甘肃省玉门市陇中苜蓿良种繁育基地.doc

linguistic code For example are there any neologisms such as portentous infants Are there any semantic syntactic phonological or graphological deviations Such deviations are often the clue to special interpretations associated with traditional figures of speech such as metaphor metonymy synecdoche paradox and irony If such tropes occur what kind of special interpretation is involved for example metaphor can be classified as personifying animalizing concretizing synaesthetic etc Context and cohesion Here we take a look at features which are generally fully dealt with in discourse analysis Under cohesion ways in which one part of a text is linked to another are considered for instance the ways sentences are connected This is the internal organization of a text Under context roughly the material mental personal interactional social institutional cultural and historical situation in which the discourse is made we consider the external relations of the literary text or a part of the text seeing it as a discourse presupposing a social relation between its participants author and reader character and character character and reader etc and a sharing of knowledge and assumptions by participants Cohesion Does the text contain logical or other links between sentences eg coordinating conjunctions linking adverbials or does it tend to reply on implicit connections of meaning What sort of use is made of cross reference by pronouns she it they etc by substitute forms do so etc or ellipsis Is there any use made of elegant variation the avoidance of repetition by substitution of a descriptive phrase as the old lawyer substitutes for the repetition of an earlier Mr Jones Are meaning connections reinforced by repetition of words and phrases or by repeatedly using words from the same semantic field Context Does the writer address the reader directly or through the words or thoughts of some fictional character What linguistic clues eg first person pronouns I me my mine are there of the addresser addressee relationship What attitude does the author imply towards his her subject If a character s words or thoughts are represented is this done by direct quotation or by some other method eg indirect speech free indirect speech Are there significant changes of style with respect to different persons narrator or character who is supposedly speaking or thinking the words on the page What is the point of view of the story Are the frequent shifts of point view If so in whose voice is the narrator speaking Chapter Seven Symbol What is symbol Symbol in the simplest sense anything that stands for or represents something else beyond it usually an idea conventionally associated with it Objects like flags and crosses can function symbolically and words are also symbols P 218 Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms A symbol is a thing that suggests more than its literal meaning It exists widely even in our daily life Our language itself is symbol The daily greetings indicate that the passage of communication is open Ring is a symbol of eternity The sign of cross indicates atonement The Big Ben symbolizes London the Great Wall China Ritualistic acts are symbolic In church wedding the bride is handed over from the father to the groom Holy eating is symbolic of communion baptizing cleansing and rebirth The raising and lowering of a national flag certainly suggest meanings larger than the acts themselves And finally toasting and shaking hands on formal or informal occasions As rhetorical device symbol is different from metaphor which is literally false but figuratively true Unlike allegory which represents abstract terms like love or truth symbols are perceptible objects In literature almost anything particular objects characters setting and actions can be symbolic if the author wishes to make it so by either hinting or insisting that the material means more than it literally does Symbols are suggested through special treatment such as imagery repetition connotative language or other artistic devices In F Scott Fitzgerald s novel The Great Gatsby a huge pair of bespectacled eyes stares across a wildness of ash heaps from a billboard advertising the services of an oculist Repeatedly appearing in the story the bespectacled eyes come to mean more than simply the availability of eye examination A character in the story compares it to the eyes of God he hints that some sad compassionate spirit is brooding as it watches the passing procession of humanity Such an object is a symbol in literature a symbol is a thing that refers or suggests more than its literal meaning There are quite a lot of symbols that appear in ordinary life for the use of symbol is by no means of limited to literature and art For instance a dove is a symbol of peace the flag is the symbol of a country and the cross is the symbol of the Christian religion These are symbols adopted by a whole society and are recognized by all members of such a society There are other kinds of symbols such as figure 3 which may be abstract symbols But symbols in literature works are different from either of the other types Generally speaking a literary symbol does not have a common social acceptance as does the flag it is rather a symbol the poet or the writer adopts for the purpose of his her work and it is to be understood only in the context of that work It differs from the kind of symbol illustrated by the figure 3 because it is concrete and specific A poet or a writer uses symbols for the same reason he she uses similes metaphors and images etc they help to express his her meaning in a way that will appeal to the senses and to the emotions of the reader Most symbols in literature and everyday life as well possess a tremendous condensing power Their focusing on the relationships between the visible audible and what they suggest can kindle it into a single impact Of course in literary works symbols unlike those in ordinary life usually do not stand for any one meaning