Textual attractors in literary discourse: a cognitive-poetic reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s “Oh, Madam . . .”

Abstract

Abstract This article offers a cognitive-poetic analysis of Elizabeth Bowen’s short story “Oh, Madam . . .” (1941), a war-time story set in a London house partly damaged during the Blitz. This literary text includes numerous gaps in the form of ellipsis, dashes, and unfinished sentences, inviting the reader into filling them as a part of reading experience. The analysis critically applies Peter Stockwell’s (Stockwell, Peter. 2012 [2009]. Texture: A cognitive aesthetics of reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Stockwell, Peter. 2020. Cognitive poetics: An introduction, 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge) concepts of texture, resonance, and textual attractors. We stress the importance of identifying textual attractors in accounting for the dynamicity of the meaning-construction process in Bowen’s story. Arguably, the so-called resonance effect, a part of the reader’s aesthetic experience, results from their cognitive engagement during the process of gap-filling. In addition to that, the recognition of specific attractors enables the reader to grasp the social relations encoded in the text. To explain the cognitive processes involved in the reading of “Oh, Madam . . .”, we propose to expand Stockwell’s list of “features of good textual attractors” by including two additional ones: absence and repetition.