| Cognitive poetics is concerned with the cognitive structure and cognitive processing of the choice of linguistic forms in discourse. As for literary works, their identification and comprehension involves readers’various cognitive strategies, therefore, the linguistic forms and stylistic features in literary texts can be fully explained at the cognitive level. As one of the most influential cognitive models in cognitive poetics, Text World Theory mainly concerns the cognitive mechanism of the discourse. In the study of literary discourse, Text World Theory is effective in interpreting readers’mental representations of the fictional world in their reading process and how literary meanings are generated in readers’mind as well.Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the most popular and famous fairy tales in the world. It is the precursory work of children’s magic and absurd literature which greatly influences children’s growth in England and becomes one of the books that children must read. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland begins as a traditional novel in which the heroine and the spatial setting are given. With the appearance of the new characters, readers are brought into a dream world unconsciously in which the narrative structure and the character construct keep on disturbing readers’existing knowledge frame so that an absurd fictional world is constructed by readers. Based on this observation, the thesis carries on a cognitive poetics study on the narrative structure and characterization of the dream world in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland within the framework of Text World Theory. It analyzes world-switches and world repair in terms of narrative structure and as for characterization; it explores the function of reference, identities and modal worlds in constructing dream world of this novel. It aims to describe the cognitive mechanism of the text in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and readers’mental construct of the dream world in this novel. The study shows that the frequent use of remindful and imaginational words and shifts of time and space make readers switch between the fictional real world and the dream world. Abundant use of references lead readers construct different identities of Alice, and negations and modal verbs contribute greatly to the absurdity of the dream world and Alice’s growth in the dream world. It is concluded that Text World Theory has great power in interpreting the dream world in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It provides a new perspective for the interpretation of novels about dreams, making readers participate actively into the fictional world and interpreting reader’s construct of the absurd dream world and characters in the novel. By doing so, the study broadens the application of Text World Theory in such unconventional text. |
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