Readers and text worlds of dystopiaTools Hasan, Arwa (2017) Readers and text worlds of dystopia. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
AbstractThis thesis is an exploration of reading styles and stylistic patterning in relation to dystopian fiction. Situated within an empirical cognitive poetics, the study draws upon naturalistic reader-response data, with specific reference to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron’, as case studies of dystopian texts that produce a spectrum of readings. The notions of preferred and dispreferred responses are defined in cognitive linguistic and pragmatic terms, and non-normative readings of these dystopian texts are investigated. The thesis adopts a text-world theoretical description, and provides both naturalistic reader-community data as well as focused interviews and reading protocols. It was found that some readers insist on producing dispreferred readings even in the face of lack of textually-driven evidence. Such readers allow their own emotions, outlooks and dispositions to over-ride the textual patterning, in producing dispreferred and non-evidential readings. These readings are nevertheless genuinely held. This study raises questions for all text-driven models of literary reading and analysis.
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