Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

A Brief History of Time
as an illustration of ‘extreme schema disruption’
in which the remarkable suggestion that time can go backwards is expressed in lucid
and unremarkable prose. Discourse like this, which disrupts and refreshes schemata,
stands in direct contrast to discourse in which schemata are 
preserved
. For example,
in the outline in A10 of the 
pub schema
(for that is what it was), reference was made
to the way this ICM might be modified and revised in the wake of new incoming
information. But the addition of, for example, a new prop to the schema (such as
an entry for 
WIDE
-
SCREEN TELEVISION
) is more an extension to the schema rather
than a disruption. Cook’s general point is that because literary texts affect our
schemata in special ways and on a number of levels, traditional stylistic concepts like
foregrounding
and 
defamiliarisation
are better located in a framework of cognition
than in a framework of language.
Text worlds and narrative comprehension
Let us begin with a seemingly tangential observation. British television runs a popular
hospital drama called 
Casualty
in which stories about the professional and personal
entanglements of the medical staff are intermingled with stories of various emer-
gencies that befall ordinary members of the public. Many episodes begin with a series
of unrelated mini-narratives involving assorted luckless characters whose actions will
lead inexorably towards the accident that takes them to the casualty department.
What is intriguing is how, as viewers of the programme, we are able to track the
progress of these various mini-narratives, which are patched together through a tech-
nique called ‘parallel editing’, when only one of the stories is in frame at any one
time. It is also intriguing that we expect 
not
to be returned to any of these stories at
the same point at which we left – it would be thoroughly disorientating if we were.
Clearly, we have some cognitive faculty that not only allows us to track the progres-
sion of character and narrative, but also to make inferences about the forward
development of a plot even when it is, so to speak, un-narrated. This sub-unit will
focus on two developments in cognitive stylistics that are linked by an interest in
narrative, character and plot, and which, if only implicitly, address the sorts of issues
just raised about narrative understanding.
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D E V E L O P M E N T

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The first model derives from the pioneering work on 
text worlds
by Paul Werth
(Werth 1999; and see Gavins (in press) for a compact introduction). Werth seeks to
account for the conceptual space that links narrative levels, and to this effect he
proposes three ‘worlds’ of discourse. The first is the 
discourse world
which is the
immediate, higher-order conceptual space that is inhabited by an author and a reader.
Understanding of this world by the reader is founded on ‘real’ external circumstances
and requires direct perception backed up by knowledge of the elements perceived
(Werth 1999: 17). Through the discourse world is constructed a 
text world
. A text
world is a ‘total construct’ which requires for its understanding memory and imag-
ination, rather than direct perception. Text worlds as conceptual spaces are defined
deictically
and 
referentially
, and are anchored by references to the world depicted by
the discourse (Werth 1999: 52). For instance, in the opening of Samuel Beckett’s
Molloy
(1950):
(1)
I am in my mother’s room. It is I who live there now.
deictic references pick out spatial location (‘in’, ‘there’) and temporal location
(‘now’), while referential information identifies the entities present in the text world
(‘I’, ‘my mother’s room’) and signals their relationship to one another.
The third type of conceptual space in Werth’s typology is a