Article.
Nataliia Romanyshyn
ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5918-5423
DOI 10.31558/1815-3070.2020.39.7
УДК 81‘373
LITERARY CONCEPTUALIZATION
FROM COGNITIVE STYLISTIC PERSPECTIVE (BASED ON WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S POETRY)
У статті
розглянуто підходи до розкриття особливостей художньої концептуалізації з
перспективи когнітивної стилістики. Процес художньої концептуалізації
розглянуто в аспекті рецептивної естетики, що постулює активну участь читача у
процесах розгортання смислової структури художнього тексту в межах
комунікативно-пізнавальної та творчо-інтерпретативної діяльності, та
когнітивної стилістики. Матеріалом дослідження стали твори англійського поета-романтика
Вільяма Вордсворта. У фокусі дослідження постає сукупність художніх поетичних
концептів, що належать до концептосфери «батьківщина», актуалізованих системою
просторових образів.
Ключові слова: художній текст, дискурс, художній
концепт, художня концептуалізація, художній / поетичний образ, Вільям
Вордсворт.
Introduction. For decades the linguistic discussion concerning the literary semantics
problems has been developing from different positions and focusing on different
issues, in particular, the questions of literary concept content and the ways
of its revealing (the works of Vorobyova O., Nikonova V., Selivanova E., Kaganovs'ka O.,
Belekhova L., Bekhna I., Semino E., Stockwell P. etc.). The literary concept as a dynamic component of
literary picture of the world is characterized by semantic diversity,
interpretative limitedness, aesthetic value, it has culturally and socially
determined content. Literary concept differs from the cultural one in its
creative, emotional, psychological nature, spheres of functioning, mode of
author’s individual cognition and verbalization.
Existing in a certain idiosphere, which is a part of author’s individual
literary picture of the world, determined by the scope of individual poetic
associations, literary concepts emerge and develop as a response to a previous
lingual and cultural experience of a creative person and express author’s
individual reconsideration of objects and events, their potential content
exists on the junctions of different lines of culture –
historical, social, everyday, literary, philosophic – and that is why it
is maximally concentrated, volumetric, complex structured,
it represents those forms of cognition that “slip out” of philosopher’s pen (Stambovsky) and become
the wisdom “trapped by a poetic word” (Maslova 31).
Consequently, modern studies of literary semantics and literary
conceptualization foreground those researches of text literary-poetic resources
that are directed to the penetration into the deep structure of stylistic and
broader poetic / literary device as a form of knowledge presentation
and an instrument of revealing and explaining cognitive strategies and
processes underlying the formation and interpretation of a literary text as a
product of cognizing subject’s creative activity in socio-cultural, historical,
political and aesthetic context (Vorobyova
“Khudozhestveiennya siemantika”;
Dolezel; Freeman 2002).
Background.
While modeling the literary concept scholars argue
that it is possible to comprehend its structure on the basis of
interdisciplinary approach that involves the integration of linguistic,
cultural and literary aspects, which enables both the penetration into the
unity of literary world of the text and the world of national culture, and the
extension of the boundaries of literary concept representation among which the
leading role belongs to the poetic word “as a manifestation of lingual creative
activity of Homo Sapiens determined by the
aspiration to interpret the world by means of verbal-imagery codes” (Malenko 5) as a means of spiritually-practical comprehension of the world which
rest on the resources of imagery consciousness of a human being and the
processes of poetic generalizations.
