Metaphorical Account of Death in Dickinson’s Poems隐喻视角下的艾米莉.狄金森诗歌死亡主题的解读

1、metaphorical account of death in dickinsons poems隐喻视角下的艾米莉.狄金森诗歌死亡主题的解读 acknowledgementsmany thanks first go to professor wang bin, my respective supervisor, who inspired my interest in cognitive linguistics from the very beginning. his influence on me and my work is tremendous. i am greatly indebte

2、d to him for his careful guidance and illuminating instructions throughout my study. he has provided me with tremendously useful material and given me informative suggestions and helped me overcome the difficulties with strict requirements and benevolent understanding during the whole process of my

3、thesis writing, from the selection of the topic, the making of the proposal and the construction of the theoretical framework, to the painstaking modification of the earlier drafts. without his guidance and encouragement, the completion of this thesis would not have been possible.i also owe great gr

4、atitude to other distinguished professors, such as professor dai weihua, assistant professor jin wenlin and etc. my appreciation also goes to shanghai university of science and technology which has offered me valuable resources of teachers, lectures, references and academic nourishments giving me mu

5、ch inspiration to better my study.i would like to thank my roommates who have given me help from them i have learned a lot of valuable experience.finally, i also owe great gratitude to my families, especially my dear wife, who has supported me both with finance and understanding from the very beginn

6、ing to the end of this thesis.艾米莉.狄金森死亡诗歌的概念隐喻分析与解读摘要 c. lewis曾说过，隐喻是诗歌的生命，是诗人的主要文本和荣耀。没有隐喻，也就没有诗歌。作为美国最伟大的女性诗人，艾米莉.狄金森的诗歌充分的反应了这一观点。本篇论文依据莱考夫和约翰逊的概念隐喻理论为理论基石和研究视角，对女诗人的死亡诗进行认知解读；从艾米莉诗歌创造的实践和对死亡的哲学思考，作者从中得出文化创造是人类超越肉体死亡的一种方法，对于艾米莉.狄金森来说，她的不朽或永恒就在于她的诗歌里。因此我们就不难理解她终生隐遁生活，其目的有二，其一是为了腾出更多的时间与经历去进行诗歌创造；其

7、二是隐遁使她的艺术生命获得了再生。概念隐喻贯穿全文，为本篇论文的理论红线。考虑到诗人的诗歌浩如烟海，作者仅对诗人的典型作品进行认知解读，并把她的死亡诗歌划分为三类，分别是对死亡的恐惧与彷徨，直面死亡以及超越死亡。这样做的是因为诗人对死亡的认识是一个动态的上升的过程，其目的是通过步步分析最终得到诗人的理想境地超越死亡获得永生。 在具体分析研究中，作者从她的诗歌中提炼出几个基本的概念隐喻，分别是死亡是一次痛苦的旅程，死亡是人，死亡是睡眠，死亡是黑夜，死亡是隐遁，圆周是永生等。并分析这些概念隐喻的系统性和连贯性，进而得到对诗人死亡哲学的一个完整的充分的认识，以及对这些死亡诗歌有一个新的理解。本篇论文

8、共有五章，第一章引言，重点是综述国内外对诗人死亡诗歌的研究特点及方法。并提出自己的视角-概念隐喻视角；第二章是文献综述。第三章分析研究死亡诗歌里出现的有关死亡的概念隐喻。第四章承接第三章，分析研究死亡隐喻的连贯性和系统性，目的是对诗人死亡哲学有个比较完整的认识，第五章是结论部分，并指出本篇论文的不足与未来的研究工作。关键词：概念隐喻 死亡 诗歌 认知分析 连贯性 abstractthis thesis gives a detailed analysis of dickinsons death poems from conceptual metaphor theory. based on the

9、 poetesss writing experience and philosophy of death, the author concludes that cultural creation is a way to overcome death. to emily dickinson, her immortality or eternity lies on her poetry. therefore, we can say that her seclusion in her later life is mainly for saving time to write poems and ma

