The Body in Literature--论文代写范文精选

这将建立在康德的理论想象上面。和柯勒律治相比,约翰逊无法克服康德理论的形式主义。柯勒律治的想象力,提供了一个更好的基础研究意义,同时保持兼容约翰逊的思想和，以及更有价值的见解。下面的essay代写范文将进行详述。

Abstract

An inadequate grasp of the role of imagination has vitiated understanding of human cognition in western thinking. Extending a project initiated with George Lakoff in Metaphors we Live By (1980), Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind (1987) offers the claim that all thinking originates in bodily experience. A range of schemata formed during our early experience manipulating a physical world of surfaces, distances, and forces, lays the foundation of later, more abstract modes of thought. In presenting his argument, Johnson lays special stress on the qualities and dynamics of the image schemata, the (generally unnoticed) metaphoricity of the transformations underlying abstract thought, and the new significance that should be attributed to the imagination, which is the general term Johnson wishes to claim for the mental processes he expounds.
In this paper I draw attention to the importance of Johnson's insights for understanding literary response. In particular, I will show how a typical procedure of literary texts involves bringing to awareness image schemata of the kind that Johnson describes. At the same time, several problems in Johnson's account which limit its usefulness will also be examined: an undue reliance upon the spatial properties of schemata; a conflation of dead with live or poetic metaphors; and a neglect of other bodily influences on thought, especially kinaesthetic and affective aspects. These problems, for example, limit the usefulness of Johnson's attempt to build on Kant's theory of imagination. In comparison with Coleridge, who also attempted to build on Kant, Johnson is unable to overcome the formalism of Kant's theory. Coleridge's account of imagination, I will suggest, provides a better foundation for examining the bodily basis of meaning, while remaining compatible with Johnson's intentions and his more valuable insights.
 
Introduction

An inadequate grasp of the role of imagination has vitiated understanding of human cognition in western thinking. According to Mark Johnson, an "objectivist" tradition of thought from Descartes, through Kant to Frege has overlooked the pervasive structuring of our thought by a range of underlying metaphors. Extending a project initiated with George Lakoff in Metaphors we Live By (1980), Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind (1987) offers the claim that all thinking originates in bodily experience. A range of schemata formed during our early experience manipulating a physical world of surfaces, distances, and forces, lays the foundation of later, more abstract modes of thought. By extension and transformation such "image schemata," as Johnson terms them, determine the processes of rational and propositional thinking. In presenting his argument, Johnson lays special stress on the qualities and dynamics of the image schemata, the (generally unnoticed) metaphoricity of the transformations underlying abstract thought, and the new significance that should be attributed to the imagination, which is the general term Johnson wishes to claim for the mental processes he expounds.

Johnson's work has been largely overlooked so far by students of aesthetics and literary theory, despite the fact that Johnson centres his claims for a reinvigorated understanding of the imagination on Kant's account in the Critique of Judgement. In this paper I will draw attention to the importance of Johnson's insights for understanding literary response. In particular, I will show how a typical procedure of literary texts involves bringing to awareness image schemata of the kind that Johnson describes.1 At the same time, several problems in Johnson's account which limit its usefulness will also be examined: an undue reliance upon the spatial properties of schemata; a conflation of dead with live or poetic metaphors; and a neglect of other bodily influences on thought, especially kinaesthetic and affective aspects. These problems, for example, limit the usefulness of Johnson's attempt to build on Kant's theory of imagination. In comparison with Coleridge, who also attempted to build on Kant, Johnson is unable to overcome the formalism of Kant's theory. Coleridge's account of imagination, I will suggest, provides a better foundation for examining the bodily basis of meaning, while remaining compatible with Johnson's intentions and his more valuable insights. First, I will offer a brief outline of Johnson's project and point to some of its limitations.

