Tracing palimpsestic text-worlds of key moments in rewrites of King Lear - A Thousand Acres and Dunbar

Abstract

In recent years, Text World Theory has been extended and elaborated to explain readers’ understanding of discoursal phenomena where toggling between separate text-worlds is sustained at length, such as extended metaphor and allegory. Similarly, experiencing adaptation, that is, reading a rewrite of a source text, may also involve readers deriving cognitive effects from shifting attention between two ontologically separate sets of worlds throughout a discourse. However, Text World Theory has not been previously applied to the study of this area. This paper deploys Text World Theory to examine the stylistic manipulation of text-worlds in A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley and Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn, novels that are both modern rewrites of Shakespeare’s King Lear. It aims to contribute on the one hand to Text World Theory by enriching and elaborating a Text World basis for explaining adaptation, and on the other to adaptation studies by demonstrating the utility of a cognitive stylistic approach for analyzing literary adaptation. Specifically, it investigates how the construction of intertextually-relevant text-world patterns serves to draw the reader’s attention to assign significance to certain narrative moments, and to allow the reader to access an additional layer of meaning. This study sheds some light on the possible contribution of special types of contextual information to the negotiation of text-worlds.