1 ‘I’ll imitate Helen’! Troubling text-worlds and schemas in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae Antonis Tsakmakis This paper deals with one of the earliest passages in western literature which problematizes the consciousness of the multifaceted relationship between reality and fictionality the parody of Euripides’ Helen in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae (846-928). In this parody two remarkable features produce comic effects: the abusive treatment of the Euripidean original (a standard practice in literary parody), but also the failure of the internal audience to acknowledge it. Critylla, the woman who is on stage during the performance, cannot apprehend the world of the performed tragedy in its own right and distinguish it from her own comic world. In consequence, the performance gives rise to a series of misunderstandings which not only expose several conventions pertaining to fiction and role playing, but also call for a study of the cognitive responses to phenomena such as drama, literature and genre. Scholarship on Thesmophoriazusae has especially focused on questions of gender and identity, as well as on the blurring of genre boundaries, themes that are of salient importance in the comedy. 1 From the perspective of cognitive poetics, these aspects can be fruitfully discussed as examples of conceptual blending on the grounds of the theory of mental spaces. 2 In this paper the discussion of particular aspects of the Helen-scene will be primarily based in Text World Theory, which is compatible with blending theory and provides a tool for a more detailed analysis of textual elements that are employed in the scene and their effects on the construction of different conceptual frames. 3 Worlds in the mind: Text World Theory Text World Theory was introduced by Werth (1994) and (1999) and further developed by Gavins (2007). It seeks to understand ‘the precise structure and cognitive effects of individual mental representations’ 4 that are triggered by discourse. Text World Theory hypothesizes the existence of mental representations of ‘worlds’ as they become manifest in discourse. Text -worlds are communication events, and as such they include the participants of the communication and their discourse; besides, the context which is suggested as relevant for the discourse to become fully intelligible is also part of a text-world. In the words of Peter Stockwell, ‘[a] world is a language event involving at least two participants, and is the rich and densely textured real-life representation of the combination of text and context’. 5 A text-world is constructed in analogy to the real world, as the real world informs our experience of life and communication, but each text-world remains a language event, i.e. it is by no means bound to a particular reality external to the mind. It is only discourse that stimulates the building of text-worlds in the mind. Text World Theory distinguishes between the discourse-world, at the primary level of communication (a world ‘prototypically involving face-to-face discourse