Past storyworld possible selves and the autobiographical reformulation of Dante’s myth in Lorine Niedecker’s “Switchboard Girl”

Abstract This essay focuses on the autobiographical reformulation of Dante’s myth in the short story “Switchboard Girl”, by the Objectivist American poet Lorine Niedecker (1903–1970). Within the cognitive linguistics paradigm of storyworld possible selves, or SPSs (Martínez, María-Ángeles. 2014. Storyworld possible selves and the phenomenon of narrative immersion. Testing a new theoretical construct. Narrative 22 (1). 110–131, Martínez, María-Ángeles. 2018. Storyworld possible selves. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter), the study explores the projection of a past Dantean SPS as key to individuals’ perspectival alignment with the narrator, and concomitantly, with the author’s fictionalized formulation of the realities of American working-class women in the 1950s. The linguistic anchoring of this Dantean SPS is also analysed and discussed. The results highlight Niedecker’s concern with drawing readers into sharing the personal hell of an intelligent, rural middle-class, mature woman with a serious visual disability, who is unsuccessfully applying for a menial job as a switchboard operator. The analysis also prompts a revision of the original SPS typology to include the author SPSs likely to be generated by readers of autobiographical narratives.