Creating a World: Text-world Theory and Cognitive Poetics

Abstract

This chapter will introduce you to the rich and burgeoning field of cognitive poetics, a relatively new sub-field of stylistics which builds on the principles of cognitive psychology and linguistics to draw conclusions about the processes involved in the interpretation of literary texts, or, more broadly, in reading. It has been argued that in its focus on how readers process the language of literature, cognitive poetics is in some sense a return to the pre-Romantic roots of literary criticism that can be found in classical rhetoric (i.e. in its focus on texts, readers and the art of communication rather than on sociocultural histories of authors, genres and periods). However, it is at the same time a very modern approach to understanding literary mechanics due to its connection with the latest advances in cognitive linguistics.1 Here are just a few of the many topics which cognitive poetics explores: Deixis Schema theory Script theory Reader attention Conceptual metaphor Foregrounding Genre Text-worlds Possible Worlds.