Prospect Theory And Its Application In The "to The Lighthouse" Stylistic Analysis Of The Application

The foregrounding theory is one of the important literary theories in the west. In this study, with a view to enhancing its interpretative power in literary stylistic analysis, a paradigm based on author, text, and reader will be proposed, and a specific application will be attempted in order to test its validity.The foregrounding theory, in its historical development, has been contributed by schools of different orientations, research methodologies, and even spheres of study, which in turn produced remarks and ideas of some disparity. By critically reviewing representative figures of the different schools, this paper first of all intends to present a holistic and historic development of the theory and hopefully show their relations of scholarly inheritance, which can facilitate our understanding of its general theoretical trend of development.The theoretical build-up subsequently leads us to ponder over the production of literary aesthetic effects of foregrounding. So far as this paper is concerned, the aesthetic effects of foregrounding come mainly as a result of collective influence from three parties, namely author, text, and reader. The author and other factors relevant to the writing process hold sway over contents and direction of the foregrounding; the text as the medium for the author's aesthetic experience, is the matrix with abundant use of foregrounding features; the reader as an active participant, exercises the perceptual, cognitive and affective power to relive the author's aesthetic experience in the appreciation of literary works, though in this process mismatch is bound to occur between the author and the reader. Therefore, the analysis of foregrounded features, in our view, involves the following three steps—authorial determination, textual realization, and reader's interpretation.Based on the above analysis, it will be further pointed out that the core of literary stylistic analysis lies in the appreciation of aesthetic effects produced by foregrounding features. Moreover, the analysis can likewise be carried out in accordance with the aforementioned three steps. Such a paradigm for literary stylistic analysis helps to make up for the deficiencies in both pure intuitive literary appreciation and rigid linguistic analysis. More importantly, the...