Text World Theory, real readers and emotional responses to The Remains of the Day

Abstract

Recent investigations into emotion and discourse processing using the Text World Theory framework (Werth, 1999) regard psychological projection as a key factor in readers’ emotional responses to discourse (Gavins, 2007; Lahey, 2005; Stockwell, 2009). The present article examines psychological projection in relation to an extract from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and the comments made by a group of readers discussing the novel. As a result, a more nuanced account of psychological projection is proposed, which highlights the multiple perspectives which readers are able to monitor and adopt during text-world construction. Whilst previous work in Text World Theory has focused upon psychological projection in relation to a single text-world role (such as the addressee, for example), here it is argued that multiple projections in relation to a range of text-world enactors are of fundamental significance in our emotional responses to narrative. Such multiple projections, it is proposed, should receive greater consideration in accounts of our emotional experience of literary discourse.