A Cognitive Analysis Of The Hours From The Perspective Of Text World Theory

The Hours is an experimental novel written by the American contemporary writer Michael Cunningham.Based on Virginia Woolf's Mrs.Dalloway,the novel links the lives of three heroines living in different times and different spaces.The story layout of this novel breaks readers' previous cognitive framework.The seemingly independent three stories are intertwined and form a complete novel,which brings a different reading experience to readers.Scholars have studied The Hours from various perspectives such as feminism,postmodernism,intertextual perspective and so on,but few studies analyze this complex structure.Text World Theory approaches texts from a cognitive perspective,and can provide a powerful theoretical framework for this aspect.Under this framework,this study will analyze The Hours from three levels namely,discourse world level,text world level and sub-world level as well as the cognition process of readers.Firstly,the author analyzes the novel from the discourse world level,and explains that the background information of the author and the reader is an important source for understanding the thematic meaning of the novel.Secondly,the author analyzes the text worlds of the prologue and the three heroines,and finds that the text worlds performances of the three heroines often conflict with the content of the sub-worlds,and the information of the sub-world is far more than the text world,indicating that the three heroines engage in constant struggle.The reader needs to construct their mental representation of the text world and explore the meaning of the theme from the memory and imagination of the heroines.Finally,the connections between the three text worlds are explained.Michael Cunningham's elaborate narrative arrangements allows the reader to capture the connections between the three heroines.The parallel text worlds converge in the last episode,which helps to complete the novel.Through the study of The Hours,it is found that the Text World Theory can explain the special narrative structure,and can interpret the meaning construction process of readers from the cognitive perspective.The thesis reveals the theme of the novel by analyzing the contradictions between the three heroines in different world levels and the interconnection of the text worlds and provides a new perspective for the study of such narrative novels.