A Study Of The Other In Lord Jim In Light Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory And Conceptual Blending Theory

Lord Jim is one of the most representative novels by the famous British writer of the Victorian era Joseph Conrad(1957-1924),whose international fame owes much to the enticing plot and the subtle and indirect expression of ideas through the artistic use of language.So,since its publication in 1900,the novel has attracted increasing attention from many critics who study it from various perspectives.Until now,studies on this novel cover a wide range including the themes of imperialism,colonialism,cultural studies,morality and ethics,self-construction,etc.,while studies on artistic form are mainly centered around setting of space,repetition,impressionism,symbolism,narrative strategies,rhetoric devices,etc.In Lord Jim,Conrad adopts many metaphors for portraying nature and characters to present his innermost feelings and ideas in an indirect way.Conrad has abundant contacts with various natural phenomena and people from different countries in his seafaring career with feet landing on Asia,Africa and Latin America.By putting his sailing experience as the experiential basis of cognition,he creates rich and vivid metaphors in Lord Jim,and by the adoption of these metaphors,he transmits his deep consciousness in this novel.This thesis tries to analyze the metaphors applied in Lord Jim by referring to the conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory and by combing the theory of the Other.It hopes to uncover the consciousness of taking nature,non-westerners and women as the Other in the novel as projected by these metaphors.Conceptual metaphor is used to adopt a concrete and familiar object to construe another abstract and obscure thing on the basis of experiential realism and similarity principle.According to human physical experience,the similarities of two different cognitive domains are captured and then one concrete domain and one abstract domain are related.By taking the former as the source domain and the latter as the target domain,one can understand and experience the abstract thing in terms of theconcrete one.In this sense,the target domain is made clearer and more understandable by projecting the schema which is based on the experience in the source domain to the corresponding elements in the target domain.In this thesis,conceptual metaphor theory is adopted to analyze the metaphors about the changeable and uncontrollable maritime climate,and the alien and unfamiliar natural Oriental environment in order to obtain a clearer comprehension of nature and the Orient.From this sort of analysis,this thesis finds that nature is depicted as the strange countervailing power to fight for the dominant position against man and is finally compelled to be the defeated Other.Conceptual metaphor theory is also used to expound the metaphors about non-westerners and women that are distinctive from westerners as well as difficult to comprehend to westerners.From this analysis,this thesis reaches the conclusion that non-westerners and women are taken as the Other.Conceptual blending theory comes to the fore when the cross-domain of conceptual metaphor is found to be one part of conceptual blending.Conceptual blending is not only used to help readers understand strange things in terms of familiar ones,but also used to help deepen the understanding of the familiar things or used to analyze the metaphorical connotations of works on discourse level.When those metaphors about non-westerners,women and Jim are analyzed in light of conceptual blending theory,non-westerners and the objects they are compared to are taken as two input spaces,women and the objects they are compared to as two input spaces,and Jim and the objects he is compared to are also taken as two input spaces.Then in the three groups,the related components in two input spaces are mapped to each other and the common abstract structure extracted from the elements of the two input spaces are projected to the generic space in the meantime.Finally,in the blended space of the three groups there respectively forms an emergent structure which transmits that people of other races and women are always unpleasant and inferior while westerners,represented by Jim,are always agreeable and acceptable or even as perfect as gods.It is also the connotation that all the metaphors about non-westerners,women and Jim in Lord Jim convey.In the novel,white males are portrayed as the excellent norm both in appearance and personalities,and this is fullof the consciousness of taking non-westerners and women as the Other.This thesis holds that in Lord Jim,nature,non-westerners and women are taken as the Other,to bring the various,complex and subtle themes of this excellent work clearer to the readers and critics.Such a finding owes much to the use of conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory in its analysis of metaphors implying the sense of the Other.This thesis can provide a new perspective for the analysis of Lord Jim,with which the studies of Joseph Conrad can be enriched.