Unrealized Utopian text-worlds in Dystopian Narratives
Text-World Theory (TWT) emerged as part of the ‘cognitive turn’ (Steen 1994) in the arts and humanities. A cognitive stylistic framework first created by Werth (1999), and then expanded upon in the works of Gavins (2007), and others, TWT provides a systematic method of tracing the different worlds that are created by the text and experienced by the reader. Readers create a version of the ‘text-world’ in which they experience texts as fully formed worlds, using the text as a guide for forming and shaping this fictional world in their minds. There has been recent interest in the worlds that are not mentioned in the text, but are created simultaneous ‘unrealized’ text-worlds; worlds in which the main narrative does not occur but are evoked temporarily, for example, through the use of negations (Hidalgo-Downing 2000; McLoughlin 2013), ambiguity (Al-Mansoob 2006) and dreams (Giovanelli 2013).
Due to the systematic nature of TWT, it is possible to shed light on how a ‘utopian impulse’ is found in dystopian narratives, which typically depict ‘nightmare worlds’ of oppression (Baccolini 2011). In particular, this paper looks at how narrated character perception which is preceded by counterfactives can also create ‘unrealized’ text-worlds through uncertainty, and thus help create this elusive Utopia in a classical dystopian text: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. If there is hope to be found in a dystopian narrative, it is created through these ‘unrealized’ text-worlds, which offer an alternate possibility to the main text-world of the narrative.
References
Al-Mansoob, H. (2006). The Text Worlds of Raymond Carver: a Cognitive Poetic analysis. Unpublished Thesis. The University of Nottingham.
Baccolini, R. (2011). ‘Finding Utopia in Dystopia: Feminism, Memory, Nostalgia and Hope.’ In Tom Moylan and Raffaela Baccolini (eds.) Utopia Method Vision: The Use of Social Dreaming. Oxford: Peter Lang. 159-189.
Gavins, J. (2007). Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: EUP.
Giovanelli, M. (2013). Text World Theory and Keats' Poetry: The Cognitive Poetics of Desire, Dreams and Nightmares. Bloomsbury Academic.
Hidalgo-Downing, L. (2000). Negation, Text Worlds and Discourse: The Pragmatics of Fiction. Stamford, CT: Ablex.
McLoughlin, N. (2013). Negative Polarity in Eavan Boland’s ‘the Famine Road’. New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 10(2):219-227.
Orwell, G. (2008 [1949]). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books.
Steen, Gerard. (1994). Understanding Metaphor. London: Longman.
Werth, P. (1999). Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman.
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