Recalling Atwood: Text World Theory and Memories of Narrative Fiction¬

Text World Theory (Gavins 2007; Werth 1999) is a cognitive-linguistic model of discourse processing which describes mental representations that discourse participants create during spoken or written communication. It stands as a counterpoint to traditional theories of linguistic comprehension by providing an account of how listeners and readers draw on background knowledge and an awareness of discourse context, as well as on linguistic cues, when interpreting texts.

To date, Text World Theory has largely focused on accounting for mental representations produced in the moment of communication. However, comprehension of lengthy fictional narratives involves drawing on a growing body of background knowledge about a fictional world. Limited attention has so far been paid to how text-worlds change as they are stored in, and subsequently retrieved from, long-term memory.

This thesis attempts to address this absence. It presents two original reader-response studies of reader summaries of Margaret Atwood’s fiction. Atwood’s innovative prose juxtaposes discourses of different types and frequently features unreliable narrators. This presents interpretive challenges which foreground strategies required to create coherent long-term mental representations of narratives. Using Text World Theory as a framework for stylistic analysis, I compare the conceptual structures of readers’ summaries of narratives with those of the texts that prompted them. Noting similarities between the two studies, gathered under different conditions, I suggest readers adopt predictable strategies when consolidating mental representations they create when reading and later recalling them.

Building on this analysis, I argue Text World Theory can be expanded to account for readers’ evolving representations of fictional worlds. I suggest it may benefit from drawing on the ‘storyworlds’ model (Herman 2002, 2009; Ryan 2019, 2022; Ryan and Thon 2014), and that together the two frameworks may provide a more complete account of readers’ long-term mental representations of fictional narratives than Text World Theory alone.