogism in the novel versus in readers’ responses to the novel? (ii) What is the effect of dialogism in the novel versus in readers’ responses to the novel?

Chapter I entitled “A Text-driven, Reader-oriented Study of Dialogism” (pp. 11-47) is divided into two parts. First, it qualitatively considers the entanglement between Barnes’s novel and past discourses through a literary study of intertextuality. Then, it analyses the entanglement between Barnes’s novel and the target ‘implied reader’ through a stylistic study of the homodiegetic narrator’s – overt and covert – addresses to the reader. The study distinguishes two types of intertextual references: cultural and literary. Using insights from Ancient Philosophy and stylistic tools, the analysis reveals that cultural intertextuality works toward spatio-temporal anchoring. References to literary texts and figures – here, the 20th-century English poets Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin – work toward characterisation. Thus, intertextual patterns fix the meaning of the novel. The second part of chapter I uses a mixed-method methodology, integrating narratological, cognitive stylistic and corpus linguistic tools to investigate the ways in which the ‘para-diegetic’ and ‘diegetic’ narrators both attract readers in the story-world and entice them into empathising with the homodiegetic narrator. Research findings reveal that several stylistic features manipulate real-world readers into inhabiting the fictional world (i.e., to perform ‘ontological metalepsis’): you-narrations embedding the progressive aspect, foregrounded negation, and the prevalence of mental processes. Thus, chapter I finds that supposedly dialogic devices (i.e., cultural and literary intertextuality combined with addresses to the reader) have for effect to decrease the dialogic scope of the novel. The novel’s to-and-fro movement between past and future discourses enables the author to manipulate readers’ interpretations.

Chapter II entitled “A SFL-based Analysis of Online Book Reviews” (pp. 50-89) qualitatively analyse three customers’ reviews of The Sense of an Ending posted on Amazon.co.uk. These reviews – here used as reader-response data – respectively feature a ‘high’, ‘medium’, and ‘low’ star rating. In the same vein as chapter I, this study maps out the ways in which online readers engage with past discourses (i.e., The Sense of an Ending) and future discourses (i.e., readers reading the reviews on Amazon). At an analytical level, the research uses the Engagement sub-system within attitudinal APPRAISAL (Martin and White, 2005; Martin and Rose, 2007). The Engagement framework – which is directly influenced by Bakhtin’s dialogism – deals with the inclusion and exclusion of other voices and sources of attitudes in a text. It comprises three main linguistic resources: projections, modality, and concessions. Research findings suggest that there is a correlation between the dialogic scope of the reviews and their perceived legitimacy in the online community. Combined with the use of low epistemic modality, projections increase the dialogic scope of the review by encouraging interactions among ‘peer-to-peer’ Amazon readers. In contrast, combined with the use of high epistemic modality and/or polarity and intertextual references, projections decrease the dialogic scope of the review by discouraging potentially dissenting interpretations. In the former case, the reviewer appears as a source of opinion among others. In the latter case, the reviewer is construed as a literary expert and as a source of knowledge in the online community. Thus, chapter II also finds that supposedly dialogic devices (i.e., projections) can have for effect to decrease the dialogic scope of the review.

To conclude, the intertextual references present in The Sense of an Ending target a very specific audience: Western, educated, and familiar with Britain’s literary heritage. This intertextual pattern hinders the readerly creation of plural interpretations. Moreover, addresses to the reader pretend to subvert the monoglossic tendency of the narrator’s discourse while in fact subtly reinforcing it. Readers’ reviews reveal that the reviewers’ different use of projections and modality construe different dialogic scopes: narrow and wide. Reviews with a narrow dialogic scope are linguistically closer to professional book reviews, which leads the reviewer to be construed as an ‘expert’. Reviews with a wide dialogic scope are linguistically closer to dialogic social media communication, which leads the reviewer to be construed as a ‘peer’.