10、king her art life immortal.as the main thread that runs through the thesis, conceptual metaphor theory is a milestone in the field of metaphor research. the traditional theory represented by aristole is confined to the rhetoric field. this thesis will just give a glimpse of metaphor history. in deal

11、ing with the poetesss death poems, the author will analyze some representatives of them. moreover, the thesis will categorize these death poems into 3 kinds: poems of fearing death, facing death calmly and overcomging death based her changing attitude toward death. the author draws a conclusion that

12、 the poetesss ideal is to overcome death through means of poetry writing after a stepwise analysis. after a comprehensive study of death metaphors in emily dickinsons poems, the author abstracts several fundamental conceptual metaphors in each of 3 kinds of poems such as death is a painful departure

13、, death is a person, death is sleep, death is night and circumference is immortality, death is seclusion and so on. then the author analyzes them combining with emily dickinsons life experience. finally, coherence and systematicity of these metaphors are studied with a view to getting a comprehensiv

14、e knowledge of the poetesss philosophy of death and providing a new perspective to understand these death poems as well.this thesis is divided into 5 chapters. in chapter one, the author will give a brief overview of metaphor study, emily dickinsons death poems and the relation among death, literatu

15、re and metaphor. in chapter 2, the author reviews the history of emily dickinsons death poem study. in chapter 3, death metaphors in emily dickinsons poems are extracted and analyzed. in chapter 4, coherence and systematicity of death metaphors are studied to get a better understanding of the poetes

16、ss view on death. in chapter 5, the author make a conclusion of this thesis and points out some limitations and future to do.key words: conceptual metaphor; emily dickinson; cognitive approach; poetry; coherence and systematicitychapter 1 introduction1.1 an overview study of metaphortraditionally, m

17、etaphor is taken as a figure of speech and is regarded as an effective rhetorical device to persuade people. viewpoints of this rhetorical school can be traced back to aristotle and cicero. such theories include aristotles comparison theory, quintilians substitution theory and blacks interaction the

18、ory. these theories treated metaphor just a rhetorical device. with the publication of metaphors we live by (1980, lakoff&johnson), metaphors have been studied mainly from cognitive perspective. lakoff and johnson as well as their colleagues have thought that metaphors have not only rhetorical funct

19、ion but also cognitive function. they believed that not only the human conceptual system involves in the processing, understanding and making use of metaphor, but the conceptual system itself is metaphorically structured. thus, metaphor is found to be pervasive in our everyday life, in language and

20、most importantly, in thought and action. in other words，metaphor plays a basic role in defining the way we perceive the world, the way we think and act to that perceived world. the reason why metaphors in linguistic expressions are possible is that there are metaphors in a persons conceptual system

21、(lakoff & johnson, 1980: 6). their theory on metaphor is known as conceptual metaphor theory.1.2 metaphor and poetrymetaphor is all essential component of poetry and it is a basic building block that makes poetry. and it has long been considered as a most important device of the poetic imagination a

22、nd it is the life principle of poetry and treated as the poets main text and honor. g. bachelard said that the brain of a poet is actually and completely a container holding a set of metaphorical syntax. aristotle once said in the end of poetics, “but the greatest thing by far is to be a master of m

23、etaphor, and it is one thing that cant be learned” and in the rhetoric, “from metaphor we can best get hold of something fresh,” and “metaphor moreover gives style clearness, charm and distinction as nothing else” (w. shys. robert). and the great poets themselves paid great attention to the role of

24、metaphor in the poetry. robert frost remarked, “there are many other things i have found myself saying about poetry, but the briefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing in terms of another.” poets frequently use it not only to simulate the reader to think and imagine, but also provoke

25、 a wide range of emotions and poets use metaphor to create beautiful and associative imagery to communicate profound meaning. without metaphor poetry would be uninteresting jargon, without metaphor the reader would not be moved emotionally, without metaphor poetry would be extremely shallow. shallow

26、 poetry is perhaps one of the most purposeless forms of writing available. so to sum up, we can know that the functions of metaphor in the poetry are to make poems more beautiful, novel and interesting, to crystallize and even visualize the abstract concepts thus avoiding wateriness and monotonousne

