Schema Disruption and Text-World Shifts in Ocean Vuong’s ‘Aubade with Burning City’: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis

Abstract

Ocean Vuong's Aubade with Burning City has been widely recognized for its fragmented imagery and exploration of love, war, and trauma. However, existing literary studies have largely emphasized its imagery and thematic concerns while giving limited attention to how its stylistic features shape meaning through schema disruption and text-world construction. This study employs cognitive stylistic analysis, drawing on Schema Theory and Text World Theory, to examine how the poem's imagery, syntax, lexical choices, and shifts in point of view contribute to meaning construction. Using qualitative textual analysis, the study identifies linguistic patterns that theoretically prompt readers to activate familiar schemas of intimacy, celebration, safety, rescue, and religious faith. These schemas are subsequently disrupted by contrasting images of violence, fragmentation, and war, requiring continual reinterpretation. The analysis further demonstrates how shifts between intimate domestic scenes and conflict-ridden environments construct multiple text-worlds that foreground the tension among love, war, and trauma. These findings provide a theoretically grounded explanation of how the poem's stylistic features may guide readers' cognitive processing and interpretation, rather than representing empirically observed reader responses. The study contributes to cognitive stylistic scholarship by illustrating the interaction between linguistic form and cognitive meaning construction in contemporary poetry. It also offers pedagogical value for literature instruction by demonstrating how cognitive stylistic analysis can support students' interpretive skills and provides a foundation for future empirical research examining readers' cognitive responses to literary texts.