Text World Theory is a remarkable approach for exploration of the reader's cognitive interactions with the
text. This study involves a Text World Theory perspective on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried to explore the
stylistic particularities of traumatically-loaded episodes in terms of the shifting between the matrix contextual frame and
the generated sub-worlds. O'Brien's techniques of tense manipulation, displacement of world-builders, and deliberate
metaphors with or without schema refreshment have been examined to highlight the way textual features cue the reader's
movements between various event frames. It was found that tense manipulation requires a more careful examination due
to the fact that the absence of tense shifting is not always a sign of the absence of world shifting. Besides, priming of
certain kinds of sub-worlds or displacement of world-builders was sometimes under the impact of emotion. Also, the
importance of drawing upon conceptual point of view in dealing with episodes containing deliberate metaphors and/or
schema refreshment was pointed out.

Using Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels as case study, this article presents a cognitive approach to fictionality and authorial intention using Text World Theory and Mind-Modelling. It investigates two forms of ontological distortion: readers’ (mis)classification of the novels’ genre (as autofiction or autobiography) and the problem posed by the author’s pseudonymic identity. The analysis has three parts: first, I conduct a Text World analysis of the novels’ syntactic/stylistic similarities to autobiography and, in doing so, reveal its ontological structure; second, I consider the ontological liminality of narration and the ways in which readers build an authorial mind-model of Ferrante; thirdly, I explore the assessment of critics and/as readers of the text’s fictionality and the impact of Ferrante’s pseudonym on perceptions of authorial intentionality and the authorial mind-model. Ultimately, I argue that a cognitive approach offers greatest insight into readers’ interpretations of authors and of fictionality.

This article uses Text World Theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007) in conjunction with VUE (Visual Understanding Environment) concept mapping software to analyze three statements from the trial of Amanda Knox, who was charged (along with her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito) with the murder of Meredith Kercher in 2007. We compare the cognitive patterns (i.e. text-worlds) as reflected in Knox's statements and use the insights gained to guide an examination of their individual linguistic features and associated potential legal implications. In the first two dictated statements, Knox is projected as an actor responsible for the reported actions/events that implicate her in the crime, whereas in the third statement (handwritten in English), she is projected as a senser, presenting more prominent epistemic uncertainty and indicating bewilderment. Further micro-level linguistic comparison indicates signs of textual alteration in the first two statements, i.e. crucial text was altered and thus resulted in a change of meaning and legal significance.

Comics offer distinctive approaches to representing experience, combining the modalities of the visual and the verbal in compatible ways. In his Carnet de Voyage – created during a trip publicising Blankets (2003) and researching for Habibi (2011), and later published as ‘a little snack’ to cover the long wait between these books – Craig Thompson uses a range of approaches to render his travel experience in words and pictures, ranging from the recognisably comics-like to more diaristic and sketchbook modes, similar to carnets published by l’Association. This article uses Thompson’s Carnet to illustrate a variety of ways in which human experience, internal and external, is construed in images as in language, and how those modes interact. I employ a framework for describing how experience can be rendered in graphic narrative, based on a Hallidayan functional model of language similar to that explored in Kress & van Leeuwen’s Reading Images and O’Toole’s The Language of Displayed Art.

In this article, I explore the experiential texture of literary fictionality and ontological blurrings, using Lance Olsen’s multimodal works Theories of Forgetting and there’s no place like time as case study texts. In doing so, I argue that whilst tropes such as recursive narrative structure and the intrusion of the author into fiction are typically postmodernist, Olsen repurposes them as part of a contemporary pursuit of the real. Contra to postmodernist sensibilities, the ontological distortions and metaleptic transgressions of Olsen’s texts are primarily deployed as a means of reinvigorating our human sense of lived experience and the place of narratives within it. My analysis adopts a cognitive approach to fictionality, using Text World Theory and the metalanguage of the narrative interrelation framework. Such an approach is ideal for tracking ontological slippages and readers’ resultant experiences, particularly in relation to the kind of blurred fictionality found in autofiction.