Comprehension of the essence of the poetic language,
in particular, its concept creative function, its value in the processes of
creative cognizing of the world and conceptualizations in correlation with the
specificity of ethnic consciousness is a leading epistemological principle of
previous and contemporary researches. Semantic limitedness of the poetic act,
contextual dependence of the word’s meaning are the basic essence of the poetic
language; the “conditions of referent-recipient duality of the author and the reader”
(Malenko 23) is its important sense creating aspect. The
recipient as a co-participant of the sense
creative act, that is verbally encoded in the poetic text, appears to be
an active subject of literary communication (Vinogradov “O tieorii hudozhestvennoi riechi” 8). A considerable value of
context in creating the semantics of a verbal sign, the phenomenon of inner and
outer form of the image, indissolubility of cognitive and emotional processes
in a literary creativity, specific nature of perception of lingual-aesthetic
signs by an individual and collective / national recipient influence the poetic
actualization of concepts, creating the effect of parallelism between
thematic/conceptual and semantic planes of the text (Vinogradov “O yazykie zhudozhestviennoy
litiratury” 14). Object-topical difference of the words which do not conform semantically
to a single notional or emotional vector in creating verbal-imagery model may
therefore produce a complete literary impression which allows the author to obtain
limitless ability of literary embodiment of concepts on the basis of
multidimensional semantic potential of the word (Malenko 31–32). An active and conscious transformation of the language means reveals
itself in ways of organizing already existing and newly created language
elements, their selection, arrangement and usage. Additional sense which they
obtain in a dynamic structure of the literary text depends both on their
potential expressiveness in the structure of language and on the acquired intratextual
connections in the text’s plot and composition.
Domestic and foreign linguistics, revealing important aspects of poetic
language creativity, especially its psychological backgrounds (Vygotsliy; Jung), unity of the form and content, idiostylistic aspects,
compositional types, phonological, lexico-semantic, expressive, stylistic and
syntactic peculiarities intensified the cognitive essence of the poetic image, its ability to become an inexhaustible source of experience (Eko 106). In the poetic diction a word used by the author is
subjected to semantic transformations, obtains new aesthetic features and turns
into the element of literary content. The
comprehension of the cognitive character of lingual-poetic thinking which in
its different variants and in different epochs for centuries has been a guiding
principle in scholastic aspiration to explain the nature of poetic creativity
as an act of aesthetic mastering of the world, the identification of a
principal parallelism between the processes of creation and reception of the
poetic text and creation and reception of natural language elements is of great
importance for the exposing the specificity of poetic conceptualization of the
world. Poetic conceptualization of the world leads to as substantial results as
language and scientific (Vygotsliy 38)
with the only difference – the accentuating of its sensual, emotional,
subjective aspect rather than purely rational, objective one (Humboldt 349–350).
Poetry, according to Y. Lotman, is a special
language accustomed to the modeling and transference of information that
secures the realization of cognitive acts, appealing to the spheres of
intuitive, existential, inventive knowledge, is characterized by modeling
nature manifested in creation of specific poetic image of the world (Lotman 243). The objectively existing world is transformed
through the prism of its subjective comprehension by a creative personality.
Potentially and virtually each poetic word bears an imprint of the
cultural unity, preserves a distinct footprint of typical collective
conceptions that determine for the author the conditions of its (word’s)
contextual actualization, since all possible constructive elements of poetic
language “are marked by primary, pre-textual aesthetic nature and a powerful
supply of artistic merit before it entered the author’s text” (Kalashnik 270). Transcending this “resistance of the language”
(Stanyts'ka 13) in verbalization of the
poetic idea, the author resorts to the original language forms capable of
reflecting the uniqueness of individual aesthetic experience. In the act of
artistic creativity the word is being individualized, raised over its meaning,
get inspired emotionally and expressively impregnated forming a united
syncretic aesthetic and psychological complex of creative cognition.
Purpose. The article is aimed at substantiating the concept creative and
cognitive nature of poetic language by analyzing idiostylistic and semantic
resources of verbal poetic image, character of poetic form as an important element
of individual poetics from cognitive stylistics perspective, proceeding from
the assumption that semantic features of verbal images reproduce cognitive
feature of literary concepts, produce literary valuable material relevant for
exposing individual world outlook dominants, dynamics of existential axiology
in the structure of literary concept. Thus, the decoding of the poetic
structure of a literary work/set of works in a certain profile, reconstruction of author’s individual language
consciousness and language usage taking into consideration the
personalized internal textual and external textual experience secures the
penetration into the totality of literary concept’s semantic features that
embody both the general cultural experience and author’s mental world.
The topicality of the research is determined by the general direction of modern
linguistics toward the theoretical and practical consideration of poetic
creativity, in particular the conceptual aspects of textual semantics as a
reflection of author’s individual aesthetic experience in correlation with the
development of aesthetic consciousness of ethnic community; the search for new
interdisciplinary direction of the study of language, culture, cognition. We
proceed from the assumption about the correlation of the dynamics of
cultural-historic paradigm and creative cognition, cognitive power of verbal
poetic image.
