A Text World Theory account of the traumatic episodes in Tim O'Brien's war memoir The Things They Carried

Journal Title: Scholars Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences - Year 2015, Vol 3, Issue 1

Abstract

Text World Theory is a remarkable approach for exploration of the reader's cognitive interactions with the text. This study involves a Text World Theory perspective on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried to explore the stylistic particularities of traumatically-loaded episodes in terms of the shifting between the matrix contextual frame and the generated sub-worlds. O'Brien's techniques of tense manipulation, displacement of world-builders, and deliberate metaphors with or without schema refreshment have been examined to highlight the way textual features cue the reader's movements between various event frames. It was found that tense manipulation requires a more careful examination due to the fact that the absence of tense shifting is not always a sign of the absence of world shifting. Besides, priming of certain kinds of sub-worlds or displacement of world-builders was sometimes under the impact of emotion. Also, the importance of drawing upon conceptual point of view in dealing with episodes containing deliberate metaphors and/or schema refreshment was pointed out. Keywords: Text World Theory, Sub-world, Priming, Conceptual Viewpoint.

Authors and Affiliations

Parivash Esmaeili, Behnoush Akhavan, FazelAsadi Amjad

Keywords

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  • EP ID EP380664
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How To Cite

Parivash Esmaeili, Behnoush Akhavan, FazelAsadi Amjad (2015). A Text World Theory account of the traumatic episodes in Tim O'Brien's war memoir The Things They Carried. Scholars Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, 3(1), 213-322. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-380664