A COGNITIVE STYLISTICS STUDY OF MIND-STYLE IN DUL JOHNSON'S ACROSS THE GULF

Abstract

This article adopts a cognitive stylistics perspective, applying Schema Theory and Text World Theory to examine mind style in Dul Johnson’s Across the Gulf. Using qualitative textual analysis, it explores salient passages featuring Ifunanya, Janbut, and Ofala to demonstrate how linguistic choices and narrative structure construct distinct mental worldviews and guide readers’ cognitive engagement. The analysis reveals layered text worlds and nested subworlds of memory, imagined futures, and traumatic recall that foreground a semantic split between characters’ internal and external realities. Through deliberate schema affirmation and disruption, Johnson invites readers to reconstruct characters’ perspectives: Ifunanya gestures toward a maternal schema while contesting imposed silence, Janbut unsettles masculine archetypes through vulnerability and displacement, and Ofala’s communal authority fractures under threats to lineage. These stylistic strategies function as powerful devices that cultivate empathy, ethical response, and psychological complexity rooted in experiences of war and dislocation. The study contributes to cognitive stylistics and postcolonial reading practices by showing how text-world construction and schema dynamics mediate cognition and moral engagement with trauma and identity.