A Cognitive Poetics Approach To The Coherent Mechanism Of The Zoo Story

Albee’s(1928-) one-act absurd play, The Zoo Story(1958) indicates the alienation in human world with the characteristics of absurd characters, absurd structures, and strange references to certain things. The absurdity disturbs the reader’s coherent cognitive construction of the play. Most of the studies conducted by the predecessors are literary explanations concerning its theme, symbols and the philosophical basis. A few are the stylistic analysis. Nonetheless, so far there have been no researches on The Zoo Story from the perspective of Cognitive Poetics. Cognitive Poetics regards literature as a process instead of a finished product, providing a useful toolkit to comprehend the meaning and value of literary works with a clear view of text and context of the literary works. With Cognitive Poetics, The Zoo Story will be studied from a new point of view with the consideration of the reader’s dynamic mental process instead of being restricted into a static model of literary explanations on certain elements about the play. On the basis of two theories of Cognitive Poetics, Text World Theory as the basic theoretical framework, and Blending Theory as the complemented one, the thesis aims to study the coherent cognitive mechanism of the play that is aroused from the assumption that the text of The Zoo Story is seemingly incoherent but coherent with the implicit coherent cognitive mechanism.The study includes three parts. The first part is the exploration of the incoherence in narrative structure of the play. By analyzing the extracts within the framework of Text World Theory, two narrative characteristics are examined. One is the incoherent conversation between characters and the other is the two-level narrative model, the level on staged world constructed through the stage directions and the level on fictional world constructed through the conversation between characters. Both the incoherent conversation between characters and the two-level narrative mode interrupt the reader’s coherent representation of the play. In order to figure out the implicit coherent mechanism, the study gets into the second part. By analyzing the characters’ worlds within the framework of Text World Theory, the significance of characters’worlds for advancing the play is suggested. It also suggests that the metaphorical reference of "the zoo" plays the key role in constructing characters’worlds. As a key reference to construct characters’worlds, the metaphorical reference of "the zoo" is explored in the third part within the framework of Blending Theory. In this way, The Zoo Story’s theme of disclosing the alienation in human world and calling for love and mutual understanding between people is unscrambled.From the study it is found that the incoherent conversation between characters and the two-level narrative model are virtually connected cognitively by Jerry’s fancy world and Peter’s pretended world. In addition, the metaphorical reference of "the zoo" advances the reader’s coherent cognitive construction of the plot and contributes to the reader’s construction of the theme in the play.The study not only makes up the vacancy of the research on The Zoo Story from cognitive perspective, but also sheds new light on the study of other absurd plays.