Attentional windowing in David Foster Wallace’s ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 11642546
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.1075/lal.17
- Book title
- Cognitive Grammar in Literature
- Publisher
- John Benjamins
- ISBN
- 9789027234063
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- This chapter appears in a collection co-edited by the author, which considers literary meaning and effect from the perspective of Cognitive Grammar, developed by Ronald Langacker. It is the first collection to attempt to thoroughly survey the potential of Cognitive Grammar through the use of literary analysis of texts in this manner, and aims to provide insight and methodological direction in the discussion of meaning, translation, ambience, action, reflection, multimodality, empathy, experience and literariness itself.
The author’s chapter uses Leonared Talmy’s (2000) concept of ‘attentional windowing’, as a form of foregrounding by the writer, to analyse David Foster Wallace’s 2004 short story ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’. In this story the protagonist’s daydream is recounted in as much detail as the traumatic event he witnesses, and the use of techniques of distraction, when understood through attentional windowing, allows us to see how Wallace’s writing involves an interaction between writer and reader predicated on digression from an already complicated plot. The chapter argues that cognitive discourse grammar can offer new insights into how we can think and talk about contemporary literature, and this has allowed an exploration of language which is essentially a disassembling of intuitive processes.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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