A Schema-Theoretic Exploration Into Strange Stories From The Lodge Of Leisures

Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures is renowned as a collection of short stories telling strange or supernatural events, or called"Zhi Guai"(志怪) in Chinese. Pu Songling, the author of the book, himself also considered it"a record of ghost and fox sprite history", because characters in the book are sometimes human beings, sometimes ghosts, sometimes sprites (transferred from foxes, in many cases), and sometimes celestial beings. However, it is this"strange"book that is regarded as the peak among all the ancient Chinese short story collections. Expert researches on this literary work are already numerous. As a"layperson"in the field of literary study, the writer of this thesis feels unqualified to make any comment on its literary achievements. She plans to depict the understanding process of those"strange"stories from a common reader's perspective.Schema theory is a theory that aims at human understanding. Its origin is generally addressed to the Gestalt psychology of the 1920s and 1930s. The theory underwent an eclipse together with the Gestalt tradition of psychology when behaviorism gained the dominance from the late 1930s to 1950s. It is the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the 1970s that has revived an interest in this theory. AI scientists tend to term"schemata"(plural of schema) as"building blocks of cognition"that are stored hierarchically in the long term memory. One of the most complete and influential models worked out in the AI schema theory is put forward by Schank and Abelson in their book Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding (henceforth SPGU) in 1977. An American scholar, G. Cook (1994), has once tried to apply the four-leveled schematic structure of SPGU to analyze advertisement texts. After the analysis, he finds that the model works, but meanwhile he detects some minor deficiencies of this model. Thus he suggests some modifications to it. It is the modified version of a three-leveled schematic structure proposed by G. Cook that is applied in this thesis as the instrument of analysis.In this thesis, the writer first selects a story as a sample from Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures, and then specifies the important schemata evoked in the reader's mind during the understanding process. After that, the writer reports how a reader perceives the"coherence"of the text by establishing links between these schemata.