Metamorphosis as a means of imagery interpretation of the eroticized human body in the English modernist fiction (a conceptual study)

Ukraine, ID LLCE2016-359;        Nowadays the representations of the body in a variety of discourses are analyzed in the humanities from various aspects as a socio-cultural phenomenon, and the focus of research is often on human body transformations (McEvilley; Antosa; Niederwimmer). The object of this research is the image of eroticized body in modernist fiction. It aims at the study of the specific ways of imagery conceptualization of the eroticized body in modernist poetics and metamorphosis as one of the cognitive mechanisms of image formation that implies change, movement or transformation and the relation of conversion between the contiguous literary images. The aim is realized with the methods of semantic and cognitive types of linguistic analyses (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Kövesces 2002) applied in the corpus of English modernist prose. The results obtained demonstrated that in the imagery system of the literary texts of the period the eroticized body is depicted by means of imagery transformation. The metamorphosis is applied by the author in the course of the image formation process to signify the highest level of realization of female sexuality and sensuality that serve as the stimulus of transformations in the imagery space of the literary text. The direction of image conversion is substantiated by the symbolic meaning of both source and target images of metamorphosis.

Key words: literary text, conceptual metaphor, cognitive poetics, corporeality, imagery

References:                 

Kövecses, Z. (2002). Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford. OUP.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago. University of Chicago Press.

Lawrence D. H. (2011). Lady Chatterley's lover. NY: Empire Books.