World Building Discourse in the Mind [Paperback]

World Buildingrepresents the state-of-the-discipline in worlds-based approaches to discourse, collected together for the first time. Over the last 40 years the 'text-as-world' metaphor has become one of the most prevalent and productive means of describing the experiencing of producing and receiving discourse. This has been the case in a range of disciplines, including stylistics, cognitive poetics, narratology, discourse analysis and literary theory.

The metaphor has enabled analysts to formulate a variety of frameworks for describing and examining the textual and conceptual mechanics involved in human communication, articulating these variously through such concepts as 'possible worlds', 'text-worlds' and 'storyworlds'. Each of these key approaches shares an understanding of discourse as a logically grounded, cognitively and pragmatically complex phenomenon. Discourse in this sense is capable of producing highly immersive and emotionally affecting conceptual spaces in the minds of discourse participants.
The chapters examine how best to document and analyze this and this is an essential collection for stylisticians, linguists and narrative theorists.

Notes on Contributors
1. World Building in Discourse,Joanna Gavins and Ernestine Lahey
2. 'I felt like I'd stepped out of a different reality': Possible Worlds Theory, Metalepsis and Digital Fiction,Alice Bell
3. Author-CharacterEthosin Dan Brown's Langdon-Series Novels,Ernestine Lahey
4. Building More-Than-Human Worlds:UmweltModelling in Animal Narratives,David Herman
5. Building Hollywood in Paddington: Text World Theory, Immersive Theatre, and Punchdrunk'sThe Drowned Man,Alison Gibbons
6. Speaker Enactors in Oral Narrative,Isabelle van der Bom
7. Text World Theory asCognitive Grammatics: a Pedagogical Application in the Secondary Classroom,Marcello Giovanelli
8. Worlds from Words:l³