This article examines direct address, or ‘breaking the fourth wall’, in the BBC TV series Fleabag. It applies Text World Theory to telecinematic discourse for the first time and, in doing so, contributes to developing cognitive approaches in the field of telecinematic stylistics. Text World Theory, originally a cognitive linguistic discourse processing framework, is used to examine how multimodal cues contribute to the creation of imagined worlds. We examine three examples of direct address in Fleabag, featuring actor gaze alongside use of the second person you or actor gaze alone. Our analysis highlights the need to account for the different deictic referents of you, with the pronoun able to refer intra- and extra-diegetically. We also explore viewers’ ontological positioning because ‘breaking the fourth wall’ in telecinematic discourse evokes an addressee who is not spatio-temporally co-present with the text-world character. We therefore propose the concept of the split text-world, which assists in accounting for the deictic pull that viewers may feel during direct address and its experiential impact. Our analysis suggests that telecinematic direct address is necessarily world-forming, but can ontologically position the viewer differently in different narrative contexts. While some instances of direct address in Fleabag position the viewer as Fleabag’s narratee and confidant, there is increasing play with direct address in the show’s second series and a destabilization of this narratee role, achieved through the suggestion that Fleabag’s addressee may be more psychologically interior than it first appears.

É na área da Linguística, especialidade de Teoria do Texto, em geral, e da Análise Conversacional, em particular, que se desenvolve este estudo.

Um texto é o produto linguístico de um complexo processo discursivo que, sob dois planos principais, deve ser considerado: sequencialidade e configuracionalidade. Em síntese, o primeiro aspecto diz respeito às unidades de dimensão e tipologia variável que estruturam um texto, à conexão dessas unidades entre si e com o todo textual de que fazem parte; o segundo aspecto diz respeito à organização pragmática de um texto, que passa dimensões de coesão semântica, de ancoragem enunciativa e de orientação argumentativa. Um texto não é um amontoado de palavras ou um simples alinhamento de frases, mas um todo estruturado e intencionado, construído (produção/emissão) e reconstruído (recepção/interpretação) num determinado contexto de comunicação.

Tais planos, complementares entre si, encontram-se presentes em qualquer texto, seja ele constituído por uma ou mais sequências tipologicamente homogéneas ou heterogéneas. Objectos também culturais, qualquer texto é a realização mais ou menos completa, mais ou menos complexa, de um modelo prototípico, em competência reconhecido.

Um conto é um texto que, apresentando embora uma determinada estrutura homogénea ao nível das macro-proposições, é, todavia, heterogéneo ao nível das sequências que constituem. Se, por definição, nele predomina(m) a(s) sequência(s) narrativa(s), nela(s) integrada(s) se encontram também uma ou mais sequência de outro(s) tipo(s). Sobretudo dialogais. Relato curto, o conto é a representação de um instante de vida, de um episódio humano ou humanizado. Daí a presença do diálogo na sua composição, como forma privilegiada de interacção humana, de configuração de encontros, dramas e conflitos.

Os diálogos são sequências discursivo-textuais mais ou menos homogéneas ou heterogéneas. Constituem-nos, porém, unidades de dimensão e complexidade variável que as definem como realizações de interacções verbais, isto é, como um tipo de discurso-textro colectivamente construído por dois ou mais interlocutores, numa dada situação. As interacções verbais, autênticas ou ficcionais, autónomas ou integradas noutras sequências, constituem, ao nível da sua estrutura e organização, por um lado, e das relações interpessoais que manifestam, por outro, o objecto específico da Análise Conversacional.