Results
Methodology. Formation of poetic image as a representative of literary concept is the selection of entities with a relevant
emotional and aesthetic evaluation and simultaneous binding of this
evaluation both in the conceptual system of literature as a subsystem of
culture and in the mental space of the whole culture, thus, for the author the
ways of conceptual system development are versatile. The exposure of the
concept creative potential of poetic images in the cognitive aspect presupposes
the unity of lingual poetic, cognitive poetic, cognitive stylistic, pragmatic
and semiotic perspective as well as the consideration of literary studies.
This scientific position concerning the active,
creative and influencing power of poetic language correlates with the
acknowledgement of the leading role of a human being in its (poetic language’s)
existence – the human factor in the creating and decoding of poetic senses.
Anthropocentric dimension in treatment of language, language-literary
creativity and reception presupposes that in the research of poetic language as
a component of the communicative act between the author and the reader the
extrapolation of scholar’s model of the world on the author’s model of the
world is of great importance which allows to admit a certain degree of
subjectivity in developing the model of literary concept. Consequently,
numerous researches in poetic conceptualization (Nikonova; Kaganovs'ka; Belekhova) are based on a
highly productive (in terms of literary semantics revealing) the
poetic-interpretative methodology that provides a wide space for individual
analytical interpretation of formal and semantic parameters of poetic text
without any limitations in the choice of a certain intentional dominant or analytical vector and fosters the formations of
a corresponding system of means and devices, methods and procedures
necessary for the exposure of the poetic word semantics in certain genres
parameters by integration of stylistic, lingual poetic, semiotic, hermeneutic
and cognitive approaches.
The synthesis of linguistic disciplines,
interdisciplinary character of scientific research has a considerable
importance both in reconstruction of author’s individual conceptual space and
in modeling of separate literary concepts and correlates with the general
theoretical postulate about the unity of form and content. The plane of
literary text content is a complex unity of interrelated notions that includes
– objective-historic content;
– ideas and ideological content reflecting author’s individual attitude to
the depicted events and phenomena, his conclusions, evaluations, sympathy or
antipathy;
– direct content fixed in the text by verbal-imagery and literary-imagery
means that encompass the theme, plot and composition, characters, acts,
experience of protagonists, etc.
Literary analysis, first and foremost, is directed
to the revealing the ideological and thematic foundations of the literary work,
exposing the versatility of addressed questions and the ways of their artistic
solution (Timofieev 129–142), character of text
critical reception against a certain historic and cultural background. This
information of literary critical plane is substantial in identification of the
key literary hyper- and macro-concepts both of the idiostyle and of
literary-artistic trend, it provides the researcher, directly or indirectly,
with the “clues” to uncovering the literary conceptualization of key notions of
linguistic culture.
Each literary work is a complex unity organized as a
sequence of elements. Irrespective of size and genre of the text its systemic
organization that constitutes its compositional essence originates from a
certain content developing in the sequence of events, circumstances, acts,
emotions – a set of textual elements that create the
plot (Timofieev 156). The scheme of the plot of any text irrespective of the genre is not
monolithic and can be easily divided into a set of elements that exist in
certain connections and create a motive as a highest stage of generalization of
the idea. The analysis of the plot and motive from the perspective of their
sense, typology, axiology, historic aspect (as their similarity, recurrence in
different authors and in different epochs) provides a key to the conceptual
content embodied in them that remains unified being transferred from one
historic environment to the other, retains its generalizing function in
profiling definite human features, regularities and life events.