The Body in the Mind

Our bodily interactions with the world around us involve repeated patterns of experience, which, following earlier thinkers such as Kant and Bartlett, Johnson terms schemata.2 These in turn provide the basis for structuring thought at more abstract levels. "I call these patterns 'image schemata'," says Johnson,

because they function primarily as abstract structures of images. They are gestalt structures, consisting of parts standing in relations and organized into unified wholes, by means of which our experience manifests discernible order. When we seek to comprehend this order and to reason about it, such bodily based schemata play a central role. (Johnson, 1987, xix)
The primary focus of Johnson's discussion throughout the book is on the more abstract level at which the schemata operate: he shows how pervasive such schemata are in everyday thought with examples such as "purposes are destinations," and "theories are buildings" (these phrases are only summary statements of elaborate and extensive structures embedded within thought).

Although Johnson offers some account of the origin of schemata in the infant's bodily experience (13, 15-16), bodily correlates of meaning in later thought are not explored. While he discusses abstract thought at one point as having "emerged" from bodily experience, he also describes it in the same paragraph as a refinement upon bodily experience which "ignores much of what goes into our reasoning" (5). Thus Johnson is perhaps ambiguous on this issue, as one of the book's reviewers noted (Wallace, 1988): it is unclear whether he wishes to claim that all meaning remains within the context of bodily experience, or whether meaning emerges from bodily experience by projection and transformation.

Johnson emphasizes that image schemata are figurative, and analog and non-propositional in nature (xx). Schemata should not be seen as either rich, mental images (concrete pictures in the mind); nor are they abstract concepts or propositional structures (23). In fact, his preferred term for understanding how such schemata operate is "metaphor." He argues that the way in which thought is organized is through "metaphorical elaborations of image schemata" which "give rise to form and structure in our experience and understanding" (73). Thus, the OUT or CONTAINER schema which is spatial in origin, projects onto more abstract entities in a statement such as "Tell me your story again, but leave out the minor details" (34). Whereas the original sense of this schema involved a physical object being located "outside," here it is an abstract or logical entity.

Johnson's discussion of the underlying logic of the passage is illuminating. As he points out, the dominant idea motivating the clerk's understanding of his response turns out to be metaphoric: Johnson states this as "PHYSICAL APPEARANCE IS A PHYSICAL FORCE." Johnson shows how this metaphor, and derivatives from it, shape the clerk's discourse. One implication of the clerk's account is the notion that "ANYONE USING A FORCE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE EFFECTS OF THAT FORCE" (8). This and other hidden assumptions of his response propel the clerk towards a violent construal of his predicament. Either it requires an act of violence towards himself, suppressing his feelings of sexual desire, resentment, and humiliation -- which is the path he actually seems to adopt -- or it requires a sexual assault upon the offending woman.

Johnson's discussion in Chapter 1 shows both the strengths and the weaknesses of his approach. While he brings to light a complex metaphoric structure underlying the clerk's discourse, several important questions that have a bearing on Johnson's project are left unconsidered. The analysis overlooks the clerk's motive for construing his response along the metaphoric pathways that Johnson has described, as well as other types of bodily experience that also underlie the clerk's response. Johnson might argue that he is concerned only with the linguistic structuring of the clerk's story, but there is nothing inevitable in the construction given to it by the clerk. Other forces are at work beside the metaphoric which help to determine his discourse. In his book, Johnson sometimes gives the impression that the metaphoric structures that he analyses constitute the basic level at which thought is shaped (for instance, the last part of his discussion of Kant, p. 169, or the definition of non-objectivist meaning given in italics on p. 174). But to understand why particular metaphoric structures appear in thought requires Johnson's account to be supplemented by an examination of the forces that bring them into play in a given context. This in turn bears on Johnson's interest later in the book (in Chapter 4) in how metaphors are created and understood. The clerk's tale illustrates this basic problem.

In certain respects, the poem seems to depend upon a ready understanding of the term "world," which has a sense similar to its meaning in a phrase such as "man of the world." The poem invites us to participate in an act of imagination in which any approval we may feel for the "man of the world" is overthrown. It is possible to see a spatial metaphor, in Johnson's sense, helping to organize a reader's understanding of this shift in sense. A comment that something is "with us" implies physical proximity; but "too much with us" seems to connote the breaching of some boundary of the self, suggesting that "The world" has impinged on the inner terrain of the self. A corresponding idea is offered in the fourth line, where the heart transfers out of the self in being "given away." In this sense the poem deploys Johnson's CONTAINMENT metaphor (21-3) to striking effect: we see the self as a container whose integrity we have violated. Similarly, "Getting and spending" implies a transfer of goods inwards and money outwards across the boundary of the self. The poem alerts us to the endangered integrity of the self through its imaginative and novel use of the metaphor: we find ourselves implicated in an act of self-betrayal in which "we" (all readers of the poem) have participated.

