World Building: Discourse in the Mind

·
· Bloomsbury Publishing
Ebook
288
Pages

About this ebook

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.

About the author

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.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.