A Cognitive Poetic Perspective On Macbeth

Shakespeare is the most outstanding dramatist in the history of English literature and also one of the world’s most remarkable writers.His tragedy Macbeth tells the story of the Scottish warrior Macbeth,who becomes a mercenary tyrant from a hero fighting against the traitors and enemies,and is eventually overthrown.Macbeth has been studied by scholars at home and abroad.But the studies have paid little attention to the reader’s experience and cognition of the suffering experienced by the protagonist.Based on this,the practice of cognitive poetics in the study of Macbeth is undoubtedly a useful attempt,as readers can not only analyse its linguistic connotations from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,but also appreciate its unique charm from the perspective of cognitive psychology.This classic work has been studied from many points of view,but textual analysis in the context of cognitive poetics is still rare.Cognitive poetics is an emerging interdisciplinary discipline with the theoretical foundations of both cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology,aiming to explain the generation and understanding of literary texts and to reveal the deeper meanings of texts from a cognitive perspective.Based on three important fundamental theories in cognitive poetics,that is,conceptual metaphor theory,mental spaces,and figure-ground theory,the thesis holds the intention to provide a detailed analysis of the container and journey metaphors in the context,mental networks of Macbeth,as well as the repetition and innovative descriptions of discourse,portraying his thoughts and actions and reproducing the rise and fall of a tragic hero.With the employment of conceptual metaphor,specifically,the container metaphor and the journey metaphor,the bodies,the castle,and even Scotland are used as containers to map onto some abstract concepts to analyse in detail the characterization of Macbeth,Duncan,Malcolm,and other characters,while creating chaotic and turbulent historical context.It is also used to analyse a lifelong journey of a tragic hero under the framework of mental spaces,from the honorable warrior in the eyes of the sergeant at the beginning,to the regicide who betrays the king to usurp the throne,recreating his brief and sanguinary career,and constructing tragic theme.Then there is followed by a brief analysis of the dominant of the themes of death and guilt using discourse deviations of repetition and innovative description in the perspective of figure-ground theory.The thesis attempts to make a cognitive poetics analysis on Macbeth to structure the play,from its characters and situation,as well as the process of reader’s understanding of the text while reading,and thus grasp the thematic and aesthetic significance of the tragedy.As such,cognitive poetics is able to read literary texts in multiple dimensions,from the text,the author,and the reader,contributing to the understanding of plot,characterization,and tragic theme,and offering new ways of thinking about how to read and interpret Macbeth effectively.