A Text-World Study Of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf is considered as one of the most important modernist authors in the 20 th century.She is a pioneer in the experiment of stream of consciousness.Among her stream-of-consciousness novels,Mrs.Dalloway is agreed to be the first mature experimental novel in which objectivity is achieved through subjectivity in multiple perspectives.Numerous studies have been done on this fiction.Narratological approaches focus on the multiplicity of perspectives,narrative voices,time and space techniques.Psychoanalytical approaches focus on the exploration of sanity and insanity in its characters against the background of Woolf’s own madness in real life.Linguistics and stylistics are interested in features of cohesion and coherence,thematic progression,and foregrounding,Free Indirect Style,etc.While almost every study illuminates the challenges of the complexity of Woolf’s fluidity,flux,and multiplicity for readers,few studies take an inward look at how readers approach the language and form of her work.To fill this gap,this study resorts to Text World Theory-a cognitive linguistic model based mainly on notions in cognitive psychology.For one thing,both stream of consciousness and cognitive linguists emphasis subjectivity,the former aims at revealing men’s subjective construction in the representation of reality while the latter highlights men’s experience,cognition and interpretation of the world.For another,cognitive linguistic theories can provide thread for understanding how readers mind represent the multiplicity of perspectives in stream of consciousness,thus bridge the gap between the writer’s production and readers’ comprehension.Text World Theory(TWT)assumes that readers approach discourses with mind representation of language in different layers: discourse-world(mind representation of the context of the language event based on discourse participants ’ situational,historical,psychological,social and cultural knowledge;text-world(mind representation of the discourse itself);sub-worlds(mind representation result from any changes to the spatial and/or temporal parameters of the initial text-world).Framed on the levels of text-worlds,this study adopts mainly a qualitative method.As one of the first trials of text-world study of a stream-of-consciousness fiction,our focus is the texture and features of text-worlds for a better understanding of readers mental representations of excerpts from the novel.We believe a qualitative study can serve the purpose.Excerpts from the novel are analyzed closely.Diagrams of the mental representations are given when necessary for a better representation of readers’ construct of the text.It arrives at the following conclusions:On the text-world level,since Mrs.Dalloway is found to be with much less description of characters’ physical environment than traditional novels,the world-building elements(temporal and spatial parameters,enactors and objects)and even the function-advancing propositions(material,relational or other processes)are to be extracted from characters’ fluid consciousness.On the sub-world level,there is a large number of modal-worlds triggered by various types of Speech and Consciousness Representation(SCR).Modal-worlds of the current character ’ s thoughts has taken a dominant role in readers’ mind,for it outnumbers other kinds of sub-worlds as well as breeds other sub-worlds.Sub-worlds in Mrs.Dalloway features constant shifting.This happens in either one or more characters’ consciousness,whether in monologues or dialogues.By depicting readers mental representations in the understanding of notoriously complex and confusing Free Indirect Style and point-of-view shifting in Mrs.Dalloway,this study extends the applicability of TWT in stream-of-consciousness discourses,as well as deepens our understanding of readers’ processing and reception of stream of consciousness,and sets a good example of close text-analysis for teachers and students in literary studies.