Calm Clashes:A Cognitive Poetic Analysis Of Ishiguoro’s A Family Supper

When Cognitive Poetics first emerged in1990s, it has become a new paradigm of literary research at the interface between linguistics, literature and cognitive science. Cognitive Poetics focuses on the interaction between readerly experience and literary discourses, which is typical of a hermeneutic theory with cognitive dimension. Based on an interpretative mode of "linguistic cuesâ†'sociopsychological realityâ†'cultural theme", this thesis makes an attempt to conduct a cognitive poetic analysis on Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Family Supper in two dimensions:cognitive linguistics and social psychology.Ishiguro’s A Family Supper is characteristic of the thickness of mysticism and suspense, which misdirects critics who take it as an allusion to "the last supper". The story is narrated in first-person in such a calm and reserved way that the text has much uncertainty and openness, requiring a reader-text interaction in thematic construction. To realize this, the thesis first analyzes the textual structure and language by using the Text World Theory, which uncovers, under the courteous and modest dialogues, a layer of sub-worlds which is fraught with mutual conflicts. The conflicting modal-worlds between characters push the plot forward and reveals father’s tragic destiny as well. Then the thesis applies Attribution Theory to decoding father’s personality by centering on his attributions to the family incidents, which exposes his dual personality. The exposition dismantles the argument of "an allusion to’the last supper’" as father’s vulnerability avoids his suicide with the whole family.After solving the suspense, the thesis finally argues that the conflicts between text worlds intensify, on one hand, readers’ emotional response to the story which produces an empathetic effect of "mono no awareness", a Japanese traditional aesthetics and embodies the writer’s discursive awareness of feminism; on the other hand, they show the clashes between the two sub-cultures of Japanese culture—Sakura, standing for peace, understanding, and respect for life; and Katana, symbolizing mightiness, authoritarianism and indifference from life—which is in fact a philosophical reflection on the choice between life and dignity. The analysis attests, in practice, the interpretative power of Cognitive Poetics, dismissing the popular argument that Cognitive Poetics has no interpretative power since it focuses only on "process" not "result".