Discursos-textos complexos e heterogéneos, aos níveis referidos, são as narrativas de Aquilino Ribeiro de Arca de Noé, III Classe, de que se toma o conto «Mestre grilo cantava e a giganta dormia como principal corpus de aplicação da teoria adoptada[1]. Apresenta, este conto, por um lado, uma composição que realiza a macro-estrutura prototípica do texto narrativo e, por outro, abundantes e variadas sequências dialogais (fáticas e transacionais) em discurso directo reproduzidas. Na sua riqueza discursiva, muito próxima da linguagem autêntica, os diálogos do Mestre Grilo são vivas representações de conflitos e encontros, humores e saberes, debates e disputas. Nas suas principais interacções verbais, encontra-se realizada, por isso, a classificação que, baseada nos actos de linguagem dos interlocutores, Sylvie Durrer porpõe em diálogos polémicos, didácticos e dialécticos[2]. Pelo que fazem, dizendo, são caracterizadas as personagens que aqueles mundos possíveis habitam, interlocutores que, na sua diversidade humana e animal, representam também competências discursivas e conversacionais distintas.

Este estudo é a aplicação de um quadro teórico sde análise textual a um texto narrativo – o conto – na sua complexidade sémio-discursiva. Trata-se de um contributo teórico e metodológico necessário à compreensão dos fenómenos da textualidade, com que todos os dias entramos em contacto, em diálogo ou à procura dele.



[1] ADAM, J.-M., 1990: Éléments de Linguistique Textuelle. Liège: Mardaga; 1992: Les Textes: Types et prototypes. Récit, descriptiom, argumentation, explication et dialogue. Paris: Nathan.

[2] DURRER, S., 1994: Le Dialogue Romanesque. Style et structure. Genève: Droz.

This paper draws on scholarship in performance history, art history, cognitive humanities, and the anthropology of urbanization and markets to argue that theatrical conventions like “fourth wall” illusion and asides first developed in China’s Song-Yuan period and matured in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries under the special influence of new demands of city life, commerce, and print culture. As anthropologists argue that participation in markets requires temporary, imaginative suspension of other roles and identities, so suspension of disbelief in mimetic portrayals (as opposed to storytelling evocations) of fictional characters with fictional minds requires “leaving one’s identity at the theater door.” Song-Yuan Chinese theater, like Japanese Noh of the Muromachi and later periods, accomplished this in a mediated fashion by including star characters to focus on and “spectators’ representative” characters to identify with. Drawing inspiration from the protean, promiscuous space and punning humor of printed miscellanies and annotated vernacular fiction, the late Ming comedy Ge dai xiao 歌代嘯 (A song for a laugh) “flattens” the “asymmetric” (mediated) structure of the traditional Yuan form it takes for its model by stringing together a series of loosely related vignettes featuring buffoonish “side” characters in a generic town setting.

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.

This article undertakes a cognitive stylistic investigation of the trial of Egyptian writer Ahmed Naji, who was prosecuted – and subsequently imprisoned – for ‘disturbing public morals’ by depicting sexual content in his novel Istikhdam al- Hayat [Using Life] (2014).  The article presents a schematic model of the narrative roles, across narrative levels and text-world ontologies, mind-modelled by readers in literary experiences. This model forms the foundation of the analysis which is consequently able to map the interrelationships between the roles on enunciation and reception and to account for the complex array of ethical positions – relative to each narrative role – taken up by readers.  The article offers a nuanced account of the ethics of reading which, by pioneering the application of stylistics to explore an Arabic cultural context, can also capture cultural difference. Ultimately, through situated analysis, this article uncovers the ideological forces involved in Ahmed Naji’s trial and the discriminatory practices therein.

Within the heuristic frame of the »Biocultural Turn«, this paper aims to propose a new transdisciplinary approach: the Neurohermeneutics of Suspicion. Its purpose is to investigate the literary text as a unique cognitive dynamic device with multilayered meanings and a metaphorical undercurrent, both responsive to the functioning system of the human mind. This implies considering the literary text as an anthropological device, which cognitively guides the imaginative, emotional and experiential responses of the reader by means of the author's linguistic, stylistic and rhetoric choices, mirroring cognitive, emotional, and imaginative human processes. We suggest that particularly Ricoeur's idea of a ›suspicious stance‹ opens a new way to hermeneutics, allowing to refigure the process of reading as a creative and ›playful‹ act, and to restore the value of subjectivity in the process of deciphering fictional worlds conveying ever new meanings to texts.