Finding Elizabeth: Construing memory inElizabeth Is Missingby Emma Healey

Abstract

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.

“I can tell the difference between fiction and reality”

“…Although both Fowler (1977) and Leech and Short (1981) suggest that analyses of authors, narrators and characters' mind styles are possible, to date the focus has been on atypical character or narrator mind styles, particularly those that are neuro-atypical (Bockting, 1994;Fowler, 1977Fowler, , 1996Fowler, [1986; Harrison, 2017;Semino, 2011Semino, , 2014Semino and Swindlehurst, 1996), primitive (Black, 1993;Browse, 2018a;Clark, 2009;Fowler, 1977Fowler, , 1996Fowler, [1986; Halliday, 1971;Hoover, 1999), suffering from alcoholic blackouts (Giovanelli, 2018), criminally sociopathic (Semino, 2002), or even vampiric (Nuttall, 2015). It is right that the focus has been on the narrator and character levels of narrative discourse.…”

“…For example, Semino (2002) demonstrates that Clegg, the sociopathic lepidopterist and narrator of John Fowles' The Collector , tends to repeat the misogynistic metaphor WOMEN ARE BUTTERFLIES throughout the novel. She argues that this habit of conceptualisation is a feature of Clegg's idiosyncratic mind style (for further analyses of mind style from a cognitive linguistic perspective, see also Harrison [2017], Giovanelli [2018] and Nuttall [2015Nuttall [ , 2018, who all use cognitive grammar [Langacker, 1987[Langacker, , 1991[Langacker, , 2008] to explore the manner in which mind styles are constructed). Finally, a feature of some work has been to examine the pragmatic strategies used to construct unusual mind styles (Clark, 2009;Semino, 2014).…”

From functional to cognitive grammar in stylistic analysis of Golding’sThe Inheritors

“…More recently, however, stylisticians have turned to new grammatical models to perform their analyses. There has been a rapid growth in research that utilises Langacker's (1987Langacker's ( , 1991Langacker's ( , 2008 Cognitive Grammar (CG) or Talmy's (2000aTalmy's ( , 2000b Cognitive Semantics (Browse 2018;Giovanelli 2017;Hamilton 2003;Harrison 2017aHarrison , 2017bHarrison et al 2014;Nuttall 2015Nuttall , 2018Stockwell 2009Stockwell , 2014a). These cognitive approaches have now matured to the point that they are codified in a text-book, Giovanelli and Harrison's (2018) Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics.…”

‘Something happened, something bad’: Blackouts, uncertainties and event construal inThe Girl on the Train

“…The remainder of this article develops the preliminary discussion of Rachel’s cognitive habits to examine a series of extracts in the novel by drawing on Cognitive Grammar as a method for literary analysis. 1 As previously discussed, there is a growing body of work that has utilised Cognitive Grammar in the service of literary criticism (see Harrison et al, 2014 for a recent introduction and overview), and specifically to examine characterisation (Harrison, 2017a), to explore how the mind style of a character afflicted by memory loss is represented (Harrison, 2017b), and how authors may manipulate how readers construct characters’ minds (Nuttall, 2015), or what Stockwell (2009) terms the process of mind-modelling. It is argued that an approach drawing on Cognitive Grammar is methodologically sound as its grounding in cognitive linguistic principles provides a strong psychological plausibility, whilst its text-driven nature allows for a close analysis of language (Harrison, 2017a).…”

“…In my analysis, I draw on Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1991, 2008) and specifically the notions of nominal grounding and reference points. This paper thus draws on and extends emerging scholarship in the area of mind style that has utilised Cognitive Grammar to provide a nuanced analysis of the way in which a particular world-view is encoded in a main character (Harrison, 2017a, 2017b; Nuttall, 2015).…”