Dr. CHEUNG Ka-yee, MarjorieMarjorieDr. CHEUNG Ka-yee2026-09-032026-09-032026Cheung, M. K. Y. (2026 Aug 20). Extending mind style to anorexic subjectivity: Linguistic insufficiency and metaphors in prose and graphic eating disorder memoirs. PALA 2026: The Philosophy of Stylistics, Uppsala University, Sweden.http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11861/28878Mind style, rooted in the relationship between linguistic patterns and cognition, is an exceptional tool for understanding the altered perceptual, emotional, and ideological worlds of non-normative cognitive perspectives. Mind style analyses have been extensively applied to narratives of neurodivergent conditions such as autism and dementia (Semino, 2014; Harrison, 2017), yet have rarely been extended to eating disorders, despite their profound disruptions to body perception, self-worth, and cognition. Existing work also tends to privilege unimodal prose narratives, with little attention to how multimodal comparisons might enrich mind style analysis through the verbal-visual interactions of graphic memoirs (Forceville & Urios-Aparisi, 2009).<br> This paper addresses these gaps through a comparative analysis of Stephanie Ng’s prose memoir Big Bites Break Boundaries (2024), a fragmented account of anorexia in the context of stigma and perfectionist culture in Hong Kong, and Katie Green’s graphic memoir Lighter Than My Shadow (2013), which visually embodies the experience of anorexia, trauma, and recovery.<br> Drawing on mind style, multimodal metaphor theory, and comics-based illness narratives, the paper investigates: (1) the key metaphors associated with the anorexic experience in prose versus graphic narratives; (2) the medium-specific motivations for these metaphorical choices; and (3) how shared metaphors operate differently across prose and graphic narratives. The analysis contrasts Ng’s linguistic metaphors of boundaries, ‘big bites’, and messiness with Green’s visual metaphors of scribbled shadows, bloated figures, and devouring mouths, showing how subjective, culturally inflected experiences take precedence over diagnostic reductionism and how different media shape representations of non-normative cognition.enAnorexia NarrativesGraphic MemoirMind StyleMultimodal MetaphorNon-Normative CognitionConference Paper