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Part of
Experiencing Fictional Worlds
Edited by Benedict Neurohr and Lizzie Stewart-Shaw
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 32] 2019
► pp. 157–176

Chapter 9
Immersive reading and the unnatural text-worlds of “Dead Fish”

In this chapter I present a Text World Theory analysis of Adam Marek’s emotionally charged dystopian short story, “Dead Fish”, which takes for its focus a possible future world recovering from environmental disaster. Drawing upon naturalistic reader response data in support of my own introspective analysis, I investigate the estranging experience of reading this particular narrative and discuss the readerly process of interpreting its defamiliarising world-building elements. Analytical focus is placed upon the responses of a purpose-built reading group (comprising four postgraduate research students from the University of Sheffield), who compare their conceptualisation of particular entities within the text-world, and reflect upon their understanding of such entities as “unnatural”. Through a combined application of narratological approaches to unnatural narration (Alber and Heinze 2013) and a Text World Theory perspective (Gavins 2007; Werth 1999), I investigate how readers respond to unnatural narration and draw several connections between readerly immersion and the emotional experience of reading unnatural texts.
Keywords: Text World Theory, reader response, dystopian short stories, Adam Marek, unnatural narration, immersion
Article outline
  • 9.1Introduction
  • 9.2Unnatural text-worlds and “Dead Fish”
    • 9.2.1Conceptualising first-person plural referents
  • 9.3Reading unnatural minds
  • 9.4An ambiguous and indifferent end
  • 9.5Comparing emotional reading experiences of “Dead Fish”
  • 9.6Conclusions
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 21 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.32.09nor
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