“The words crawled like spiders” : a cognitive approach to memoirs and graphic novels about psychosis
cIRcle (University of British Columbia) July 10, 2026 Joshua Levesque
This thesis combines cognitive linguistic and phenomenological approaches to investigate how people communicate the experience of psychosis through memoirs and graphic novels. I start from an understanding of psychotic language as rhetorical, in the sense that it is used to express one’s viewpoint on the world and to change the cognitive states of others; it is not merely ‘word salad’....