Cognitive Poetics
Cognitive Poetics: Jasper Fforde's Rewriting of Jane Eyre in The Eyre Affair
Margarete RUBIK(Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna)
The fantastic world of Jasper Fforde’s novel The Eyre Affair, a modern rewriting of the 19th century classic Jane Eyre, presents a number of cognitive challenges, since it is radically at odds with our normal world schemata. The book dispenses with such epistemological strongholds of cognition as the space-time continuum by allowing time travellers to meddle with the past and future and proposes the existence of alternative universes. Most scurrilous of all, the novel blurs the ontological difference between fact and fiction, gleefully juggling the hierarchies of its plurireginal world by making characters migrate from the actual text world to the text world of various well-known literary works and back again. In addition, Fforde’s novel , by means of intertextual references, parodies of textual schemata and a juggling of incongruent scripts, engages in a constant dialogue with and deconstruction of existing literary models and familiar world schemata. I will analyse how readers process and understand this defamiliarized world and how many of the wildly absurd elements in fact re-enact in an exaggerated way typical reader-reactions to literature.
Back to MEiCogSci Lecture Series Programme
MEi:CogSci Consortium:
