摘 要

埃德加·爱伦·坡是文学史上最伟大的诗人之一。其诗歌大多构建了一个既唯美又悲情的诡异国度，具有超前的神秘性、梦幻性、心理性，沉浸于爱伦坡的诗歌王国是一种独特的美学体验与心灵的激荡。现代以来，对爱伦坡作品的解读逐渐多样化。文学作品的跨学科研究受到越来越的重视，用语言学的理论研究爱伦坡的诗歌不失为一种新的方法。本文通过分析十余首爱伦坡作品中主题为美丽女子死亡的诗歌，结合认知语言学中意象图式的理论和各类意象图式的定义，并对其中《安娜贝尔·李》、《尤娜路姆》、《睡美人》三首进行重点分析，从认知层面上分析意象图式在主题烘托、情感表达、结构塑造上的作用，以便读者更好理解爱伦坡诗歌及其诗歌原理，进一步对爱伦坡诗歌进行跨学科现代阐释。

关键词：爱伦坡诗歌；美丽女子死亡；意象图式；认知；诗歌原理

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the greatest poets in literary history. Most of his poems create a beautiful and sorrowful kingdom of strangeness. Aware of the mysterious, dreamy, and psychological elements, readers can indulge themselves in the special aesthetic experience and soul excitement. Since modern era, the explications on Poe’s work have been diversified. When more attention has been given to the analysis of literary work with cross-disciplinary aspect, it is a new field to interpret Poe’s poems with theories of cognitive linguistics. By summarizing more than ten poems whose motif is the death of a beautiful woman and combining with the perspective of image schemata in cognitive linguistics and definitions of image schemas, the paper aims to, from a cognitive level, elucidate the function of image schemata in theme presentation, sensibility expression, and structural establishment after selective analysis of three poems named “Annabel Lee”, “Ulalume”, “The Sleeper” so that the readers can foster a deeper understanding on Poe’s poems and his poetic principles , and finally further modern interpretation of his poems interdisciplinarily.

Key Words: Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, the death of a beautiful woman, image schemata, cognition, poetic principle

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Edgar Allen Poe and His Theory on Poetry Writing 1

1.2 Image Schemata and its Application in Literature 2

1.3 Framework of the Thesis 3

2 Analysis of Image Schemata in Poe’s Poems 5

2.1 The Common Image Schemas in Twelve Poe’s Poems 5

2.2 Elaboration of Image Schemas in Three Poems 6

2.2.1 Image Schemas in “Annabel Lee” 7

2.2.2 Image Schemas in “Ulalume” 7

2.2.3 Image Schemas in “The Sleeper” 8

3 Image Schemata’s Contribution to Poe’s Poems 10

3.1 The Correlation Analysis of Image Schemas in Poems and the Motif about a Beautiful Woman’s Death 10

3.2 The Effect Created by Those Image Schemas 11

3.3 The Function of Image Schemata to Poe’s Writing Principle 12

4 Conclusions 13

References 14

Acknowledgements 15

The Interpretation of the Theme of a Beautiful Woman’s Death in Edgar Allan Poe’s Poems from the Perspective of Image Schemata

1 Introduction

At the beginning, this paper will give background information on the life of Edgar Allan Poe and his poetic principles. After presenting a brief literature review about recent research of his work and an introduction of image schemata in cognitive linguistics, the paper takes the feasibility of interpretation on Edgar Poe’s poems from cognitive level into consideration, and then the thesis will be stated at the end of this part.

1.1 Edgar Allan Poe and His Theory on Poetry Writing

Edgar Allan Poe, for a long time after his death, remained the most disputable and severely misunderstood literary figure in the field of American literature. Written in an eccentric, gothic and fantasized style，the villain-looked man was on the diatribe in his time when the main stream of literature was Transcendentalism. Till 20^th century, the thriving Symbolism school, aiming at writing pure poems, establishes the great reputation of Poe. Though few Chinese literary critics comment on Poe, cultural value of his work maintains vitality and the unknown parts of his work are worthy of exploration. Poe was the forerunner of detective story with a highly-polished style, was a master of short stories, and was unique in poetry creation. In his three-stage poem-writing, the first period was mainly about the memory of childhood and melancholy and bitterness on the lost pure love by the form of dreams. In the midst, the imagination on the uncertainty about the future and meditation on death were took as principal. And the final stage, with heritage and deep exploration of early work, Poe penned the sphere of psychological insanity and schizophrenia. However, his obsession on the search of a beautiful woman’s death never waned. The beauty, named as Annabel Lee, Ulalume or Lenore, died of natural or man-made disasters, was often mourned in a series of poems tinted in a dreamy, hallucinatory color. In other words, it is a craving for maternal love and the comprehension of death that originally spur his composition. Suffering from the abandon by his natural father and the early death of mother, though adopted by Mr. John Allan（Shen, 2017）, Poe didn’t receive much warmth from family and the sought solace in literature world. By applying unique images and expressions, he revealed his thoughts on life——isolation in spiritual sphere, escape from self, early awareness of death and crave for ideal beauty (Cao,2013). As for his poetic theory, Poe was opposed to “the heresy of the didactic” and called for “pure” poetry, chiefly aiming to producing a feeling of beauty that whatever the kind is, should excite the sensitive soul to tears. Thus melancholy is the most legitimate of all the poetic tones.

1.2Image Schemata and its Application in Literature

Appreciating the poems written by Edgar Allan Poe that crosses the boundary between literature and linguistics, the scholars all over the world explored it from many perspectives. But over the past five years, due to the thriving literary circles, many researchers start to analyze his work with cross-disciplinary methods. The overseas researches about poems and short stories of Edgar Allan Poe recently are very inspiring. One of them representatively ponder the psychological consequences between the early death of the poet's mother and female characters in his stories by means of Freudian theory (Obaid, 2016), which further the study of Poe in psychology. And scholars also search for extraterrestrial beauty in his poems (Simovic. S, 2016).Luckily, domestic scholars’ studies flourish on it. In the part of its translation, and redemption of his cosmology and artistic view(Cao，2009) the latest Chinese version of many poems come to readers (Cao, 2016). Also, the meditation on his death motif, beauty images and horrible effects, sometimes compared with ancient Chinese poetry, expands the study(Ren，2011). In addition, owing to the Poe’s distinctive philosophy of beauty , a number of them study on it in terms of aestheticism, Poe’s aesthetic interest can be sensed by understanding his the mingle of dream, gloom and holy beauty (Zhu，2014). Besides, modernist mental crises (Zhu，2010)seem to be predicted by Poe. Last but not least, his unique space writing was discussed(Shu，2018) from the ＂spatial practices＂,＂the representations of space＂and ＂spaces of representation＂of his poetry, which spurs me to probe into the construction of this space from cognitive level. The innovation part of the paper is that it sees the cognitive field of Poe’s poems is still beyond exploration. Moreover, thanks to the development of cognitive psychology, and with the achievements of George Lakeoff, Mark Johnson and Li Fuyin, the Chinese Professor who publishes the elucidation of image schemata, progress of cognitive linguistics paves way for literature analysis.

Image schema ,as an important concept of cognitive linguistics, according to Mark Johnson , is a recurring，dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our experience．(Johnson，1987) The experience is actually shaped by physical actions in some space of material world(Lakoff amp; Johnson，1999).Therefore, an image schema links both cognitive and conceptual organization. From interactive experience to the formation of concepts and categories, two play a key role——image schemata and metaphorical projections (Johnson，1987). Even though metaphor is more discussed in literature about its rhetoric effects than image schema, they are inseparable for cognition (Li,).

Given the plausibility and possibility of research, the paper aims to apply the image schema defined by Johnson in Poe’s poems. For the instance of containment schema (Johnson，1987) in “Annabel Lee”, narrator’s beloved was “in her tomb by the side of the sea”(Cao，2013) , and that hints a container image with which a concept of death is connected. Some similar patterns related to images and emotions are also found in other poems. Hence, the image schemata, formed by metaphor, are primary codes for us to understand and grasp the organization. The kind of perspective is accessible to literary studies.