DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2015.v03i01.043

Pages: 313-322

Text World Theory is a remarkable approach for exploration of the reader's cognitive interactions with the text. This study involves a Text World Theory perspective on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried to explore the stylistic particularities of traumatically-loaded episodes in terms of the shifting between the matrix contextual frame and the generated sub-worlds. O'Brien's techniques of tense manipulation, displacement of world-builders, and deliberate metaphors with or without schema refreshment have been examined to highlight the way textual features cue the reader's movements between various event frames. It was found that tense manipulation requires a more careful examination due to the fact that the absence of tense shifting is not always a sign of the absence of world shifting. Besides, priming of certain kinds of sub-worlds or displacement of world-builders was sometimes under the impact of emotion. Also, the importance of drawing upon conceptual point of view in dealing with episodes containing deliberate metaphors and/or schema refreshment was pointed out.