Consequently, the comprehension of
plot-compositional structure of the literary work and revealed by it typicality
and individualization of images are inseparable from the comprehension of the
conceptual structure of the literary work as a whole and the model of literary
concept in particular. In our research, thus, we suggest that the revealing of
the process of literary conceptualization develops according to two reciprocal
analytical cycles:
1.
analysis of ideological and
thematic content that turns into the analysis of the plot and composition in
their unity with the system of literary images outside of which both the plot
and the composition are merely general void structures. The analysis of the
plot and composition turns into the plane of verbal embodiment analysis –
verbal images and poetic language with a corresponding accent on lexical,
syntactic, tropeic, stylistic canvas of the text, with a specific attention
being paid to the slightest literary detail, symbol, etc.;
2.
analysis of the language of
the poetic text as a result of lingual means selection by the author motivated
by a concrete aesthetic and cognitive tasks, as the specific character of the
poetic language can be comprehended in identifying its role in the imagery
system. The actualization of the poetic word creates the world of complex
correlations, interactions and connections that change their structural forms,
their subject-semantic or characterological features in the dynamic process of
the development of the plot and transference of its separate areas. In
this respect the language of the poetic work is considered as a form concerning
the verbal image, and the verbal image as a form concerning the
ideological-conceptual content. The analysis of the poetic language then turns
into the analysis of the plot and composition, the specificity of the system of
literary images (when it is necessary the protagonists speech and actions as a
means of literary portraying), which opens the perspective to generalizing
about ideological-thematic content of the work.
Consequently, the analysis of the literary conceptualization is
inseparable from the analysis of the unity of textual form and content, their
interrelations, transmutation and the integrity of all aspects of
literary/poetic creativity. Solely verbal and solely content matter is
insufficient as a source of conclusions concerning the conceptual senses. Thus,
the reconstruction of the literary conceptualization processes in the systemic
unity of textual form and content presupposes the sequence of the following
procedures
– identification of content filling of micro- and macro contexts by
defining their thematic dominants. As a rule the dominant thematic line / thematic lines correspond to the nomination of a corresponding literary
concept and are identified in the result of informational reduction of the
context, the analysis of the strong positions, types of foregrounding,
identification of the key words, defining their semantics and sematic
enrichment due to the development of the associative field both objectively
represented in the text in the lexical meaning of the verbal elements and the
chain of reactions that emerge in the recipient’s consciousness in the process
of poetic text reception, its understanding and interpretation;
– comprehensive analysis of lingual-aesthetic parameters of the literary
text, penetration into the deep layers of the text, “splitting” of the
literary-aesthetic matter of the text with the aim of “extracting” the ideas,
values and knowledge implemented in it. In this respect it is important to take
into consideration that the conceptual representations in the texture of the
literary work encompass both explicit and implicit forms. The implicitness of
concept verbal representations, descriptiveness, high contextual dependence of
the language sign sense, ludic, symbolic character of the expression is a
leading feature of the poetic discourse. In this case the identification of the concept results from the interrelation of
multilayer textual constituents – the hinting
words, signal-words, “congestion” of images, emotions and impressions, emerging
in the result of holistic perception of the text.
Complex process of poetic, imagery sense of the
poetic word meaning originated from the ability of the
poetic contexts units to enrich their semantics in the result of interaction
with other elements, to produce additional associative manifestations which are
the ways expressing definite conceptual meanings and secure the transference of
the imagery structures into the conceptual ones – the phenomenon defined as surface / quick and deep/postponed
conceptualization (Tsur). Herewith, it is worth considering the thesis about a
special character of the representation of the world in fiction, creativity of
cognitive processes, the phenomenon of the so called cognitive “unconscious” as
a dominating in the literary semantics those forms of conceptualization which
are not easily accessible for direct observation but are extricated in the
process of “deep reading” (Vorobyova 379–380) and
reconstruction of multidimensional semantic-cognitive structure of the literary
text.
Literary conceptualization of national space: literary poetic concepts
NATIVE LAND and MOTHERLAND. Let us demonstrate the efficiency of the suggested theoretical principles
of cognitive stylistic approach on the analysis of national space literary
poetic conceptualization in the poetry of famous English Romantic poet William
Wordsworth.
Poetic text as a type of the art
enjoys its own rules of matter organization that lies in the connection of its elements into a single unity. The meaning
of each separate element seems to dissolve in its environment giving
birth to new, unexpected senses. The volume of the poetic text sense increases
both on account of associative-imagery connection of the word and the effect of
poetic formula (Maslova 171) specific for any time and any nation providing the
fusion of national spirit and poetic sense.
Calm is the fragrant air, and loth to lose
Day's grateful warmth, tho' moist with falling dews,
Look for the stars, you'll say that there are none;
Look up a second time, and, one by one,
You mark them twinkling out with silvery light,
And wonder how they could elude the sight!