nor for anything absolutely definite they point they hint or as Henry James put it they cast long shadows Symbolism The term symbolism refers to the use of symbols or to a set of related symbols which is one of the devices that enrich short fiction and compensate for its briefness in space 2 There are two broad types of literary symbols Symbol is generally acknowledged to be one of the most frequently employed devices in poetry In works of fiction it is no less frequent and no less important The fact is that when a reader reads a work of fiction his focus is mostly cast upon the plot the character and the language used so that the symbols are automatically backgrounded on the reader s part But in some novels and stories the symbolism looms so large that the reader will fail to get a comprehensive understanding of the work without paying special attention to the symbols The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of such works The very title points to a double symbol the scarlet letter A worn by Hester conveys a multiple of senses which differ greatly from what it literally stands for and the work eventually develops into a test and critique of symbols themselves Thomas Pynchon s V continues along much the same line testing an alphabetical symbol Another example is Herman Melville s Moby Dick in which the huge white whale in the title of the book acquires greater meaning than the literal dictionary definition of an aquatic mammal It also suggests more than the devil to whom some of the characters liken it The huge whale as the story unfolds comes to imply an amplitude of meanings among them the forces of nature and the whole universe Literary symbols are of two broad types one type includes those embodying universal suggestions of meaning Flowing water suggests time and eternity a journey into the underworld and return from it is interpreted as a spiritual experience or a dark night of the soul and a kind of redemptive odyssey Such symbols are used widely and sometimes unconsciously in western literature The other type of symbol secures its suggestiveness not from qualities inherent in itself but from the way in which it is used in a given work in a special context Thus in Moby Dick the voyage the land and the ocean are objects pregnant with meanings that seem almost independent of the author s use of them in the story on the other hand the white whale is invested with different meanings for different crew members through the handling of materials in the novel Similarly in Hemingway s A Farewell to Arms rain which is generally regarded as a symbol of life especially in spring and which is a mildly annoying meteorological phenomenon in the opening chapter is converted into a symbol of death through the uses to which it is put in the work 3 Symbols in fiction are inanimate objects Often symbols we meet in fiction are inanimate objects In William Faulker s A Rose for Emily Miss Emily s invisible but perceptible watch ticking at the end of a golden chain not only indicates the passage of time but suggests that time passes without even being noticed by the watch s owner The golden chain to which it is attached carries suggestions of wealth and authority Other things may also function symbolically In James Joyce s Araby the very name of the bazzar Araby the poetic name for Arabia suggests magic romance and The Arabian Nights its syllables the narrator tells us cast an Eastern enchantment over me Even a locale or a feature of physical topography can provide rich symbolic suggestions The caf in Ernest Hemingway s A Clean Well Lighted Place is not merely a caf but an island of refuge from sleepless night chaos loneliness old age the meaninglessness of life and impending death In some novels and stories some characters are symbolic Such characters usually appear briefly and remain slightly mysterious In Joseph Cornard s Heart of Darkness a steamship company that hires men to work in Congo maintains in its waiting room two women who knit black wool they symbolize the classical Fates Such a character is seen as a portrait rather than as a person at least portrait like Faulkner s Miss Emily twice appears at a window of her houses like the carven torso of an idol in the niche Though Faulkner invests her with life and vigor he also clothes her in symbolic hints she seems almost to personify the vanishing aristocracy of the South still maintaining a black servant and being ruthless betrayed by a moneymaking Yankee Sometimes a part of a character s body or an attribute may convey symbolic meaning for example a baleful eye in Edgar Allan Poe s The Tell Tale Heart 4 Symbol used in works of fiction is the symbolic act Another kind of symbol commonly employed in works of fiction is the symbolic act an act or a gesture with larger significance than its literal meaning Captain Ahab in Melville s Moby Dick deliberately snaps his tobacco pipe and throws it away before setting out in pursuit of the huge whale a gesture suggesting that he is determined to take his revenge and will let nothing to distract him from it Another typical symbolic act is the burning of the barn by the boy s father in Faulkner s Barn Burning it is an act of no mere destroying a barn but an expression of his profound spite and hatred towards that class of people who have driven his family out of his land His hatred extends to anything he does not possess himself and beyond that burning a barn reflects the father s memories of the waste and extravagance of war and the element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring in his being 5 A symbol is a trope In a broad literary sense a symbol is a trope that combines a literal and sensuous quality with an necessary or suggestive aspect However in literary criticism it is necessary to distinguish symbol from image metaphor and especially allegory An image An image is a literal and concrete representation of a sensory experience or of an object that can be known by one or more of the senses