The reader as detective : a Text World Theory analysis of the classical whodunit

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to identify cognitive reasons which explain why readers typically do not reach the correct solution when reading detective novels. It assumes the presence of both true and false clues in these texts, as well as multiple suspects, and analyses whether these are presented in a way that allows the reader a fair chance of guessing correctly. These questions will be explored in two novels from different time periods: Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds (1935) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). They will be analysed and compared primarily through Paul Werth’s cognitive linguistic Text World Theory framework and Joanna Gavins’s elaboration of it, although reference to other cognitive theories will be made. The opening chapter will explain in more detail the purpose of this dissertation and the methodology I will be adopting. Chapter 2 will contextualise the study, first by describing the typical features of the whodunit genre until Christie’s time, and then by contextualising Text World Theory in relation to other cognitive theories and explaining what it is. Chapters 3 and 4 will apply the ideas presented in Chapter 2 to Christie’s and Conan Doyle’s novels respectively. Each chapter will seek to establish the reasons why readers fail to infer the correct solution in that particular novel. Chapter 5 will then compare and contrast these two analyses, outlining the differences in the two novels and explaining why Text World Theory is appropriate to explain the reader’s processing of both texts. The final chapter will attempt to answer the question posed in Chapter 1 by showing how both texts permit a plausible alternative solution which the reader cannot eliminate on the basis of textual elements. It will also relate this finding to the attractiveness of the genre and suggest possible topics for further study.