The birds, of late so noisy in their bowers,
Warbled a while with faint and fainter powers,
But now are silent as the dim-seen flowers:
Nor does the village Church-clock's iron tone
The time's and season's influence disown;
Nine beats distinctly to each other bound
In drowsy sequence – how unlike the sound
That, in rough winter, oft inflicts a fear
On fireside listeners, doubting what they hear!
The shepherd, bent on rising with the sun,
Had closed his door before the day was done,
And now with thankful heart to bed doth creep,
And joins his little children in their sleep.
The bat, lured forth where trees the lane o'ershade,
Flits and reflits along the close arcade;
The busy dor-hawk chases the white moth
With burring note, which Industry and Sloth
Might both be pleased with, for it suits them both.
A stream is heard – I see it not, but
know
By its soft music whence the waters flow:
Wheels and the tread of hoofs are heard no more;
One boat there was, but it will touch the shore
With the next dipping of its slackened oar;
Faint sound, that, for the gayest of the gay,
Might give to serious thought a moment's sway,
As a last token of man's toilsome day (Calm is the fragrant
air, and loth to lose).
The cited verse is saturated by
sensor, acoustic and visual images of the completion of a summer day (man's toilsome day), as a full round of clock arrows (the village Church-clock) – a cycle between work (Industry) and rest (Sloth), intended to represent a model of
microcosm pivoting around the axis between the terrestrial and the celestial
“shaped” by the vertical line of the church bell tower. Above there is the Sky
studded by stars which twinkling is scarcely discernible because of the thick
wet fragrant air. Below there is the
Land – bedewed, covered by flowers. The space is cozy limited
outside and above by the crowns of trees along the narrow path, by bowers
formed by bushes and flowers (trees the lane o'ershade, along the close arcade in their bowers). The motion in this evening space is
practically imperceptible, unnoticeable, it can be just sensed by scarcely
heard sounds (Faint sound): The
bat, lured forth; Flits and reflits; A stream is heard – I see it not, but know / By its soft music
whence the waters flow; The busy dor-hawk chases the white moth / With burring note; Wheels and the
tread of hoofs are heard no more; the next dipping of its slackened oar. And when the birds songs came down (The birds, of late… / Warbled a while with faint and fainter powers),
this space is evenly filled with nine clear and calm strikes of the church
clock. In this space-microcosm the human life is programmed by the laws of the
Nature, determined by the motion of the celestial bodies (The shepherd, bent on rising with the sun, / Had closed his door before the day was done),
by the change of seasons. And even the toll of the bell sounds differently in
winter and in summer, evoking different emotions (how unlike the sound / That, in rough
winter, oft inflicts a fear / On fireside
listeners, doubting what they hear!).
In Wordsworth’s poetry
there is a strong connection between concrete, single and everyday facts in
their function, on the one hand, to foster the comprehension a hidden essence
of life, the perception of single life manifestation as an important aspect in
the general scheme of the existence (thus, it is worth attention the
introduction into the imagery texture of the verse such seemingly unpoetic
creature as bat, goatsucker, moth); on the other hand – to depict really important experience of ethnic mentality. The poet
creates the model of miniature, as if disjoined land on the surface of which
the ray of poetic generalization seizes punctate detached one from the other,
self-sufficient stable values – the English peasant, his home and
the closest natural environment. The space is poetically conceptualized as a
physical and spiritual pillar of human existence, thus, its role in the
depiction of ethnic, psychological, social and historical parameters of the
national existence is of great importance in the authors poetic picture of the
world.
