WRITING is medicine

This chapter investigates Paul Auster’s novels The Brooklyn Follies (2006) and The Book of Illusions (2002) from a cognitive stylistic and corpus stylistic perspective. The first section shows that, following Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) approach to blending, the blend of writing is medicine, and some variations on it, structure the main characters’ mental lives as well as the readers’ inferencing processes. In the second part of the chapter, I test to what extent the blend of writing is medicine has a textually foregrounded base. Drawing on corpus stylistic methods, I demonstrate that the input spaces of writing and medicine both implicitly and explicitly show up in the lexico-grammatical structure of The Brooklyn Follies. Finally, I stress the need for using a cognitive stylistic approach in conjunction with text-based methods to measure and describe in detail the lexico-grammatical character of a text.