In:Practising Stylistics: Essays in Honour of Paul Simpson
Edited by Clara Neary, Simon Statham and Peter Stockwell
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 45] 2026
► pp. 61–69
Chapter 5: VignetteNon-events in stylistics
An analysis of a passage from Zadie Smith’s NW
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Abstract
Drawing on and expanding Simpson and Canning’s (2014) analysis
of ‘action and event as well as inaction and non-event’ (p. 299) in Joseph Conrad’s novel Chance (1913), Joe
Bray analyses an event which can be assumed to be taking place but which is represented obliquely in NW
(2012) by Zadie Smith. By developing the ‘transitivity-plus approach’ proposed by Simpson and Canning (2014, p. 281), Bray demonstrates in this chapter that the stylistic toolkit for examining non-events
can be augmented further by the analysis of speech presentation and the notion of construal from Cognitive Grammar,
illustrating how the effect of disorientation in fiction can be achieved through indirect narration.
Keywords: non-events, transitivity-plus, speech presentation, construal, disorientation
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