Paralysed Dubliners

This dissertation presents a text world approach to the analysis of James Joyce's short story collection Dubliners. It aims to describe the cognitive mechanism of the short stories in Dubliners, and account for the complex ways of readers'text processing and construction of the cognitive worlds. The study employs the methods of cognitive stylistics to carry out a practical operation to the analysis of the fictional world. For cognitive stylistics is concerned with the cognitive structure and cognitive processing course of language analysis and linguistic form's choice, it then plays an important role in the description of text-processing at cognitive level. For literary work, its linguistic forms and stylistic features can not be fully explained without interpreting the construction of its text's meaning at the cognitive level, since the identification and comprehension of the text needs the involvement of readers'various cognitive strategies.Although Dubliners does not adopt the stream-of-consciousness techniques in describing the character's erratic thoughts and surging emotion, some of James Joyce's writing skills have shown his feature of the stream-of-consciousness in depicting the protagonist's spiritual world. This collection is an organic whole with Dublin, the capital of Ireland, as its writing background, with stories linked together through the theme, style and techniques to portray the paralyzed state of the whole Dubliners from four aspects: the childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The theme of paralysis in Dubliners is manifested by characters'recurrent inner thoughts, which transfer the reality to characters'intricate inner worlds.Based on these observations, this dissertation made a tentative attempt to conduct a cognitive stylistic study of three representative stories in Dubliners from the text world perspective. As one of the most influential cognitive models in cognitive stylistics, Text World Theory explores the cognitive mechanism of the discourse and readers'mental representations of the fictional worlds from their cognitive processes in the course of interpretation of the text. The text worlds analysis of fictional discourse can not only explore the construction mechanism of story's thematic meaning but also provide a more insightful interpretation of how the profound thematic meaning is conceptualized in the reader's mind.The practical analysis shows that frequent occurrences of modal verbs, nagative words, the words of remindful and imaginational nature and tense shifts create multiple layers of text worlds, the modal subworlds and world switches, through which the protagonists'ambivalent and complex inner worlds can be revealed clearly. Readers negotiate with the text by virtue of their existent language and background knowledge to achieve the purpose of understanding discourses.The little boy in The Sisters jumps around different text worlds and struggles along the contradictary conflicts between the paralyzed social reality under religious rules and his inner world of longing for freedom. The conflicts in the character's inner world suggest that the paralyzed social state brings about the nationals'spiritual paralysis and numbness, including such a little boy.Eveline is a story describing a young lady Eveline's aspiration of pursuing her new life. After she determines to get rid of the lifeless and hopeless living style, Eveline wanders in the memories of her old life and imaginations of her bright future life, and ultimately gives up her dicision of pursuing her new life for lack of courage. Readers need to resort to the protagonist's memory and imagination and the"author's voice"to construct Eveline's passive and spiritual paralyzed text worlds in their reading processes.The closing story The Dead is a generalization of the whole collection Dubliners. In the three main world switches, the protagonist Gabriel, after suffering his defeats for three times, recognizes himself and the paralyzed social reality, which also evokes his thinking about the relationship of the living and the dead, about his past and future and even about the whole Ireland's future. The author James Joyce intends to arouse the Irish nationals'spiritual awakening through Gabriel's disenchantment.Through the case study of the three representative stories in Dubliners, we find that the proposed text world model is an applicable and effective toolkit for the examination of the stories in Dubliners, providing a cognitive explanation of readers'conceptual similarity in their reading of the story. The current research dissected the profound influence of the paralyzing social reality through the characters'frequent transformation between two different worlds of the external worlds and their inner worlds to reveal the theme of Dubliners. Such a tentative research will, we hope, provide a new perspective to the study of James Joyce's writings and his later stream-of-conciousness novel. At the same time we find that the text world theory provides a practical model for the investigation of characters'conceptual mechanism, which will attract more attention to the cognitive stylistic analysis of the literary works with the features of stream-of-consciousness from the text world perspective.