Subjective time, place, and language in Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses

Abstract

Fiction has often shown that our sense of time can be affected by the spaces and things around us. In particular, the houses in which characters live can make the passing of time dilate, accelerate, even to seem to skip or stop. These interactions between place and time may represent more than metaphor or literary artifice, but rather genuine cognitive processes of embodied subjective time. This is demonstrated in an analysis of Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses, supplementing traditional stylistic analysis with cognitive poetics to explore an influence of the central house, the Sea House, on the young protagonist’s experience of time. Exploring the text through the fictional mental functioning of a main character offers a new way to understand The Life of Houses, and, more broadly, the cognitive approach set out in this article—one which takes into account various active and interactive influences on subjective time—may have implications for the interpretation of other works which analyse the connections between time, place, and self.

The year’s work in stylistics 2021

“…Adopting a cognitive poetics perspective, Wentworth (2021) explores the language of place and time in Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses . Wentworth argues that a cognitive approach which takes space (i.e.…”