Text World Theory And Theme Interpretation Of Robert Frost's Poems From The Perspective Of Cognitive Poetics

As a famous nature poet of the United States in the twentieth century,Robert Frost is deeply loved and respected by people.His poems are mostly based on the background of the New England countryside scenery with a strong performance of rural atmosphere and pastoral style.Frost is good at using simple language to express profound philosophy of life.He believes that the highest value of poetry lies in its ulteriority of significance,which is just like what he has written in an article The Figure a Poem Makes(1939): “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Thus his poems become hot research objects of many scholars at home and abroad.Moreover researchers can always explore different and novel connotations in these simple lines of Frost's poems.The text world theory which belongs to one important part of cognitive poetics,is currently receiving an increasing amount of attention of scholars at home and abroad under the development of cognitive poetics.Based on the theoretical foundation of cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology,the interdisciplinary cognitive poetics combines and permeates literature and linguistics and also has established its own literary theory and theoretical criticism.In the meantime,cognitive poetics is devoted to making cognitive interpretations for literary texts on the cognitive linguistics research orientation.The book Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction(2002)written by Peter Stockwell is the symbolic work.This thesis mainly chooses the text world theory as theoretical support and regards the six classical poems as research objects,aiming to probe into the cognitive themes interpretation and themes realization of Frost's poems.Professor Paul Werth first proposed the text world theory and formed the basic theoretical framework of it.After that,the basic theoretical framework of the text world theory was further complemented and perfected under the study of professor Joanna Gavins.Based the research methodologies in cognitive linguistics,cognitive psychology and philosophy,it devotes to the cognitive research of discourse.Scholar Ma Juling(2010: 72)points out that the text world theory interprets the close connection between language and conceptualization,and also delves into the mental process of human communication in her article.Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse(1999)written by Paul Werth and Text World Theory: An Introduction(2007)of Joanna Gavins are the two authoritative books about the text world theory which become the basic theoretical framework of later studies on the text world theory.This paper makes an exploration of the theme realization in Frost's poems from the generation of the text world,the function advancing of the text world and the switch of the text world.First of all,the duality of the text world which emphasizes the combination of intrinsic attributes of the text world and the subjective initiative of the external readers determines the principle of “Heteronomousness” in the appreciation of Frost's poetic themes.What's more,the realization of the themes in Frost's poems mainly focuses on the function advancing from single layer one to multi-layer one.At last,in the process of world switching,the focalisation shift of the poem leads to the correct interpretation of poetic themes.In the poem analysis,there can be achieved an effective communication across space and time between the readers and the poet,both the exact interpretation of themes.