Text-worlds, blending and allegory in ‘Flamingos in Dudley Zoo’ by Emma Purshouse

Abstract

This paper will develop a cognitive stylistic framework drawn from Conceptual Integration (Blending) Theory ( Fauconnier and Turner 2002 ), and Text World Theory, which uses the idea of elaboration sites as potential structural enablers in mapping across blend spaces. The framework will be used to investigate the operation of allegory and metaphor in Emma Purhouse’s poem ‘Flamingos in Dudley Zoo’. Previous work on blending and allegory is taken as a departure point for the exploration of the relationship between text-worlds and blends in allegory in order to investigate how a hybrid approach may produce a richer understanding of how the poem achieves its effects. The paper will examine the conceptual blends created by metaphors suggested by the allegory in terms of their input (source and target) spaces, and examine how these may create and enrich metaphoric text-worlds in the poem. The paper develops a text-world mechanism, the peri-text-world, that allows the source, target and blended worlds to be integrated into one complex that can allow the necessary mappings to proceed from the source world-system of the allegory, through the allegorical blend, to structure a target world. It will also consider how this mapping process creates the potential for a number of candidate targets and how that uncertainty helps the poem make its point.

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“…In my opinion, Hutcheon’s “oscillation” (2013: xvii) description of adaptation has a strong connection to Text World Theory’s concept of toggling, which refers to readers’ shifting attention back and forth between simultaneously active worlds. Toggling tends to occur in situations where attentional shifts help the reader better grasp overall textual coherence or uncover additional meaning: shifting, for instance, between concurrent worlds with different physical locations in the manner of “cinematic split screen” (Werth, 1999: 224–225); concurrent worlds of different conceptual planes, such as the fictional and staged worlds that arise during the reading and mental staging of a dramatic play-text (Cruikshank and Lahey, 2010: 76); or conceptually corresponding worlds, such as the source and target worlds in the processing of extended metaphor (Browse, 2016: 24–25; Gavins, 2007: 152) and allegory (McLoughlin, 2020: 401–402). As Browse notes, toggling should be best conceived of as something scalar, rather than in a “binary ‘on’ or ‘off’ fashion” (2016: 25), with gradation in readerly attention manipulated by observable stylistic forms.…”

“…In Browse (2016) and Gavins (2007)’s diagramming of extended metaphor, the source worlds are meshed within the main text-worlds array, right beside the target worlds. Meanwhile, McLoughlin argues that the allegorical world “operates like a skin around the main text-world, like the pericardium around the heart,” a layer called the peri-text-world (2020: 397–400). In adaptation as in allegory, readers “reconstruct the perceived intention of the author through the text” (2020: 397), which likewise seems to occur in a layer of conceptual space a bit removed from the core text-worlds.…”

“…Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007;Werth, 1995Werth, , 1997Werth, , 1999) is a cognitive linguistic discourse framework that has enjoyed growth and elaboration in the past decade to explain a rich variety of discourse types and discourse phenomena (e.g., Browse, 2016;Canning, 2017;Cruikshank and Lahey, 2010;Gavins and Lahey, 2016;Gibbons and Whiteley, 2021;Giovanelli, 2013;McLoughlin, 2020;Whiteley, 2011). Of the several levels of worlds the theory proposes, the discourse-world is "the situational context" (Werth, 1999: 83) in which participants engage in a discourse event; for literature, this world is split spatiotemporally (Gavins, 2005: 26) for the writer and the reader.…”

“…A vibrant trend in Text World Theory research investigates how readers' processing of certain discoursal phenomenafor instance, extended metaphor (Browse, 2016;Gavins, 2007;Werth, 1994) and allegory (McLoughlin, 2020) can be represented conceptually as negotiations between text-worlds. In this paper, I advocate for the suitability of Text World Theory as an analytical framework to account for literary adaptation, similarly a discoursal phenomenon involving different text-worldsin this case, different worlds of separate texts.…”