Spatial concept-images play a
leading sense creating role in the literary work and are defined by the
diversity of the ways of their imagery representation. The imagery organization
of the space in Wordsworth’s poetic works turns to the reader by its different
facets. The poetic space is related to the real geographical space that is
verbalized by specific toponyms ('Mid
the green mountains; these steep and lofty cliffs; In the sweet shire of
Cardigan, / Not far from
pleasant Ivor-hall; "Kilve," …"was a pleasant place, / And so is Liswyn farm; From the Great Gavel, down by Leeza's banks, / And down the Enna, far as Egremont"), it is experienced and interpreted by a human
being, by a protagonist, by a lyrical hero, by the author as native and strange
(To join those miserable men he
flew; / And now to the sea-coast, with numbers more, we drew; Some mighty gulf
of separation past, / I seemed transported
to another world), close and remote (distant town), hostile (the streets of
want and pain; Helpless as sailor cast on desert rock; Dismissed, again on open
day I gazed, / At houses, men, and
common light, amazed); favourable, existing here and now
and imaginative, fantastic belonging to the past, the dream, the memories (the sweet thoughts of home; Foregone the
home delight of constant truth, / And clear and open
soul, so prized in fearless youth; My thoughts on former pleasures ran; / I thought of Kilve's delightful shore),
real (home, village, field) and mystical (grave, lake, wood), corresponds to
the spiritual and physical state of the protagonist (There is a blessing in the air, / Which seems a sense of joy to
yield / To the bare trees, and mountains bare, / And grass in the green field); Love, now a universal birth, / From heart to heart is stealing, / From earth to man, from man to earth), serves as a background of the
depicted events (the dreary
mountain-top; on English ground, / And in the broad
highway), related to the notions of motion
and transference (And she came far
from over-the main; to the woods away! With quickening pace my horse drew nigh / Those paths so clear to me).
The positive perception
of the space is construed as limitedness, freedom, the sense of calmness and
happiness manifested by the accumulation of lexicon saturated by emotional and
expressive connotations within the micro context (for example, open space – freedom, happiness): Light was my sleep; my days in transport roll'd: / With thoughtless joy I stretch'd along the shore (The Female Vagrant). Native space stretches up and down, it is open
and let the human being to feel safe and protected: The fields better suited the ease of his soul; Among thy mountains did I feel / The joy of my desire (I travelled among unknown men); His soul was knit to this his native soil (Brothers). Native, inhabited land is filled with the objects of love observing
which a human experiences joy and pleasure. Natural objects and the elements of
the landscape are personified, endowed by the ability to positively influence
the subject, native land is the object of love and the environment of the
spiritual improvement: “Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale / Where he was born and bred”, – writes Wordsworth about his hero in
the poem There was a Boy, and he himself expresses his love to
his native land:
1)
I travelled among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee (I travelled
among unknown men).
2)
visible for
many a mile,
The cottage-windows through the twilight blazed,
I heeded not the summons: happy time
It was indeed for all of us; for me
It was a time of rapture! (Influence
Of Natural Objects In Calling Forth And Strengthening The Imagination In
Boyhood And Early Youth)
3)
Therefore am
I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear
4)
well pleased
to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being (Lines
Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting The Banks Of The
Wye During A Tour July 13, 1798)
Aesthetic assimilation of the space
occurs through the prism of perception and activity of the main Wordsworth’s
character – a peasant-farmer, a peasant-shepherd, herewith, it is worth attention that there is a domination of the idea
of individual rather than collective mastering and transformation of the
space. A lonely female reaper works in the field singing, and the sounds of her
song fill up the space of the valley as an activity fills up the space of the
life: Alone she cuts and binds the grain, / And sings a melancholy strain; / О listen! for the Vale profound/Is overflowing with
the sound (A Solitary Reaper). The house of the shepherd Michael stands high
in the mountains, far from the inhabited space: … from the public way you turn your steps / Up the tumultuous brook of Greenhead Ghyll; No habitation can be seen; but they / Who journey thither find themselves alone / With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites / That overhead are sailing in the sky… / Their cottage on a plot of rising ground / Stood single, with large prospect, north and south, / High into Easedale, up to Dunmail-Raise, / And westward to the village near the lake; (Michael). The space of his life is understandable and subjected to him only, it defines the essence of his individual activity.
The sounds that fill the space is a special music understandable by him only: Hence had he learned the meaning of all
winds, / Of blasts of every tone; and, oftentimes, / When others heeded not, He heard the South / Make subterraneous music, like the noise / Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills (Michael).
The space is not only the natural
environment but an essence of the human being existence. Maximal authenticity
in the depiction of the space, detailed description of everyday ethnic aspect
of the space to which a large textual matter aim to intensify the pragmatic
influence of the text over the recipient, to secure his / her emotional “immersion” into the
reality.
