Enhancing disability awareness and empathy through children’s literature about characters with disabilities: a cognitive stylistic analysis of Rodman Philbrick’s Freak The Mighty

Abstract

The present study depicts how cognitive stylistic analyses help readers to interpret the children’s literature and infer the underlying meaning of metaphorical points in the text. Cognitive stylistic approach enables readers to create different meanings and various interpretations of a literary text. This paper applies Werth’s Text World Theory, as a sub-discipline of cognitive stylistics, to analyse Rodman Philbrick’s Freak the Mighty to connect the text world to the reader’s worlds. This enables them to interpret the text, develop awareness and empathy towards the character’s thoughts and attitudes. The researchers have the following aims: (1) to examine the building blocks of the novel in accordance with the Text World Theory, and (2) to evaluate the readers’ responses and examine how reading children’s literature with disabled characters can enhance their disability awareness and empathy. The second part of study is allocated to the evaluation of readers’ responses to the novel. It is believed that these connections will enhance disability awareness and empathy of readers. The study uses content analysis method to analyse both the text and readers’ responses.