Jane Lugea | Queen's University Belfast (original) (raw)

Papers by Jane Lugea

A Little Unsteadily into Light, 2022

An afterword to the short story collection, A Little Unsteadily into Light, which considers how f... more An afterword to the short story collection, A Little Unsteadily into Light, which considers how fictional writing about dementia uses recurring stylistic features to represent the cognitive and subjective experience of the illness.

Springer eBooks, Dec 31, 2022

The Gerontologist

This article presents findings from an interdisciplinary project which invited readers to experie... more This article presents findings from an interdisciplinary project which invited readers to experience the impact of dementia via fictional characters’ narratives. Combining methods from critical gerontology and literary linguistics—a field that examines the language of literature—we undertook an empirical reader response study of dementia fiction. We constructed a large corpus of dementia fiction; selecting 12 extracts, each containing first-hand, focalized accounts of fictional characters’ experiences of living with dementia. Readers (31) were purposively sampled for 4 separate reading groups—student social workers (9); general public (9); family carers (6); and people with dementia (7). Over 6 weeks they engaged in separate, facilitated, on-line group discussions of extracts. Discussions were independently coded using ATLAS.ti. Although readers from all 4 groups reported that fictional characters drew them into the internal life of someone with dementia, some carers questioned whet...

Applied Stylistics Symposium, May 6, 2021

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

This article reports the findings of the first large-scale study into how dementia is depicted in... more This article reports the findings of the first large-scale study into how dementia is depicted in the minds of fictional characters. Dementia is increasingly prevalent and, in the absence of a cure, requires better societal and cultural awareness. Literary representations offer readers the opportunity to ‘try on’ fictional minds, and better understand alternative cognitive experiences. Stylisticians have explored the ‘mind styles’ of characters with various illnesses, characteristics and behaviours, but this is the first comprehensive study of dementia mind styles, and indeed, any one syndrome. A substantial corpus of contemporary fiction depicting the internal perspectives of characters and narrators with dementia was compiled. The data is analysed qualitatively and quantitively, embracing a methodological eclecticism suited to understanding the patterns in characters’ cognitive experiences across texts. The results are presented thematically, demonstrating the enduring significanc...

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018

Language and Literature, 2013

In this article, Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) and Ryan’s model of fictional worl... more In this article, Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) and Ryan’s model of fictional worlds (1991a, 1991b) are both applied to Nolan’s blockbuster film, Inception (2010) to explore the multi-layered architecture of the narrative. The opening two scenes of Nolan’s screenplay are analysed using Text World Theory, with particular attention to the embedded nature of character dialogue, or, more generally, ‘represented discourse’ (Herman, 1993), otherwise known as Direct Speech (Leech and Short, 2007). Based on this analysis, I suggest a modification to the way in which Text World Theory deals with represented discourse, which improves the framework’s applicability to all text types. Moving from the micro-analysis of the screenplay text, to a macro-analysis of the film narrative as a whole, I outline the various different worlds that make up the reality, dream and ‘limbo’ layers in the film, explaining how most of the action takes place at a remove from the world at the centre of...

Contemporary Media Stylistics, 2020

Image macros are a particular kind of internet meme which consist of patterned combinations of im... more Image macros are a particular kind of internet meme which consist of patterned combinations of image and text which, through widespread (re-)production, have become an established sub-genre, cohering around a certain fixed set of features, called ‘cohesive quiddities’ (Segev et al, 2015). The stylistic features of these incredibly popular online texts have not been described until now, despite the fact that memes operate under very strict stylistic rules and are subject to great user creativity. This study provides a pragma-stylistic analysis of five of the most popular image macro families, as well as their most liked and disliked iterations. An existing framework for the analysis of internet memes (Shifman, 2014) is adopted and refined and applied in a qualitative analysis of the data. In order to account for the reasons behind their (dis)approval in the meme community, this study incorporates into the model additional concepts from humour studies and from Goffman, including ‘keying’ (1979/1981) and the distinction between ‘author’ and ‘animator’ (1974/1986). In providing a pragma-stylistic account of image macros, this chapter advances the analytical toolkit available to stylisticians dealing with digital texts and contexts.