27、ss. in a word, metaphor is the life of poetry. dickinsons stark style, her ambiguous punctuation and capitalization, her variant word choices and multiple versions of poems, and her practice of expunging clearly historical references from her poetry, all contribute to creating poems that are open to

28、 varying, sometimes contradictory, interpretations that perplex, startle, and amaze her readers. beside this, the most salient feature is her frequent use of metaphors, which are novel and seems quite strange to her readers. she believes that mind can know everything. emilys mind is analogical, that

29、 is to say, most often, the boundary of the poem is not a particular scene or situation but the figure of analogy as it moves from scenes to scenes. she often employed at least two things or ideas at once to create a complicated relationship between two ideas or images. her so-called abstract images

30、 are grounded in her physical and intellectual experience of the world and the universe around her. the constructive power of the conceptual metaphor can enable her to create her individualized world. however everything has two sides. the poets frequent use of metaphor, on one hand, can make poems m

31、ore novel and interesting and help the reader take something abstract and put it into concrete terms, then figure out what meaning the poet is intending to convey. it allows them to go beyond the outward view of the text and further into the internal structure of the poem to grasp its deep meaning.

32、but on the other, the use of metaphor can add difficulty to understanding of the poems, because one metaphor has various interpretations which run parallel with various understanding of a single poem. so a proper understanding of metaphors is crucial to understanding her poems.1.3 death and literatu

33、rein western humanism, death, as the opposite of life, has irreplaceable value. so it is common that death becomes the everlasting subject the western literature. it can be said that without much consideration of death, there is no literature. for without death, man has no horror, no regret, and no

34、ideal. therefore man cant create a metaphysical world of literature to compensate mans loss and regret, to satisfy mans dream of immortality and eternity. this can be traced back to ancient greece. as early as in ancient greece, the great philosophers such as socrates and plato as well as great writ

35、ers all paid much attention to the problem of death. plato gave a very famous definition of philosophy: philosophy is the practice death. the great tragedian sophocles in his master piece oedipus also discussed the riddle of death. actually, the riddle of sphinx is the riddle of death to a deep exte

36、nt. if the bystanders cant figure out the riddle, they would be killed. the modern philosopher schopenhauer articulated that death is the source of inspiration for philosophy. and heidegger claimed that man is being-towards-death. it can be said that all great literary works more or less correlated

37、to death. because death is inevitable, in order to overcome, exceed the death of body or flesh, man has painstakingly tried all their means to construct his belief of truth, beauty and holiness, and further to materialize such belief as the form of cultural creation. it is out of question to say tha

38、t literature is one kind of such cultural creation ( ji fenglin p398). only by investing all his efforts into the various kinds of cultural creation can he face directly and bravely the riddle of death to journey the life of promise and dignity, can make limited lifetime meaningful and valuable, can

39、 realize immortality and eternalness. so from this, it is relatively right to say that dickinson, by means of her voluminous work, has exceeded her physical life and realized her pursuit of immortality. 1.4 death in emily dickinsons poems “death in earnest,” kierkegard writes, “gives life force as n

40、othing else does; it makes one alert as nothing else does.” (fred d. white, p.103). emily dickinson gives dramatic importance of the subject of death in her poems. death in her eyes sets a thing significant (p109, selected poems). of all her poems, about one third is about death. she described death

41、 from various perspective employing different kinds of images. some of them was written from viewpoint a dying, some of them from viewpoint of a bystander of a dying. some poems focused on the process of dying and others focused on sentimental feelings at the time of dying. her obsession with death

42、actually conveys that death is not the end of life, but a bridge to immortality and eternity. her exploration for death makes limited life extend to unlimited one, and also disillusioned life to eternity. her recluse makes her have much time and energy to explore the meaning of life with anti-tradit

43、ional rhythm and vagarious images. although before realizing the dream of immortality, she experienced suffering, hesitation and finally calmness, she still held onto her ideal within her inner heart. so it can be said that she herself embodied the saying: true is beauty, beauty is true. in 1886, in

