Absurd 'Worlds' In Distorting Mirrors: A Text World Approach To American Black Humor Fictions

This dissertation presents a text world approach to American black humor fictions. It aims to describe the cognitive mechanism of black humor fictions, accounting for how their idiosyncrasy, Absurdity, is generated in readers'text processing and in the fictional characters'perception of the textual actual world. The study is an integration of cognitive stylistics in its explanation of readers'mental representations of the fictional world at cognitive level on the one hand, and traditional stylistics in its interpretation of linguistic forms and textual mechanics at textual level on the other. Besides, psychoanalysis is complementary to the study of the mental functioning of fictional characters. Black humor fiction gained its popularity in American literature in the 1960s and early 1970s and was still flourishing in the 1990s of last century, which exerted worldwide influence on literature, including Chinese contemporary literature. It is a lucid fact that black humor fictions have received extensive attention in literary studies for their humorous way of satirizing the absurdity and cruelty of modern society. Nonetheless, the role that linguistic forms and textual mechanics play in creating Absurdity in these novels has not received much attention. Absurdity as the cornerstone of black humor fictions is a cognitive phenomenon which is generated in the reader by the discontinuity between serious or even horrible situations and their humorous presentations. It is argued that Absurdity in black humor fictions is not confined to their absurd content and themes, as has been comprehensively discussed among literary critics, but more significantly, it is manifested in their textual mechanics and stylistic features, which can not be fully accounted for without consulting the construction of meanings at cognitive level for the involvement of readers'varying conceptual strategies in their identification. Black humor fictions as a trend of absurd literature are marked predominantly by their humorous expressive modes which the reader empathizes. As such, the emotional effect of black humor fictions is inseparable from readers'mental conceptualizations of the fictional world established by linguistic expressions. Besides, the fictional worlds depicted in black humor fictions, which have transferred from the exterior turmoil to the intricate inner worlds of the characters, foreground the cognitive nature of the novels from another perspective. The cognitive stylistic investigation of black humor fictions not only provides an account of the cognitive source of Absurdity but has a deeper insight into the profound meanings of Absurdity.Based on these observations, this dissertation makes a tentative attempt to conduct a cognitive stylistic study of black humor fictions as a particular type of discourse. To orient the study theoretically, the current research proposes a modified text world model of black humor fictions on the basis of a cognitive discourse theory, Text World Theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007), complemented by two relevant theories, possible worlds theory (Ryan 1991b) and reference theory (Emmott 1997). It argues that Absurdity in black humor fictions is generated in three aspects: text processing at macro level of narrative, character construct in plot advancement and the characters'world views projected in their corresponding text worlds. To validate this proposal, three representative black humor novels are selected as case studies: Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and John Barth's The Floating Opera (1967).The study aims to: (1) account for the cognitive mechanism of black humor fictions, providing a unique insight into the idiosyncrasy of black humor fictions, Absurdity, within the proposed text world model; (2) probe into the cognitive stylistic properties of black humor fictions via foregrounded linguistic features in the novels; (3) testify the applicability of the Text World Theory model through the case studies of unusual discourses.The significance of the study is as follows: (1) it provides a cognitive discourse model of absurd literature and a new perspective, a text world approach, to examining world view, which can be a useful toolkit for practitioners to explore the cognitive source of absurd literary discourses or the similar types; besides, the combination of cognitive stylistics and psychological analysis is also a significant attempt of cognitive stylistic model; (2) it is one of the pioneering and systematic stylistic studies of a literary school in the realm of cognitive stylistic analysis, offering an exploration of the cognitive mechanism of a particular type of discourse at a more abstract level rather than the description of the diversified linguistic expressions in formal presentation; (3) the identified cognitive stylistic properties of the novels will shed light on an all-round and in-depth appreciation of this trend of literary genre; (4) it applies the Text World Theory model to a wider scope of abnormal fictional discourses and testifies the applicability of the theory.The dissertation consists of seven chapters.Chapter One is a brief introduction to the dissertation. It gives an overview of black humor fictions, argues about the necessity of its cognitive stylistic study, outlines the objectives and the significance of the current research and sketches the theoretical basis, operational procedures and the methodologies of the study. Chapter Two is literature review of cognitive stylistics studies, the practice of text world model on literary discourses, the studies of world view and the stylistic studies of black humor fictions, finding that Text World Theory is a suitable model for black humor fictions, whose stylistic research is relatively scanty. Chapter Three offers the theoretical description and elaborates the analytical framework of the study.Chapters Four to Six are case studies within the set-up framework. Chapter Four surveys the cognitive properties of Absurdity in the novel Catch-22. Text processing in the narrative is impeded by two prominent discursive features: negation as a type of sub-world, and paradoxical state of affairs. It is observed that the two text world features construct an inverted fictional world in which everything is dislocated and upside-down. This cognitive feature of the fictional world is described