Analysis of Three Contemporary Persian Stories in Stream Consciousness Style Based on the Cognitive Theory Named Text Worlds Theory

Abstract

The text world theory is one of the theoretical frameworks in cognitive poetics studies which provides the context for the study of literary discourse through the analysis of conceptual structures. This theory was first presented by Paul Werth in 1999 and was mainly developed through the works of Gavins and Stockwell. The main problem of the current research is to explain some structures of this theory, i.e. world-building elements and propositions in the fluid style of the mind in three Persian stories, according to text world theory.by analyzing and comparing three stories in the mentioned format. This research tries to show how the structures of this theory work in creating space and moving between the spaces of the narrative text. For this purpose, the world-building elements including time, place, character and objects used in it, as well as functional advancing propositions and sub-worlds were analyzed. The findings of this research indicate that amount of functional advancing proposition of action-event which are actually more extensive are more noticeable. The sub worlds in the stories in the style of stream of consciousness are more of the type diectic than the attitudinal and epistemic sub worlds.

Keywords

• text world theory
• sub-worlds
• functional advancing proposition
• world-building elements
• stream of consciousness