| The present paper employs the text world theory to describe the cognitive mechanismof the death-themed poems of Emily Dickinson from the perspective of cognitive poetics.Compared with the conventional poetry analysis, cognitive poetics is concerned more withthe cognitive structure and cognitive processing course of language analysis and linguisticform’s choices and focuses on the readers’ mental representation. Therefore, theapplication of the theories related to cognitive poetics makes the poetry analysis deeper.During her lifetime, Dickinson has composed more than600death-themed poems,which accounts for nearly one third of the total number of her poems. The death-themedpoems mainly focus on the observation of death, the relationship between death andimmortality and the relationship between death and God. The present paper selects threerepresentative poems from these three aspects respectively and aims to exploreDickinson’s special feeling towards death and the reader’s mental representations in thereading process.According to text world theory, the “worlds” in the discourse can be divided intothree layers, including “the discourse world”,“the text world” and “the sub-world”, basedon which the present study follows the following two steps. The first step starts from thediscourse world to explore what elements affects Dickinson’s special attitude towardsdeath. Since the text world and the sub-world are closely related, the second step analyzethese two layers of worlds together to find out Dickinson’s attitude towards death, herattitude towards the relationship between death and immortality and the relationshipbetween death and God. Besides, since there are a large number of metaphors inDickinson’s poems, the present paper embeds the metaphor into the framework of textworld theory, which not only benefits the interpretation but also enriches the text worldtheory.Though qualitative analysis of the selected poems, based on the reader’s backgroundknowledge and the text, it can be proved that the text world theory is efficient in exploringthe discourse construction mechanism and Dickinson’s unique attitude towards death. Thepresent paper offers the readers a practical way to interpret poems and a new point to study Dickinson’s poems as well as other poems. |
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