Linguopoetics of corporality in literary texts of English modernism and postmoderism

Abstract

The article focuses on the study of linguistic manifestations of corporality in literary texts of English modernism and postmodernism, which envisages the analysis of literary corporality as a linguopoetic category. As a product of cognition and literary conceptualization of human bodily experience in the dialectic unity of its somatic-physiological, sensory, psychic, and mental facets, this category is formed in compliance with the author’s aesthetic purport in the context of an epoch, being manifested in literary text through its verbal, imagistic, and narrative semiotic means. Given the assumption that a literary text is a multilevel verbal unity, comprising a complicated system of codes, the research applies a cognitive-semiotic approach to the analysis of literary corporality. Such an approach fostered revealing the specificity of multi-dimensional textual representation of literary corporality, including a fictionalized body as a narrative construal, with regard to a set of mental structures relevant to literary interpretation of corporality. The authorial construal of fictionalized body incorporates three dimensions: conceptual, narrative-semiotic, and verbal. This construal is represented in the narrative by its three varieties: sensory-emotional, eroticized, and socialized bodies. They are marked by narrative patterns which specify linguopoetic features of corporality in literary texts of English modernism and postmodernism, related to its conceptual, narrative-semiotic, and verbal manifestations.

Keywords

• cognitive poetics
• cognitive semiotics
• construal
• constructing
• linguopoetics
• linguopoetic category
• modernism
• fictionalized body
• postmodernism
• literary text
• literary corporality