storyworld |
Working Definition:
storyworlds are mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world (space/time frame) to which recipients relocate (imagine) as they work to invent or comprehend a narrative.
Disciplinary Definitions:
"storyworlds are mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate—or make a deictic shift (Galbraith 1995; Segal 1995; Zubin and Hewitt 1995)—as they work to comprehend a narrative. As I discuss in more detail below, I here use the term world (and storyworld) in a manner more or less analogous with linguists' use of the term discourse model. A discourse model can be defined as a global mental representation enabling interlocutors to draw inferences about items and occurrences either explicitly or implicitly included in a discourse (Emmott 1997; Green 1989; Grosz and Sidner 1986; McKoon et al. 1993; Webber 1979). By the same token, and like Jahn's cognitive frames, storyworlds—or models for understanding narrative discourse—function in both a top-down and bottom-up way during narrative comprehension. They guide readers to assume that jets, cell phones, and plasma // guns do not exist in the world of Madame Bovary (Flaubert 1992). But they are also subject to being updated, revised, or even abandoned with the accretion of textual cues, as when the reader of John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure (1996) gradually realizes that the storyworld is not at all the way its narrator, a homicidal gourmand, says it is" (Herman, Story Logic, 5-6)
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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