44、 deathbed, she uttered “back” in dying at last.1.5 a brief introduction of the characteristics of dickinsons poemsit is generally believed among dickinsons scholars that emily dickinsons poems have no titles, and hence, are always quoted their first lines. in her poetry, there is a particular stress

45、 pattern, in which dashes are used as a musical device to create cadence and capital letters as means of emphasis. the form of her poetry is more or less like that of the hymns in community churches, familiar, communal and sometimes, irregular. emily dickinsons irregularity of sometimes inverted sen

46、tence structure also confuses her readers. however, her poetic idiom is noted for its laconic brevity, directness and plainness. her poems are usually short; rarely more than twenty lines and many of them are centered on a single image or symbol and focused on one subject matter. her poems tend to b

47、e very personal and meditative. she frequently uses personae to render the tone more familiar to the reader, and personification to vivify some abstract ideas. emily dickinsons poetry, despite its ostensible formal simplicity, is remarkable for its variety, subtlety and richness；and her limited priv

48、ate world has ever confined the limitless power of her creativity and imagination.(zhu, p140)1.6 organization of the thesisin what follows，the thesis will be organized in four chapters, in chapter 2, the author will invest main effort into the metaphors present related to the subject of death in dic

49、kinsons poems from the angle of cognitive linguistics, namely lakoffs cmt. and in chapter 3 and 4, the author will give a detailed analysis of these metaphors related to death from their coherence and sytematicity with the purpose of uncovering dickinsons philosophy of death, and state that his atti

50、tude toward to death is dynamic. it undergoes three phases-fearing death at the beginning, dealing with death calmly and finally exceeding death. in chapter 5, the author will put forward his own view on death and then make a comparison between dickinson s view on death with that of authors.1.7 the

51、significance of this thesisthe author of this thesis will firstly classify the death poems of dickinsons into 3 kinds. namely, poems about fearing death, poems about facing death and poems about exceeding death. correspondingly, the author will explore 3 kinds of conceptual metaphors which appear in

52、 these 3 kinds of poems. moreover, the author will analyze in detail them from the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory with a view to exploring the reasons for writers fascination with the topic of death. note worthily, the author in this thesis claims that cultural creation is a way of exceed

53、ing death, and also, the author in this thesis put forward a view that the topic of death in dickinsons poems is actually a metaphor for writers seclusion by which she can enjoy amounts of time and freedom for poetry writing. the author hope this new perspective in reading and explaining dickinsons

54、poems and new point of view can do something to dickinsons scholarship and facilitate the readers understanding of dickinsons poems.chapter 2 literary review of the subject of death in dickinsons poemsemily dickinson enjoys an ever-increasing critical reputation both within and outside of american h

55、istory of literature. she is even considered as revolutionary as her contemporary walt whitman, who broke the bounds of 19th century verse form, refusing the confines of conventional poetics. (wendy barker, emily dickinson and poetic strategy in emily dickinson) since her poems were first published

56、posthumously in 1890, critical responses and literary critical essays and articles to emily dickinsons work have been both abundant and unceasing; steadily gathering force with every new version of her collected poems as well as her manuscripts. in her life, she wrote about 1,800 poems, and these po

57、ems centered on the four topics- death, love, nature and immortality. among these four, death is her favorite concern, evidenced by surprisingly about 600 death poems. so to understand emily dickinsons poems one must grapple, as dickinson herself did, with the problem of death. 2.1 overseas reviewpr

58、evious scholars studied dickinsons preference for the subject of death from various perspectives. they are mainly psychoanalytic, social and historic criticism and religious influence and cognitive perspective and finally new critic.here i classify feminism into the category of social and historic c

59、riticism2.1.1 perspective of social and historic and poets personal experiences a well-known dickinson female scholar wendy martin in her brilliant book emily dickinson elaborated the underlying meanings and characteristics of dickinsons death pomes. “dickinsons poetry is dedicated to recording to the subtle emotions of the moment; her attitude toward death is not con