| The 68th Oscar nominated movie 12 Monkeys is under the direction of the well-known British director Terry Gilliam. Inspired by the short French movie La jetee, the plot of 12 Monkeys is unfolded centering the time perception, memory and madness of the protagonist James to express the theme of fatalism. Though 12 Monkeys has undergone heated discussions and praisings since its release, there are rare researches to probe into the Cassandra Complex in this movie, without which a profound understanding of 12 Monkeys is hard to achieve.Within the framework of Text World Theory, the present thesis aims to account for how mental representations are constructed in the text processing and to explore how the Cassandra Complex related worlds are generated at the cognitive level. Since Text World Theory divides the world into levels of the discourse world, the text world and the sub-worlds level, the analysis starts from the layer of the discourse world to analyze the myth complex of the director and the inspiration La jetee. It is revealed that related background knowledge guides audiences to recognize the Cassandra Complex in the movie. At the text world level, the Cassandra Complex is fully represented by the confusion and the desperation brought by similar world builders and world-repairs. At the sub-world level, ring-like world-switches are created by time travels and the changing modal-worlds are generated by the employment of direct speeches, which illustrate how the protagonist is addicted to the Cassandra Complex step by step.The current study makes a tentative attempt to conduct a Text World Theory analysis of the Cassandra Complex in 12 Monkeys from the cognitive poetics perspective. It is hoped that the study could provide a new approach and a valuable strategy for movie interpretation. Meanwhile, it is devoted to testifying the feasibility and extending the scope of application of Text World Theory in analysis of such literary works. |
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