A Study Of The Animal Image Metaphors In Lu Hsun’s Novels From The Cognitive Perspective

Human’s rich imagination has an immeasurable function in meaning, understanding and reasoning. The present thesis intentionally applies two types of imaginative structures, metaphorical projection and image schema, to the analysis of the animal image metaphors in Lu Hsun’s novels.Lu Hsun’s novels are spiritual wealth in Chinese culture, which will in turn have an everlasting influence on it. Mr. Lu is good at using animals to symbolize and metaphorize his characters in the works in order to compliment or satirize different kinds of intellectuals in that society. During the literary creation, Mr. Lu has extensively and frequently made use of animals. So the present author chooses two kinds of animals in Lu Hsun’s novels as the objects of this study, i.e. wolf and dog, which are typical representatives of animals, and attempts to use conceptual metaphor and image schema theory to make a systemic comparative analysis of the image creation of the two animals.Through the comparative analysis of the two animals in texts, we have drawn three findings as follows:1. The wolf image and dog image respectively come from two opposite animal image systems which stand for two different kinds of intellectuals in Mr. Lu’s writing. The membership group of wolf image metaphorizes the intellectuals who have progressive thoughts, namely fighters in the spiritual world; while on the contrary, dog image stands for the slaved intellectuals.2. Based on the different features of wolf and dog, we have made the following classifications of their metaphorical images:wolf mainly metaphorizes:1)the rebels of the feudal code and the representative figure is the madman in the novel "The Story of a Madman’s Diary";2)the lonely and lost modern intellectuals and the representative figure is Wei Lien-shu in the novel of "The Misanthrope";3)the brave and resourceful intellectuals and the representative figure is Mei Chien Chih in the novel of "Forging the Sword"; the leading dog images include:the feudalism protectors such as Mr. Chao and madman’s elder brother in the "Story of A Madman’s Diary"; the lackeys and executioners of the reactionary government such as Third Uncle Hsia Mr. Kang in Medicine; the double-face intellectuals like Imitation Foreign Devil in "The True Story of Ah Q".3. From the comparative analysis of wolf images and dog images, a very important image schema is found between these two animal images:up-down schema. No matter through the comparison of external and internal features of wolf and dog in the real world, or making a contrast on the aspects of food, sound, wildness and freedom between wolf and dog in the novels as well as through comparison of the their different spirits, fates and Mr. Lu’s attitudes towards them, there all exists a universal cognitive mechanism, that is up-down schema.Due to the limitations of the author’s academic ability and the huge and dispersed language data, the thesis is unable to make an exhaustive research covering all the animals from the two opposite animal image systems. The author has unscrambled the establishment and operation of animal images from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and hopes that the thesis has a reference function for future studies.