scholarly journals ‘Something happened, something bad’: Blackouts, uncertainties and event construal in The Girl on the Train

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcello Giovanelli
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Anterograde Amnesia ◽  
Cognitive Grammar ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
World Theory ◽  
Event Construal

This article examines the representation of mind style in Paula Hawkins’ (2015) best-selling novel The Girl on the Train. It examines how Hawkins presents the fictional mind of Rachel, a character who is affected by anterograde amnesia as a result of alcoholic blackouts. Rachel’s narrative voice drives the novel, and its retelling of events is characterised by her inability to recall important information related to the night that a young woman disappeared and was murdered. This article specifically draws on the Cognitive Grammar notion of construal to explore the presentation of Rachel’s mind style and its affordances and limitations. In doing so, it builds on developing scholarship that has identified the potential for Cognitive Grammar to provide a richly nuanced account of the representation of a fictional mind. The analysis specifically examines two ways in which event construal is presented: nominal grounding strategies and reference point relationships. For the latter, the article also develops emerging work that has sought to make a connection between Cognitive Grammar and Text World Theory in terms of how mental representations are projected by the text.

any real doubt about the ending. Heliodoros redirected curiosity from outcome to explanation. The second problem is lack of direc­ tion and unity: romance was prone to fall apart into a series of exciting but only loosely connected adventures, at the end of which the protagonists recovered their lost happiness and simply lived out the rest of their lives as if nothing had happened. By leaving central questions unanswered Heliodoros is able to hold large spans of text together, and the most important answers, when they do arrive, involve decisive change for the protagonists. Both these strategies imply an interpretatively active reader. The opening of the novel is deservedly famous.11 A gang of bandits come across a beached ship, surrounded by twitching corpses and the wreckage of a banquet. Through their eyes, and with their ignorance of what has taken place, the reader is made to assimilate the scene in obsessive but unexplained visual detail. In the midst of the carnage sits a fabulously beautiful young woman, nursing a fabulously handsome young man. It does not take long to identify them as the hero and heroine of the novel, and learn that their names are Theagenes and Charikleia, but Heliodoros tantalizes us over further details. Thus at the very beginning of the novel two riddles are established: what has hap­ pened on the beach? and who exactly are the hero and heroine? Heliodoros prolongs the reader’s ignorance by his characteristic use of partial viewpoint. Sometimes, as with the bandits, there is a fictional audience whose specific perceptions act as a channel of partial information to the reader, but elsewhere Heliodoros as narrator simply relates what an uninformed witness of the events would have seen or heard. For example, we are only allowed to find out about the hero and heroine as they speak to others r are spoken about: Heliodoros as author knows all about them but keeps quiet in favour of his recording but not explaining narrative voice. The opening scene is eventually disambiguated by Kalasiris, an Egyptian priest. He regales Knemon, a surrogate reader within the text who shares the real reader’s curiosity about the protagonists, with a long story, beginning in Book 2, of how he met Charikleia at Delphi, witnessed the birth of her love for Theagenes and helped the lovers to elope. He chronicles their subsequent experiences, until at the end of Book 5, half-way through the novel, the story circles back to its own beginning and at last resolves the mystery of the scene on the beach.

2014 ◽  
pp. 327-327
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Partial Information ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
The Real ◽  
Opening Scene ◽  
Visual Detail ◽  
As If

scholarly journals Online readers between the camps: A Text World Theory analysis of ethical positioning in We Need to Talk About Kevin

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Nuttall
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Cognitive Grammar ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Reader Responses ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
Interpersonal Experience ◽  
World Theory ◽  
Ethical Positioning ◽  
Ethical Experience

Recent investigations into ethical experiences of fictional narratives have discussed the ‘positions’ that readers adopt in relation to the author, narrator and characters . This article applies Text World Theory as a means of accounting for the ethical experience of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. Qualitative analysis of a sample of 150 online reader responses on the reading-based social network Goodreads reveals a range of ethical responses to the novel positioned between two interpretative ‘camps’ and the nature/nurture debate they reflect with regards to the character, Kevin. Drawing from this dataset, I explore how stylistic features of Shriver’s epistolary novel could be seen to influence readers’ ethical positioning in relation to the multiple perspectives presented at different levels of its narrative structure. As a result of the analysis, I propose that an account of ethical experience using Text World Theory may benefit from the concept of ‘construal’ in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. By modeling readers’ variable attention to multiple minds, including their own, a cognitive grammatical model of construal may support an understanding of ethical interpretation as an interpersonal experience within particular reading contexts.

Clarice Lispector, Ora stelei: Măști narative și violență textuală

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 64-72
Author(s):  
Rodica Grigore
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Clarice Lispector ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
The Poor

Published in 1977, the year of its author’s death, The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector’s last novel, represents one of the best creations of the Brazilian writer. The book describes the poor life of a young woman, but at a deeper level it analyzes the complex relationship between author and reader, but also between authors and their fictional creations, the characters. Rodrigo and Macabéa, the character and the narrative voice in The Hour of the Star play an intricate game of masks, permanently reduplicating perspectives and forcing the reader to decode the meanings of violence (either textual or physical) Lispector describes within the novel.

On Antigone’s Suffering

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-231
Author(s):  
Ankhi Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Personal Loss ◽  
The Relationship

Examining the contestation of interpretations around this work, I argue that the proliferation of exegetical material on Sophocles’s Antigone is related to a noncomprehension of the human motives behind her transgressive action. Did she ever love, and is there any suffering in her piety? If she didn’t love (her brother), could she have suffered? I read the play alongside Kamila Shamsie’s postcolonial rewriting of it in Home Fire to elaborate on the relationship between personal loss and collective (and communal) suffering, particularly as it is focalized in the novel by the figure of a young woman who is both a bereaved twin and a vengeful fury.

