Abstract

Discourse: A deliberate and joint effort on the part of a producer and recipients to build up a 'world' within which the propositions advanced are coherent and make complete sense.

Text world: A deitic space, defined initially by the discourse itself, and specifically by the deitic and referential elements in it.

I will be looking into feminist and psychological perspective prevalent within the poetry of Sylvia Plath through textual and cognitive analysis into the sentential construct, semantics, lexis, form and mental representations. The discourse of her poetry would also be looked at from within the frame of the schema theory, especially with due emphasis on how schema refreshment or schema disruption are used to draw the readers into her poetic world, by challenging the preconceptions and assumptions of the reader and hence leading to the rethinking of perceptions. From this and the re-questioning of literary texts, I hope to bring about the re-thinking of literariness, in view of what have been advanced in literary theory and stylistics. The texts will be examined from the point of view of a critic (a stylistician in practice) and that of the non-professional reader, both of whom are deitically situated to the text-world (the poems examined). The paper will be concluded with the idea that literariness could be objectively and subjectively anchored.