Construing the Child Reader: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of the Opening to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book

Giovanelli, Marcello

doi:10.1007/s10583-016-9285-3

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 28 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Scope (Langacker, 2008) refers to the way language constructs ‘cognitive viewing frames’ or, the “limits of what humans can and need to mentally focus on at one time” (Giovanelli, 2018, p. 187). These ‘frames’ are ‘bounded’, in the way our spatial viewing frame is limited by forward facing eyes, or the framing of existence in the present.…”

Section: Cognitive Stylistics Concepts In the Writing Classroommentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The nouns handle and blade intensify the specificity to each part of the knife, functioning like a camera zoom and reversing the 'immediate scope' from the hand, which becomes the 'maximal scope', to the features of the knife (Giovanelli, 2018). Without details about the individual to whom the hand belongs, a sense of mystery and anticipation is created.…”

Section: Scopementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Writing, grammar and the body: a cognitive stylistics framework for teaching upper primary narrative writing

Healey

Gardner

2021

Literacy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper synthesises aspects of functional grammar and cognitive stylistics to posit a theoretical approach to the teaching of the grammar of narrative writing to upper primary and lower secondary students. It is argued the development of students' metalinguistic understanding is essential if they are to make informed language choices as they write. Cognitive stylistics is an embodied theory of grammar derived from literary studies, which is used here to construct a theoretical framework for teaching metalinguistic understanding in writing. The proposed framework includes concepts to support the way writers might focus their ‘readerly’ attention via devices such as ‘figure’ and ‘ground’, ‘scope’, ‘attentional windowing’ and ‘deixis’, to create narrative perspectives and interactions between narrative participants, by means of ‘clausal action chains’. The theory is premised on the idea that students can be taught to ‘embody’ the imagined narrative world, and make specific grammatical choices to effectively capture, for the reader, each element of their story. The framework outlines the role of the teacher, when supporting the student, in both the ‘embodiment’ of their narrative, and their grammatical decision‐making.

show abstract

Section: Cognitive Stylistics Concepts In the Writing Classroommentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Scopementioning

confidence: 99%

Writing, grammar and the body: a cognitive stylistics framework for teaching upper primary narrative writing

Healey

Gardner

2021

Literacy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The interest in social minds has so far been absent from cognitive approaches to children's texts, which usually focus on one of the following: scripts and schemas (Stephens, 2011;Seelinger Trites, 2014;Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Marecki, 2015;Oziewicz, 2015;Palkovich, 2015;Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2016); on Theory of Mind (ToM) and empathy (Nikolajeva, 2014;Seelinger Trites, 2014); on emotions (Nikolajeva 2014); on embodied metaphors (Seelinger Trites, 2014;Purcell, 2018), or on Text World Theory and cognitive grammar (Giovanelli, 2016). My analysis also points to some wider implications of the study of social minds in children's literature; for, while differences and conflicts between younger and older generations have been abundantly acknowledged in children's literature criticism, a broader focus on intergenerational collective thought in texts for young audiences has not been considered, albeit it uncovers a diversity of child-adult relationships.…”

Section: A Radical Subgenre Of Fantasymentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading About Solidarity and Collective Action: Social Minds in Radical Fantasy Fiction

Deszcz-Tryhubczak

2018

Child Lit Educ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article employs the theory of social minds proposed by Alan Palmer (Social Minds in the Novel, 2010) to argue for the emergence of a group-based thinking, feeling, and acting focused on reforming the status quo, using David Whitley's Agora trilogy (2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013) as an example of Radical Fantasy. This particular subgenre of fantasy is seen as radical in the way it envisions an intergenerational struggle by the oppressed against political, racial and economic injustice, resulting in a new social order (Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2016). The notion of transformation, it is argued, is a characteristic quality of mental functioning in Radical Fantasy storyworlds. Beyond examining Whitley's trilogy in these terms, the article also argues for a broader interest in intergenerational collective action in the field of children's literature as a way of acknowledging texts that extend the aetonormative paradigm of children's books (Nikolajeva, 2010).

show abstract

“…Preliminary research has been carried out on the relationship between construal and Text World Theory specifically (Giovanelli 2016;Harrison 2017;Nuttall 2014;Van Vliet 2009). A pertinent Cognitive Grammar study that similarly explores shifting perspectives and "condensed viewpoints" is Nuttall's (2014) chapter "Constructing a text world for The Handmaid's Tale".…”

Section: Construing Text-worlds: Reader and Character Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In summary, this paper has provided an account of narratorial perspective that aims to be both "nuanced" (Giovanelli 2016) and "text-driven" (Werth 1999). The combination of frameworks has allowed a consideration of the fine-grained attentional shifts that occur in the novel, alongside an exploration of how these shifts create wider patterns that impact on text-world construction at a more macro-level in the text.…”

Section: Narrative (Dis)continuity: Summary and Sequence Scanningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding Elizabeth: Construing memory inElizabeth Is Missingby Emma Healey

Harrison

2017

Journal of Literary Semantics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstractby Emma Healey was published in 2014 and won the Costa Award for best first novel. Both humorous and sad, it has been categorised as literary fiction, detective fiction and a psychological thriller, and is thus a “hybrid” genre novel that is difficult to categorise neatly. The novel’s chief protagonist and narrator is Maud, who has dementia. As a narrator Maud is extremely unreliable and often forgets facts and events even as they are unfolding around her. Maud’s memories, however, have a much higher degree of specificity than her present day narratives: they are richer, more detailed, and therefore much more reliable, than the narrative of her current life. Consequently, the novel is characterised by a stylistic contrast between the vague and the specific, the remembered and the forgotten. In order to investigate this contrast, this paper argues that a stylistic account of Cognitive Grammar can shed further light on how Maud’s cognitive habits are represented in the novel, and are represented in the novel, and how these in turn impact upon text-world representation. The analysis draws upon Cognitive Grammar’s construal processes, in particular, to explore the fictive illustration of mind style – and of memory – in this literary context. Finally, this paper considers how one of the particular experiences of reading the narrative is dependent on the “layered construal” prevalent in the text, whereby a reader’s experience of the fictional world is continually contrasted with that of the narrator.

show abstract

Construing the Child Reader: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of the Opening to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book

Cited by 8 publications

References 28 publications

Writing, grammar and the body: a cognitive stylistics framework for teaching upper primary narrative writing

Writing, grammar and the body: a cognitive stylistics framework for teaching upper primary narrative writing

Reading About Solidarity and Collective Action: Social Minds in Radical Fantasy Fiction

Finding Elizabeth: Construing memory inElizabeth Is Missingby Emma Healey

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About