Divi pirmās personas stāstījumi Osvalda Zebra romānā „Māra”

2021 ◽  
pp. 197-208
Author(s):  
Daiga Zirnīte
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Growth Path ◽  
Dramatic Structure

The aim of the study is to define how and to what effect the first-person narrative form is used in Oswald Zebris’s novel “Māra” (2019) and how the other elements of the narrative support it. The analysis of the novel employs both semiotic and narratological ideas, paying in-depth attention to those elements of the novel’s structure that can help the reader understand the growth path and power of the heroine Māra, a 16-year-old young woman entangled in external and internal conflict. As the novel is predominantly written from the title character’s point of view, as she is the first-person narrator in 12 of the 16 chapters of the novel, the article reveals the principle of chapter arrangement, the meaning of the second first-person narrator (in four novel chapters) and the main points of the dramatic structure of the story. Although in interviews after the publication of the novel, the author Zebris has emphasised that he has written the novel about a brave girl who at her 16 years is ready to make the decisions necessary for her personal growth, her open, candid, and emotionally narrated narrative creates inner resistance in readers, especially the heroine’s peers, and therefore makes it difficult to observe and appreciate her courage and the positive metamorphosis in the dense narrative of the heroine’s feelings, impressions, memories, imaginary scenes, various impulses and comments on the action. It can be explained by the form of narration that requires the reader to identify with the narrator; however, it is cumbersome if the narrator’s motives, details, and emotions, expressed openly and honestly, are unacceptable, incomprehensible, or somehow exaggerated.

A Sacred Communion

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-108
Author(s):  
Erin Michael Salius
Keyword(s):  
Spirit Possession ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
The Way

Chapter 2 focuses on another trope that upsets the realist and rationalist discourse of slavery: spirit possession. Whereas existing scholarship stresses the postmodernist resonances of this trope, the chapter argues that Catholicism serves to frame—and even to facilitate—the antirealist effect that spirit possession has on two contemporary narratives of slavery. First is Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which is one of the earliest examples of the genre and a novel rarely associated with either spirit possession or Catholicism. By highlighting where Jane’s narrative voice is possessed by other speakers, this chapter documents how the Catholic characters in the novel enable it to engage radically antirealist views about history without ultimately endorsing them. The second part of the chapter focuses on Leon Forrest’s critically acclaimed but insufficiently studied novel Two Wings to Veil My Face, which also figures storytelling as a kind of spirit possession. Despite its obvious skepticism towards organized religion, the novel depicts these spiritual intercessions as Catholic sacraments: rituals of eating and drinking that recall the Eucharist. Thus, Catholicism is implicated in the way the narrator remembers slavery and in the parts of his history that are “beyond understanding.”

First Study

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Nikhil Govind
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Television Media ◽  
Cultural Historian

The first chapter discusses the path-breaking contemporary novel Hangwoman (2016) written by K. R. Meera, and translated by cultural historian J. Devika. The novel focalizes the ethical dilemmas of capital punishment through the perspective of a young woman, Chetna. Chetna inherits the gruesome profession—however, the new factor is the presence of a sensationalist television media, which reduces what should have been a moment of crime and pathos to a lurid search for commercial visibility. The chapter allows the book to foreground the questions of injustice and ethics as they interact with the gendered perspective of a subaltern young woman. The notion of subjectivity finds an opening and horizon within these difficult questions of private shame and a determination to make one’s way in a hard and unforgiving world.

Turning Oppression into Challenges: Women in Badriyya l-Bišr’s Hind wa-l-ʿaskar

Arabica ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 61 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 69-88
Author(s):  
Sanna Dhahir
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Protagonist

Abstract Saudi novelist Badriyya l-Bišr, a well-known advocate for women’s rights in her country, uses her novel Hind wa-l-ʿaskar1 (Hind and the Soldiers) to trace the growth and the struggle of a young woman in a rigid, conventional society. As the novel’s title suggests, the female protagonist, Hind, finds herself in a situation of war at different stages in her life—war against various forces that deny her self-expression and jeopardize her happiness as a human being. Yet the novel is not just a series of complaints about the grievances experienced by women in Saudi Arabia; it focuses in the main on women’s potential and their power to use their judgment and arm themselves with all the weapons available to them in order to overcome oppression and marginalization.

scholarly journals Radical Communication Types in William H. Gass’s "The Tunnel"

Tertium ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-161
Author(s):  
Sergii Sushko
Keyword(s):  
Private Life ◽  
Experimental Techniques ◽  
Communication Style ◽  
Communication Styles ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Experimental Fiction ◽  
Figure Of Speech ◽  
Radical Content

Radical communication largely characterizes W. H. Gass’s The Tunnel. The novel incorporates many forms of radical speech and thought, it unfolds a number of radically charged issues of public and private life. It features a multitude of innovative experimental techniques and, in many instances, it demonstrates predominance of language and form over the content. In this paper, we have ascertained that the authenticity and multitude of radical communication forms in the said novel can essentially be grasped in terms of disjointing the Ich-Erzähler’s narrative voice and the authorial one. It has been ascertained that the sincerity in narrative largely governs its radical content while the book’s radical composition and radical language and style form the second set of the radical communication styles in the novel, reflecting Gass’s bent on experimental fiction. In the paper, the following radical communication style varieties have been singled out:  “breaking the narrative monotony,” “hate intensifying,” “filial unwillingness to forgive,” “revulsion invoking,” “provoking indecipherability/unreadability,” “accentuated total criticism,” or “downgrading metanarratives,” “ambivalent portrayal of the war and Holocaust,” “pictorial communication style,” “communication style of radically structured composition,” “communication style of verbal adornment,” “embellishment,” “conceit” (as a figure of speech).

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