One significant function of a poem may lie in bringing to consciousness the hidden spatial metaphors that, as Johnson points out, determine the structure and assumptions of much of our everyday thinking. Our normal assumption is perhaps to think of ourselves as "in the world," or to approve of the "man of the world," whose interchange with the material and social aspects of the world is managed in a competent and urbane manner. Wordsworth unsettles this familiar notion by telling us that this world is in us, with harmful consequences; in other words, the container shifts from being the world to being the self. And in this way the poem also seems to suggest that a proper distance of self from the world would protect the self's true interests, although this notion is not explored in the poem explicitly (in the remainder of the poem Wordsworth is more concerned to rehabilitate our relationship with nature).

It is possible to see the container metaphor, then, with its implied derivation from bodily experience, as fundamental to understanding how these lines of the poem function. Other modes of bodily experience, however, are also likely to play a significant role in response to the poem. In this respect, Johnson's account of imagination falls short: being based primarily on spatial accounts of "embodied" thinking it cannot encompass the sensory and affective dimensions that also influence literary response. Yet these aspects of response have as much right to be considered a part of imagination as metaphoric schemata, if the views of Coleridge (perhaps the most important exponent of the imagination) are accepted. Nor does this richer view mean imagination "in the Romantic sense of unfettered creative fancy" (194). As Coleridge argued, poetry is organized and systematic: it has "a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes" (Coleridge, 1983, i.9). Among other aspects, the diction and the affective structuring of poetry contribute to its imaginative power in the sense claimed by Coleridge.

What Kant describes here, however, involves the symbolic mode of thought: it works to defamiliarize its object (or tenor), just as Wordsworth's poem unsettles our standard notion of being "in the world." In Johnson's book, however, he is primarily concerned with the level of thought at which familiar objects and processes are construed (purposes are destinations, theories are buildings). In these instances no other terms are available or occur to mind; no novel meanings are intended. All such terms are "reach-me-down" constructions. While Johnson does mention in passing how such conventional constructions can be invigorated, making dead into live metaphors (e.g., "He prefers massive Gothic theories covered with gargoyles," p. 106), he neither distinguishes adequately the two kinds of metaphor (which have radically different effects), nor does he consider the possibility that many poetic metaphors, unlike the "Gothic theories" example, do not spring from conventional metaphor. (As Neill (1989) pointed out, Johnson also has difficulty accounting for some conventional metaphors such as "Sally is a block of ice," or "John is bitter," perhaps because they lack the spatial qualities of his standard examples.)

More problematic, Johnson's appeal to Kant bypasses the issue of Kant's formalism. Central to Kant's Critique is the disinterested function of the imagination involved in response to both the beautiful and the sublime. For example, it is a condition of the beautiful, says Kant, that the responder "can find as reason for his delight no personal conditions to which his own subjective self might alone be party" (6). And in the case of the sublime, the mind conceives its powers in purely formal terms as transcending any powers in nature whatever (e.g.28). The formalism of Kant's account here is integral, not incidental. Johnson attempts to discount it by denying the problem: there is no gap, he asserts, between the formal and material, the rational and the bodily (168). Where Kant saw an unbridgeable gap, concealing the mystery of how schemata come into being (Kant's notorious observation in the first Critique is cited on p. 156), Johnson wishes to see a continuum (170). This is to elide the problem, however, not to resolve it. If a better theory of imagination is to be founded upon bodily meaning, as Johnson proposes, some agency that acts both at the levels of mind and body must be found. Rethinking the disinterest on which Kant insisted offers one possible starting point: it is, moreover, one of the points which distinguishes the theory of imagination that Coleridge formulated, partly out of his dissatisfaction with Kant. In Coleridge's account feelings and the self find a central place.（essay代写)
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