The function of language in this activity is to pick objects in the textual world, to link them with properties, to animate characters and setting—in short, to conjure their presence to the imagination. The world metaphor thus entails a referential or “vertical” conception of meaning ... [] ... In this vertical conception, language is meant to be traversed toward its referents. Sven Birkerts describes this attitude as follows: “When we are reading a novel we don’t, obviously, recall the preceding sentences and paragraphs. In fact we generally don’t remember the language at all, unless it’s dialogue. For reading is a conversion, a turning of codes into contents” (Gutenberg Elegies, 97). (p: 91-92)
The idea of textual world provides the foundation of a poetics of immersion, but we need more materials to build up the project since poststructuralist literary theory is hostile to the phenomenon because it conflicts with its concept of language ... [] ... The building blocks of the project will therefore have to be found in the quarries of other fields: cognitive psychology (the metaphors of transportation and being “lost in a book”), analytical philosophy (possible worlds), phenomenology (make-believe), and psychology again (mental simulation). (p: 92 - 93)
The frozen metaphors of language dramatize the reading experience as an adventure worthy of the most thrilling novel: the reader plunges under the sea (immersion), reaches a foreign land (transportation), is taken prisoner (being caught up in a story, being a captured audience), and loses contact with all other realities (being lost in a book). The work of the psychologists Richard Gerrig and Victor Nell (Experiencing Narrative Worlds (10–11), follows the thread of these classic metaphors to explore what takes place in the mind of the entranced reader. (p: 93)
The best illustrations of this script come from the realm of fiction, but Gerrig’s stated purpose is to describe a type of experience that concerns “narrative worlds”—what I would call the worlds of mimetic texts—not just fictional ones. The metaphor of transportation captures how the textual world becomes present to the mind, not how this world relates to the real one, and this sense of presence can be conveyed by narratives told as truth as well as by stories told as fiction. Victor Nell writes that “although fiction is the usual vehicle for ludic reading, it is not its lack of truth—its ‘fictivity’—that renders it pleasurable” (Lost in a Book, 50). (p: 95)
The idea of textual world provides the foundation of a poetics of immersion, but we need more materials to build up the project since poststructuralist literary theory is hostile to the phenomenon because it conflicts with its concept of language ... [] ... The building blocks of the project will therefore have to be found in the quarries of other fields: cognitive psychology (the metaphors of transportation and being “lost in a book”), analytical philosophy (possible worlds), phenomenology (make-believe), and psychology again (mental simulation). (p: 92 - 93)
The frozen metaphors of language dramatize the reading experience as an adventure worthy of the most thrilling novel: the reader plunges under the sea (immersion), reaches a foreign land (transportation), is taken prisoner (being caught up in a story, being a captured audience), and loses contact with all other realities (being lost in a book). The work of the psychologists Richard Gerrig and Victor Nell (Experiencing Narrative Worlds (10–11), follows the thread of these classic metaphors to explore what takes place in the mind of the entranced reader. (p: 93)
The best illustrations of this script come from the realm of fiction, but Gerrig’s stated purpose is to describe a type of experience that concerns “narrative worlds”—what I would call the worlds of mimetic texts—not just fictional ones. The metaphor of transportation captures how the textual world becomes present to the mind, not how this world relates to the real one, and this sense of presence can be conveyed by narratives told as truth as well as by stories told as fiction. Victor Nell writes that “although fiction is the usual vehicle for ludic reading, it is not its lack of truth—its ‘fictivity’—that renders it pleasurable” (Lost in a Book, 50). (p: 95)