as an inverted world in mirror reversal, which enables us to expound the superficially nonsensical and paradoxical meanings in the text-driven Common Ground. The survey of character construct in terms of the reference chaining of'naming'foregrounds the ontological insecurity of the inhabitants in the inverted and dehumanized fictional world in which the majority of the victimized individuals are deprived of their'sense of self'. Besides, the'changing self'developed by the protagonist Yossarian is another significant feature of character construct. In terms of the foregrounded text world feature, world conflicts in various types, the world views of three representative survivalists in the inverted world are investigated: the active survivor Orr who develops the'innocently stupid'world view to beat down the military system; the passive survivor Yossarian who holds an inverted mind to escape the oppression from the superior officers; the victim Clevinger who conforms to the system but is devoured by the callous world.Chapter Five explores Absurdity in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. In text processing, the reader's knowledge of time frame and sequential order of narrative is totally disrupted by the protagonist Billy Pilgrim's messy time travel between episodes of his life and his imagination. This makes the fictional world a dreamlike world in which the distinction between truth and illusion is obliterated. This cognitive stylistic feature of the narrative, as is observed, is fragmented worlds in a broken mirror in which Billy Pilgrim jumps around different text worlds so that both the narrative and Billy's identity are divided into pieces. As such, the character construct of Billy is discontinuous and fragmented in two perspectives: the multiple selves and the mind-body split self. The former co-exists with his real self as a means to escape the relentless situation and the latter makes him a passive observer of the environment and an outwardly normal individual. Observation in this respect leads to the study of the abnormal world view of a split self, which is investigated through three types of foregrounded text worlds: vision switches in narrative that examine Billy's perception of the depersonalized world and his mild persistence in his ontological existence; modal worlds that explore Billy's split sense of body and mind and his fear of loss of self; and world conflicts that reveal his indifference to life and his breakdown in communication.Chapter Six goes on to examine the stylistic cognitive features of Absurdity in the novel The Floating Opera. Text processing is likewise discontinuous but is impeded in a different way from the two former novels in third person narration which deconstruct the chronological narrative and possess their own internal rules to govern the fictional worlds. The difficulty of text processing in this novel owes much to the first-person narrator's dubious'authorial voice'which intersects different text worlds of the story in a non-sequential order with the text world of the act of narrating; besides, the narrator's dubious tone, constant modification and delay of the narration slow down the reading process as well. The exploration of the text processing foregrounds the most significant cognitive stylistic feature in the narrative, the abundant modal worlds, which establish an uncertain world in a double-image mirror, in which both the narrative and the identity of the narrator are divided into two layers. In terms of the narrative, it is both the mergence of the text world of the act of narration and the text world of narrating the story and the fusion of the text world of narrating the story and the retrospective story. In accordance with the reference maintenance, the narrator's sense of self is examined in three aspects: the double selves in two voices in narrative which conceal his incompetence; the false selves which disconnect his inner self from'reality'; and the mind-body self which petrifies the environment and preserves his real self as well. Going deeper into the characterization, the dissertation explores the narrator Todd's perception of the absurd fictional world in terms of three sub-types of epistemic modality: belief worlds with varying degree of confidence that demonstrate Todd's indefinite vision of the world around him; a special form of Free Direct Thought, rhetorical questions that illustrate his suspicion of the perplexing universe; and hypothetical modal worlds that account for his conditional view.Chapter Seven is the conclusion. It summarizes the current research of its findings, practical implications and limitations and predicts the future research.Some major findings are obtained through the case studies of the three black humor novels:Firstly, the proposed text world model is proved to be an applicable and efficient toolkit in the exploration of black humor fictions as a particular type of discourse, providing a good means to explain the cognitive commonness in readers'understanding of black humor fictions and shedding some light on the novels'particular cognitive stylistic features as well. More remarkably, the tentative extension of the Text World Theory to the examination of characterization proves to be effective in accounting for the world views of characters.Secondly, Absurdity as the key concept of black humor fictions is a cognitive phenomenon that can be observed via linguistic patterns and textual mechanics. It is observed that Absurdity in black humor fictions is generated in three major cognitive aspects: text processing of narrative, character construct and world view. The cognitive exploration of Absurdity can account for the acceptability of black humor fictions.Thirdly, the discourse worlds in black humor fictions on the whole are incoherent. The unstable and disoriented narratives undermined by the uncooperative narrators establish absurd fictional worlds which are summarized as absurd worlds in distorting mirrors.Fourthly, the character construct in black humor fictions is discontinuous in the plot advancement, which brings forth one of the major concerns of black humorists, the problem of ontological insecurity. Characters in black humor fictions demonstrate a variety of absurd world views to preserve their self-identities and survive disordered'reality'. Their absurd behaviors are largely ascribed to their absurd mental functioning as a result of the processing of linguistic choices and patterns in texts.