In the poetic
picture of the world, created by Wordsworth, characters act and exist outside the collectively
mastered space. Irrespective of the notion that gets into the focus of poetic
depiction (either a lonely tree securing shelter for a tired wanderer, or a
destiny of family or single person) – Wordsworth’s poetic space is the
limited location in the unlimited space of the nature. The loneliness,
remoteness, solitude of the object of poetic depiction and the subject of
experience is a dominating feature of the literary structure of most Wordsworth’s
poetic works which (the structure) we understand
as a set or system of corelations between content, expressive and depicting
elements of the unity that in its functional,
communicative and axiological value, in its intellectual and sensual flows is directed
to the stylistic system, of a certain author or literary trend. Wordsworth
strictly adhered to the principle of depicting a human being through the common
natural manifestations, through the idea of harmonious coexistence of a human
being and natural environment, a human being as a center that absorbs all
natural impressions and the nature vibrating in concord with the inner state of
the experiencing subject in the result of which the outer and inner
“landscapes” become symbolic correlates.
Wordsworth’s hero is lonely both
physically and socially, hencewith, the “loneliness” and “remoteness as a
feature of real and poetic space is marked by axiological ambivalence. On the
one hand, loneliness and remoteness is a correlate poverty and old age (poems Goody Blake and Simon Lee); on the other – the salvation from the invading of
“social” space both in the sphere of intimate feelings (the poem Thorn) and
into the destiny of protagonists, avoiding of intrusion of the “new times
advancing”, civilizational changes (Ruth,
The Ruined Cottage, Female Vagrant, etc.) which in their textual projection
is manifested in gravitating towards specific temporal-local images
characterized by the general common semantic feature “calmness”, “tranquility”, “stagnation” (At evening, when the earliest stars began / To move along
the edges of the hills, / Rising or setting, would he stand alone, / Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake; In November days, / When vapours rolling down the valleys made / A lonely scene more lonesome;), cyclicity on motion (around a
circle, up and down): She wandered up and
down; / And many a hill did Lucy climb; when like a
roe / I bounded o'er the mountains, I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills; among woods / At noon; and 'mid the calm of summer
nights, / When, by the margin of
the trembling lake, / Beneath the gloomy
hills, homeward I went / In solitude, such
intercourse was mine (Influence Of
Natural Objects In Calling Forth And Strengthening The Imagination In
Boyhood And Early Youth).
Wordsworth’s poetic
discourse is saturated by micro images of stone covered in moss (hill of moss, mossy stones, verdant
hills),lonely tree on the hill (This lonely yew-tree stands / Far
from all human dwelling; the bare trees, and mountains bare), cliff which top is a cozy place to watch the distance (that tall rock / That eastward looks):
Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
Who he was
That piled these stones, and with the mossy sod
First covered o'er, and taught this aged tree,
Now wild, to bend its arms in circling shade (Lines Left Upon A Seat In
A Yew-Tree Which Stands Near The Lake Of Esthwaite, On A Desolate Part Of The
Shore, Yet Commanding A Beautiful Prospect).
The images of
this kind are defined as “little images” that create “imagery luminescence of
the text” and highlight from an unexpected side the particular events which in
their unity have specific expressiveness in representation of the main sense, tone and stylistic colouring which enables tracing
the semantic motion of general ideas in the textual depth.
The land eulogized by Wordsworth’s
poetic word in all its moving picturesque ethnographic
characteristics, that seemingly was rejected from the advance of the progress
at the turn of the century reflected social and psychological processes
pertaining to this period. Detached and local became the representative of
common to mankind and the special national destiny. Natural economy and nature
friendly life create the “natural’ world of the human being – familiar and usual, however, this world, in its primordial state is
not devoid of difficult natural, social and spiritual collisions.
