A Cognitive Interpretation Of To The Lighthouse From The Perspective Of Text World Theory

Virginia Woolf is one of the most famous British novelists in the 20thcentury. Herautobiographical novel To the Lighthouse, implying a profound humanistic ideas and literaryvalue, successfully interpreted the Ramsay family life involving love, marriage, life, death,women’s right, etc. Since its publication, the novel is under heated discussion from theperspective of psychoanalysis, feminism, new criticism. The novel successfully combinescharacterization with psychological description, creating a series of vivid characters through theinner world. But so far no analysis has done from the dual perspective of cognitive poetics andcognitive psychology to analyze the inner world of characters in the novel, to expose readers’online interpretation of the novel and to discuss how readers exchange ideas with the author.The paper selects a practical theory of cognitive discourse analysis from Cognitive Poetics–Text World Theory as its main framework. It exposes how readers construct Mrs. Ramsay’simage in the reading process at the cognitive level and analyzes the narrative structure at the textlevel, complemented by a cognitive psychology analysis of characters’` inner activities. TextWorld Theory divides the“world”into three levels: the“discourse world”level, the“text world”level and the“sub-worlds”level. Based on this division, the paper starts from the discourseworld to see how Woolf’s personal knowledge-frame affects her in creating Mrs. Ramsay’simage, then enters the text worlds and sub-worlds to explore how readers construct Mrs.Ramsay’s image from textual information concerning with her. Through the analysis, we findthat Woolf’s way of combining her own life experiences with literature works makes thedistances between her and her readers much closer. Besides, by analyzing text worlds from theperspective of thought, speech and narration, we can not only see how readers construct theexterior world and interior world of literary characters, but also explain how abundantpsychological description in various forms affects readers’interpretation of these characters.The present study aims at applying the Text World Theory framework to analyze Mrs.Ramsay’s image from the cognitive poetics perspective. By exploring literary character from theperspective of cognitive linguistic, cognitive psychology, corpus stylistic and discourse analysis,it is hoped that this study will provide a theoretical framework and analytical method for theanalysis of stream-of-consciousness novel and the interpretation of fictional characters.