[Download] "Cognition and Representation in Wordsworth's London." by Studies in Romanticism # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Cognition and Representation in Wordsworth's London.
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 222 KB
Description
1. Introduction THIS PAPER IS PARTLY AN EXPLORATION OF SPATIAL PROCESSING IN LITERARY cognition and partly an analysis of Wordsworth's mimetic theory and practice in Book 7 of The Prelude, "Residence in London." The yoking of these topics is less arbitrary than it may seem, though it was, I admit, fortuitous that I picked up the Wordsworth straight upon the heels of Stephen Levinson's definitive new treatise on Space in Language and Cognition. (1) Having Levinson's study in the background no doubt helped to foreground for me what is on any view a remarkable passage of spatial representation early in Book 7, in which Wordsworth bids London, "Rise up" and "Before me flow!" (149-50) and then proceeds to escort his readers (note the shift to the first person plural pronoun at line 169) through the streets and districts of the city thus conjured. (2) This seventy-line imitation of the phenomenal experience of London is unusually thorough-going and consequently absorbing; the obliging reader feels, for the duration at least, in the midst and on the move, advancing through a streaming scene of buildings, people, and objects, with attention shifting here and there among clusters of visual and auditory images that give way one to the next in steady succession--much as they appear to do when one is really walking in the city. (3) The passage thus provides an exemplary instance of what cognitive linguists like Levinson call a body or driving tour, that is, a mental or linguistic representation of embodied movement through a spatial array, such as one pictures to oneself in wayfinding or speaks to another when giving directions. For obvious reasons, body tours and route descriptions tend to be scrupulously and single-mindedly realistic, and that Wordsworth's passage is no exception in this regard should suggest at once how exceptional it therefore is with respect not just to the bulk of his verse but indeed to the better part of English romantic verse in general. (4) By happy conjunction, then, I found myself possessed of a deviant text, a new descriptive apparatus, and two substantial and potentially related questions (and if that's not a recipe for a scholarly article, I don't know what is): first, how exactly does this or indeed any text work its mimetic magic in the mind of the reader? And second, what is the function and status of this and other orders of mimesis in Book 7 specifically and Wordsworth's poetics generally?