The reconstruction of systemic relations of verbal means of
conceptualization in cognitive
perspective – the comprehensive analysis of imagery semantics by means of
– defining the semantic structure of trope’s lexemes-constituents
semantics, the set of semantic features that motivate the imagery transference,
literary-associative reinterpretation of verbal-imagery means, their semantic
and connotative dominants within micro- and macro contexts in the close
connection with the conditions of their emergence and functioning, taking into
consideration author’s intentions and pragmatics against the broad
ideological-aesthetic, social, historic and cultural background;
– exposure of the semantics of symbols, mythologemes, imagery stereotypes
and archetypes allowed to model the structure of the concepts
MOTHERLAND and NATIVE LAND. In the result the content of the discussed concepts
is reflected in the system of propositions that describe the corresponding
fragment of reality the correlates with the sense space of the poetic work,
about the object of poetic depiction and the decoded in the literary work its
(object’s) essentials features which are gradually reconstructed by the
recipient in the process of interpretation.
Consequently, the structure of the concepts’ content includes features
that expose them as ambivalent in terms of emotional perception and evaluation.
The space of the Motherland in its physical
and geographical parameters is created by the system of natural and
artificial objects of landscape where the individual mastering and
transformation of the space prevails. There is a domination of visual and
acoustic manifestations of space poetically modelled in the system of toponyms,
the diversity of flora and fauna. In the imagery representation of space there
prevails the device of natural phenomena personification, usually positively
connoted. In its axiological parameterization the native space is generally positively
marked as an object of love, devotion, the source of positive emotions. Native
land positively influences the experiencing subject functioning as the space of
freedom and the formation of personal spiritual and moral background. It also
worth mentioning that the images of stability, stagnation, calmness in poetic representation of space are positively
charged, whereas, on the contrary,
motion, instability, changes, transformations acquire negative connotations
embodied in the imagery paradigms that include images and association ranging from the change of seasons to the destructive
effect of natural powers and phenomena. The personification of the
natural phenomena and powers in these cases is usually negatively connoted
through the evoked by them palette of dominating lyrical subject’s or
protagonist’s emotions of fear, anxiety, frustration.
Conclusion
Specificity of the poetic
conceptualization of interaction of the human being and the national space
uncovers in the works of the originator of English Romanticism William Wordsworth that literary-aesthetic,
philosophic and ethical complex of issues which has never lost its topicality in the art and gained its important
place in the leading outlook and national conceptions. A human being,
the world of his personality, destiny, identity, national culture – this literary complex, having overcome the locality and autonomous character
of the individual literary consciousness, creative manner, experimentality of
the verbal form and ideology of the content, in its imagery-conceptual
embodiment determines the specificity of the national content without which the
art cannot be understood. National specificity of Wordsworth’s poetry lies in
the subtly elaborated ethnographic and naturalness of the space, foregrounding
the idea of the indissolubility of individual destiny and the processes of
social transformation of the ethnic environment.
The national character of
Wordsworth’s creativity lies in the transformation of the elements of
ethnographic world, local limitedness of the space, customary life themes and
dramatic character of the individually intimate events in the life of the protagonist
into the symbols that reflected general human and national destiny of England
at the turn of the century. The spatial parameters of the national existence in
Wordsworth’s poetic discourse correlate with the status, state and
psychoemotional dominants of the poetic subject. Poetic depiction of space is
created on the basis of its physical and spiritual comprehension as a pillar of
human existence – peasant-owner for whom the land is the essence of
existence, existential value, he cause of spiritual and psychological
transformations.
The
poetic word, focused on the micro world of an individual as a bearer of ethnic, psychomental, behavioral
characteristics and on the macro world of ethnic national existence represented
by the system of everyday realia, on the result of mastering the human world by
a human being, embody the complexity and ambiguity of these worlds interaction.
From axiological point of view Motherland and native land is exposed as an
ambivalent category: its beauty, living power is both the foundation of the
structuring of the world of a human and his fate and h is load, the factor of limitation, individual tragedy. The concentric
structure of the spatial-landscape perspective – home, threshold, garden, fence,
field, valley, high hill, shore-intended to secure the feeling of
safety, impenetrability into the individual’s intimacy, seclusion is unstable.
The space can be either favourable, beneficial or
aggressive, devouring, functioning both as a symbol of unavoidable
transformations and stagnation. The dynamics of space transformations in the
plane of textual actualization is embodied in fuzziness of the boundary between
freedom and restriction, life and death, stability and changeability, power and
fragility, motherland and strange land.
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