A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis Of William Faulkner's Barn Burning

As an emerging interdisciplinary research of field, cognitive stylistics has stimulated great interests among linguistic circles. It adopts empirical evidence and theories in cognitive science to analysis of literary discourse and offers a new perspective to literary reading. Enthusiastic about cognitive stylistics, many cognitive and text linguists are engaged in building up applicable and reasonable cognitive models to explore complex conceptual processes involved in the interpretation of literary language. Werth's Text World Theory, with its great explanatory power, is one of the prominently influential cognitive linguistic models. His model shows systematically both how textual information is collected from the discourse and how this is integrated with contextual information to create the representations of characters, and objects, and their relations, incorporating the active role of the reader and a dynamic approach to text processing as conceptual states of affairs. With this model, Werth aims to explain how the reader manages text through strings of sentences and to explore the complex ways the reader interacts with text, bringing along shared knowledge with the world and the language, in the course of interpretation of the text. In comparison with Possible World Theory and Mental Space Theory out of which it evolves, Text World Theory has demonstrated its wider applicability. This thesis takes William Faulkner's Barn Burning as a case study to explore the complex ways of how the conceptual worlds are established by the reader in text-processing and how these conceptual worlds contribute to revealing the conflicts between the characters and the conflicting minds of the protagonist. The analysis shows that there is an imbalance between the text worlds and the subworlds for the text worlds contain much fewer function-advancers, most of which describe static relationship between the entities rather than physical actions. Furthermore, frequent occurrences of epistemic modal subworlds, epistemic negation subworlds as well as attitudinal subworlds are foregrounded features of the story, which are thematically important. The epistemic subworlds create an epistemic distance from the character in the text world and the reader in the discourse world. Moreoverepistemic negation subworlds create contradictions between the status quo of the text worlds and the subworlds and within the subworlds through negative incrementaion and accommodation. The characters' attitudinal subworlds are in opposition to each other or to what is represented in the text world, hence revealing the conflicts among the characters. The contradictions among the subworlds and between the text worlds and the subworlds present the conflicts between the characters and the conflicting minds of the protagonist. This analysis provides a unique insight into the literary work from the perspective of discourse processing and understanding.