![]() ![]() In our conclusion (Section 7), we examine how these multiple representations of Olive converge as the text progresses to provide an intricate mental model of her character, which both forms a cohesive thematic link across the collection and also contributes to the emotional resonance experienced by readers. In Sections 5 and 6, we analyse three of the stories in the collection, two in which Olive is framed through external narration, and one in which the reader is provided with a more direct access into Olive’s thought processes. In Section 4, we examine a set of online reader reviews from Goodreads, in which readers outline their experience of emotionally connecting with Olive. In Section 3, we summarise previous work on characterisation in stylistics and introduce the concept of mind-modelling. In the next section, we introduce the style, structure and form of Olive Kitteridge as a short story cycle. Our paper is organised in the following way. In examining a specific genre, we also provide new ways of considering the genre-specific processes by which readers mind-model and track characters and the linguistic features that prompt them to do so. Our paper offers new research in cognitive stylistics in two distinctive ways given that it provides, to our knowledge, both the first literary linguistic analysis of Elizabeth Strout’s writing and the first sustained stylistic exploration of characterisation across the short story cycle form. We draw explicitly on work in contemporary cognitive stylistics that has examined how readers engage with characters through specific textual features that give rise to rich mind-models Footnote 3 in order to demonstrate how readers are positioned to track and respond to Olive’s character. In this paper, we examine how readers may construct a comprehensive mental model of Olive’s character, and crucially the workings of her mind, across the chapters in the interconnected stories that make up the novel. She is a (retired) local maths teacher, a mother, a wife, a friend, a local busybody, to name a few roles, and while readers are given direct access to her thoughts through focalisation in nearly half of the chapters (6/13), readers are also invited to view her through external focalisations, such as through her husband Henry (“Pharmacy”, chapter 1), her friends Harmon and Daisy (“Starving”, chapter 5), as well as other more peripheral acquaintances in the town, such as the minister’s daughter, Rebecca (“Criminal”, chapter 12) and Angie, the “Piano Player” (chapter 3) of the local bar. Footnote 2 Olive Kitteridge invites readers to incrementally build up a picture of the fictional seaside town of Crosby, and to piece together facets of Olive’s character. ![]() Footnote 1 Smith argues that “n cycles, stories can be read singly but gain meaning together, drawing on both the power of particularity and the explosive energy of fusion”. Somewhere between a short story collection and a fragmented novel, and much like Jennifer Egan’s fellow Pulitzer Prize winning text A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), this book can be labelled as a “short story cycle” in that it “most accurately captures the recursiveness central to the genre and privileges the short story as its formative element”. We further argue that tracking Olive is a process that places particular demands on readers: Strout shifts our attention across numerous iterations of events and characters in a way that invites constant readjustment of our understanding of Olive and the significance of her actions and relationships with others.Įlizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008) is a collection of interrelated stories about the life of the eponymous character, who lives in a small seaside town in Maine. Drawing explicitly on the concept of mind-modelling, we provide, to our knowledge, the first stylistic analysis of character across a short story collection. ![]() In this paper, we explore the process of tracking Olive by integrating several cognitive stylistic frameworks to examine how multiple representations of Olive and her life are processed in reading the novel. 2 (2010): 411–415, 412) suggests, is required to keep track of “the sense of multiple self-states that unite to form her continuity and coherence over time”. Strout’s narrative style means that the reader, as Guaccero (““Standing in the Spaces” with Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.” Psychoanalytic Perspectives 7, no. The novel’s chapters move across different time frames and thus present its characters in various stages of change. Readers are presented to Olive both mediated through other characters’ viewpoints, and with more seemingly direct access into Olive’s mind and motivations. Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge consists of thirteen interrelated chapters, each one involving to some degree the novel’s eponymous character. ![]()
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