It is the means by which experience in its richness and emotional complexity is communicated Holman and Harmon A Handbook to Literature 1986 Images may be literal or figurative a literal image being one that involves no necessary change or extension in the obvious meaning of the words Prose works are usually full of this kind of image For example novels and stories by Conard and Hemingway are noted for the evocative power of their literal images A figurative image is one that involves a turn on the literary meaning of the words For example in the lines It is a beauteous evening calm and free The holy time is quiet as a nun the second line is highly figurative while the first line evokes a literal image We consider an image whether literal or figurative to have a concrete referent in the objective world and to function as image when it powerfully evokes that referent whereas a symbol functions like an image but differs from it in going beyond the evocation of the objective referent by making that referent suggest to the reader a meaning beyond itself In other words a sysmbol is an image that evokes an objective concrete reality but then that reality suggests another level of meaning directly it evokes an object that suggests the meaning with the emphasis being laid on the latter part As Coleridge said It partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible Metaphor A metaphor is an implied analogy imaginatively identifying one object with another and ascribing to the first object one or more of the qualities of the second or investing the first with emotional or imaginative qualities associated with the second It is not an uncommon literacy device in fiction though it is more commonly used in poetry while simile is more commonly used in prose A metaphor emphasizes rich suggestiveness in the differences between the things compared and the recognition of surprising but unsuspected similarities Cleanth Brooks uses the term functional metaphor to describe the way in which the metaphor is able to have referential and emotive characteristics and to go beyond those characteristics to become a direct means in itself of representing a truth incommunicable by other means When a metaphor performs this function it is behaving as a symbol But a symbol differs from a metaphor in that a metaphor evokes an object in order to illustrate an idea or demonstrate a quality whereas a symbol embodies the idea or the quality Allegory An allegory is a story in which persons places actions and things are equated with meanings that lie outside of the story itself Thus it represents one thing in the guise of another an abstraction in the form of a concrete image A clear example is the old Arab fable of the frog and scorpion who me one day on the bank of the Nile which they both wanted to cross The frog offered to ferry the scorpion over on his back provided the scorpion promised not to sting him The scorpion agreed so long as the frog would promise not to drown him The mutual promise exchanged they crossed the river On the far bank the scorpion stung the frog mortally Why did you do that croaked the frog as he lay dying Why replied the scorpion We re both Arabs aren t we If we substitute for the frog a Mr Goodwill and for the scorpion Mr Treachery or Mr Two face and we make the river any river and for We re both Arabs we substitute We re both men we can make the fable into an allegory In a simple allegory characters and other ingredients often stand for other definite meanings which are often abstractions We have met such a character in the last chapter Faith in Hawthorne s Young Goodman Brown A classical allegory is the medieval play Everyman whose protagonist represents us all and who deserted by false friends named Kinddred and Goods faces the judgment of God accompanied only by a faithful friend called Good Deeds In John Bunyan s Pilgrim s Progress the protagonist Christian struggles along the difficult road towards salvation meeting along the way with such persons as Mr Worldly Wiseman who directs him into a comfortable path a wrong turn and the resident of a town called Fair Speech among them a hypocrite named Mr Facing both ways One modern instance is George Orwell s Animal Farm in which among its double meanings barnyard animals stand for human victims and totalitarian oppressors Allegory attempts to evoke a dual interest one in the events characters and setting presented and the other in the ideas they are intended to convey or the significance they bear Symbol differs from allegory according to Coleridge in that in allegory the objective referent evokes is without value until it acquires fixed meaning from its own particular structure of ideas whereas a symbol includes permanent objective value independent of the meanings that it may suggest In a broad sense all stories are symbolic that is the writer lends the characters and their actions some special significance Of course this is to think of symbol in an extremely broad and inclusive way For the usual purpose of reading a story and understanding it there is probably little point in looking for symbolism in every word in every stick or stone in every striking fo a match in every minor character But to refuse to think about the symbolic meanings would be another way to misread a story So to be on the alert for symbols when reading fiction is perhaps wiser than to ignore them How then do we recognize a symbol in fiction when we meet it Fortunately the storyteller often givens the symbol particular emphasis It may be mentioned repeatedly throughout the story linguistic code For example are there any neologisms such as portentous infants Are there any semantic syntactic phonological or graphological deviations Such deviations are often the clue to special interpretations associated with traditional figures of speech such as metaphor metonymy synecdoche paradox and irony If such tropes occur what kind of special interpretation is involved for example metaphor can be classif