Mind Styles In The Sound And The Fury: A Cognitive Stylistic Approach

This thesis aims to demonstrate how a cognitive stylistic approach can be ideally suited to account for the linguistic construction of mind style in a narrative fiction. In stylistics, the concept “mind style” was coined by Roger Fowler to interpret how linguistic formats in a passage can reflect a typical world view, a characteristic way of perceiving and making sense of the textual world. In Linguistic Criticism, “mind style” is depicted clearly by Fowler as substituent to “world-view” and “point of view on the ideological plane”. Though following Fowler’s definition of “mind style”, Leech & Short still hold slightly different views. They do not deny that a “mind style” contains not only social and cultural respects but also individual cognitive habit, but they lay more focus on the latter one, especially the world-views of those characters with a naive or innocent mind as well as those who suffer limitations in their experience or cognition. According to Semino, however, “mind style” only refers to the first part of Fowler’s definition, while his idea of world-view is nothing different with that of Fowler’s.For this purpose, the present study has focused on the analysis of The Sound and the Fury, one of William Faulkner’s most representative works due to its use of stream-of-consciousness technique. This study has focused on mind styles of the four main characters and their polyphonic features. The novel is about the past glory and declining of the Compsons, which not only reflects the social and cultural conflicts in the American Southern society, but also depicts the people’s unrest in that great historical moments. This stream-of-consciousness novel reveals Faulkner’s outstanding writing skills and creativity, and thus enables him to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949.Contrary to traditional narrations, a stream-of-consciousness novel lays focus on the direct exploration of a person’s consciousness in the novel, with no intervention of an omniscient narrator. By comparison, the mind style refers to the linguistic expressions of an “individual mental self” in the novel. The expressions of such “individual mental self” are usually dominant in stream-of-consciousness novels, such as the works of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, etc. The mind style reveals the fact that the conceptualizations of the same world can be various from one to another, and are more or less determined by the language we use.Numerous studies have been conducted on the novel from various perspectives. Readers are amazed by the special narrative techniques of the novel, yet few have done studies through a combination of the theories of conceptual metaphor, schema and polyphony. The present thesis, based on the conceptual metaphor theory, schema theory and polyphony theory, attempts to make a tentative research on the artistic value of The Sound and the Fury, in the hope that it can add some color to the study of mind style, and be beneficial for readers to have a better understanding of the theme and characters of the novel. The author also hopes that this thesis can shed some light to the study of cognitive stylistics on literary works.