Chapter 9. Immersive reading and the unnatural text-worlds of “Dead Fish”

Schemata of estrangement in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed

“…A flip side to this is that schema theory allows interpretive possibilities to be flexible and amenable to a diverse array of readers and texts (Stockwell, 2003, 2020; see also Jeffries, 2001), but perhaps a happy medium can be found in Culpeper’s recommendation to conduct reader studies in order to quantitatively gauge how multiple readers might or might not respond to the same text (2001: 146ff.). This has recently been done by Norledge (2019, 2021), who applied Text World Theory to examine readers’ responses to mindstyle and world-building elements in various works of dystopian fiction. A similar study focusing on reader schemata in response to Le Guin’s The Dispossessed could either confirm or expand what has been discussed here, and pedagogical implications to such reader responses could also be explored (Giovanelli and Mason, 2015).…”

“…Gavins (2014) takes things a step further and integrates this dualistic angle into Text World Theory (TWT), a framework that attempts to model the cognitive effects that texts evoke on their readers in the creation of richly layered "text worlds" (Gavins, 2007; see also Werth, 1999). That is, by drawing the reader's attention to specific objects or concepts, the process of estrangement evokes various 'world-building elements' that assist the reader in mentally construing the worlds of the texts they are reading (Gavins, 2014; see also Giovanelli and Mason, 2015;Scott, 2016;Norledge, 2019). This does not so much add to Shklovsky's idea of estrangement but rather augments the way it can be modelled to reflect the cognitive processes at work in the reader during the reading process (through the use, for example, of diagrams that reflect sub-worlds and world switches).…”

BuildingThe Ark: Text World Theory and the evolution of dystopian epistolary

“…Dystopian narratives themselves offer refracted representations of real-world anxieties, presenting worlds that are at once familiar, being connected in some way to the ideal reader’s real-world present, while remaining somewhat estranging and displaced (Norledge, 2019, in press). The Ark is very much both of these things, presenting a world which is notably futuristic yet grounded in real-world socio-cultural practice.…”

The year’s work in stylistics 2019

“…Ten analytical chapters in three sections chart the foundations and formation of fictional worlds as well as focus on empirical, reader response research on a variety of subjects. These include fictional worlds, as in Norledge’s (2019) chapter on the considerations of a small-scale reading group on unnatural fictional entities in the dystopian short story ‘Dead Fish’ by Adam Marek. Giovanelli (2019b), on the other hand, addresses the reading context of the classroom, presenting a case study of lessons on ‘Cold Knap Lake’ by Gillian Clarke.…”