Harry Cooper

The Stylistics of Immersion – A Cognitive Poetic Study of Text and our World

My project adds to linguistic research exploring how readers feel ‘lost’ in a literary text. This is called immersion, and current understanding is that specific patterns of language, termed textual artifacts, create this immersive effect. One way this happens is by these patterns creating images of the text in readers’ minds, which guides how they feel about and interpret texts. This process is termed mental imagery, and while it is touted as important, my project argues it can be understood further to elucidate immersion. My cross-cultural, empirical and cognitive stylistics investigation of immersion looks to provide a reliable account of mental imagery and immersion.