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.docx

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 beginni

2、ng. His influence on me and my work is tremendous. I am greatly indebted 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 re

3、quirements and benevolent understanding during the whole process of my 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 com

4、pletion of this thesis would not have been possible.I also owe great gratitude 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 o

5、f teachers, lectures, references and academic nourishments giving me much 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 ha

6、s supported me both with finance and understanding from the very beginning 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

7、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

8、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

9、of Dickinsons death poems from conceptual metaphor theory. Based on the 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 secl

10、usion in her later life is mainly for saving time to write poems and making 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 f

11、ield. This thesis will just give a glimpse of metaphor history. In dealing 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

12、 her changing attitude toward death. The author draws a conclusion that 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 met

13、aphors in each of 3 kinds of poems such as DEATH IS A PAINFUL DEPARTURE, 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 systematici

14、ty of these metaphors are studied with a view to getting a comprehensive 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 stu

15、dy, Emily Dickinsons death poems and the relation among death, literature 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

16、death metaphors are studied to get a better understanding of the poetesss 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 systematicity

17、Chapter 1 introduction1.1 An overview study of metaphorTraditionally, metaphor 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 compa

18、rison theory, Quintilians substitution theory and Blacks interaction theory. 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 the

19、ir colleagues have thought that metaphors have not only rhetorical function 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,

20、metaphor is found to be pervasive in our everyday life, in language and 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

21、are possible is that there are metaphors in a persons conceptual system (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 lon

22、g been considered as a most important device of the poetic imagination and 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 t

23、he end of Poetics, “But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor, 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. Robe

24、rt). And the great poets themselves paid great attention to the role of 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 i

25、t not only to simulate the reader to think and imagine, but also provoke 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

26、emotionally, without metaphor poetry would be extremely shallow. Shallow 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 v

27、isualize the abstract concepts thus avoiding wateriness and monotonousness. 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 refer

28、ences from her poetry, all contribute to creating poems that are open to 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

29、 believes that mind can know everything. Emilys mind is analogical, that 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

30、 relationship between two ideas or images. Her so-called abstract images 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

31、sides. The poets frequent use of metaphor, on one hand, can make poems more 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 fur

32、ther into the internal structure of the poem to grasp its deep meaning. 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 o

33、f metaphors is crucial to understanding her poems.1.3 Death and literatureIn 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