Записки з романо-германської філології (Apr 2015)
Semantic and cognitive aspects of imagery interpretation of HUMAN BODY UNDER THE POWER in the English Postmodernist fiction (on J. Fowles’s “The Collector”)
Abstract
The research focuses on the semantic and cognitive analyses of the specific ways of conceptualization and cognitive mechanisms accompanying the formation of the image of the BODY UNDER THE POWER in the literary semantics. The material of the research is the text of English postmodernist writer – J. Fowles “The Collector”. The methodological basis is the theory of conceptual metaphor and implies reconstruction of conceptual metaphors in the text. This study focuses on the specificity of language representation of the socialized body, mainly the image of the body under the power in a literary text of postmodern period, the linguistic aspects of which have not been the subject of a special analysis, which reinforces the relevance of the research. The object of the study is the ways of conceptualizing HUMAN BODY UNDER THE POWER in the narrative space of the British postmodernist prose. The subject of the study are fragments of a literary text, which explicitly and implicitly reveal the image of the BODY UNDER THE POWER, the priorities of its reinterpretation. The material of the research is based on literary text "The Collector" by the English representative of postmodernism in literature, John Fowles [22]. The purpose of the study is to identify the specific figurative interpretation of the BODY UNDER THE POWER and the features of the discourse of power through the discourse of embodiment in postmodernist poetics. The choice of the literary text is conditioned by the fact that the novel views emodiment in a specific postmodernist mode as the plane of unfolding social codes, in particular, the body as an object of power finds bright and figurative representation. In the study we employed the method of semantic-cognitive analysis, which involves reconstructing conceptual metaphors in the text. The methodological base of the research is the theory of conceptual metaphor of J. Lakoff and M. Johnson. Thus, the image of the body under the power in novel "The Collector" by J. Fowles is primarily construed through the activation of conceptual metaphor HUMAN BODY UNDER THE POWER IS A BUTTERFLY, which foregrounds the semantics of a helpless, frightened, body devoid of will on the one hand, and the body as a precious object of property on the other hand, which in reality implies a paradoxical depreciation of the body for those who have the power, its loss of anthropological qualities, because nothing human except the body itself interests the rulers, and the realization of the value of body by its owner is associated with the fear of death and the reluctance to leave the world. It determines the specific artistic representation of embodiment in the novel, which condemns blind, destructive and uncontrolled power aimed at mindless and meaningless possessiveness. The power over the body which takes on a distorted, pathological form, figuratively represents such modes of power as dictatorship, totalitarianism, which forced people to feel like "an insect", which nothing can protect.
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