A Cognitive Stylistic Study of William Wordsworth's Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known in Terms of Text World Theory

Abstract

Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known, is William Wordsworth's an inspiring piece within  Lucy poems sequence which readily engages the reader with a deep psychological conflict that is involved in a narrator whose intense love is suddenly transformed into an unreasonable feeling of fear of death.  Noteworthy, the language of the poem tacitly shows a sophisticated cognitive structure which traces a lover’s journey to his beloved’s cottage where the beauty of the moonlit landscape suddenly triggers a dim world of anxiety and fear. However, this past experience of the narrator is not driven by external events only, but, rather, by a powerful and spontaneous separation in his own consciousness. This strictly shows a kind of challenge of literary analysis that  leads the reader directly to draw a map of emotional and mental state of a speaker whose reality is immediately broken by ambiguously internal and subjective perception.

This paper addresses that challenge by applying Text World Theory (henceforth TWT) which is a comprehensive cognitive-stylistic model developed by Werth (1999) and later refined by Gavins (2007a , 2007b). TWT provides an inclusive framework that moves further than thematic understanding of the text to the very construction of textual meaning by assuming that readers create representations, or text worlds while reading the discourse. In the case of Wordsworth’s Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known, TWT’s analytical tools , specifically the distinction between the familiar Text World, i.e. the physical journey; and the embedded sub-world, i.e. the speculation of the narrator’s fear, show to be exhaustive for guiding the poem's suspense.