Dr Jeremy Scott, from the Department of English Language & Linguistics, has just published a chapter in the new collection edited by Joanna Gavins and Ernestine Lahey, World Building: Discourse in the Mind (Bloomsbury, 2016).
Over the last forty 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. The collection represents the state-of-the-discipline in worlds-based approaches to discourse, collected together for the first time.
Jeremy’s chapter, entitled ‘Worlds from Words: Theories of World-building as Creative Writing Toolbox’ sits on the critical-creative boundary and draws upon aspects of the field of cognitive poetics to explore what happens when readers read, and asks how an understanding of these processes can benefit the creative writer. It considers the implications of cognitive poetic approaches to the ‘mechanics’ of prose fiction explicitly in terms of creative practice rather than from the perspective of the stylistician or literary critic. The central (and simple) proposal is this: there is a remarkable facility in the mind of the reader which enables her or him to be transported to fictional worlds which may or may not bear relation to his or her ‘actual world’. Traditionally referred to as a process of ‘suspension of disbelief’, this remarkable facility is something which creative writers should understand thoroughly and aim to exploit and, crucially, should also be wary of disrupting unnecessarily (or, at least, be ware of what happens when it is disrupted). It is in providing a principled and rigorous account of the way readers read that cognitive poetics has much to offer the writer. Indeed, the writing and reading, rather than being separate activities, should be seen as interrelated positions along a cline.
For full details of the collection, please see the publisher’s webpage here:
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/world-building-9781472586551/