Possessing Or Being Possessed:the Cognitive Predicament Of Scholar Group In Possession:A Romance

A.S.Byatt(1936-)is both a writer and critic,particularly adept to create academic fiction and campus characters.Her masterpiece Possession: A Romance tells the story about a group of scholars who rely on written documents to reveal historical mystery in the Victorian age so as to change the face of scholarship.As an academic novel,Possession gives high priority to characters of scholar group,who embodies Byatt’s critical views,literature concepts and historical perception.The related studies home and abroad mainly analyze individual characters or female existence predicament to reflect external problems like academic system or social and cultural trends.Few attention has been paid to internal problems of characters like mental states and minds.However,the author Byatt repeatedly emphasizes that Possession has particular concerns on human’s thinking process.Therefore,the thesis adopts narrative projection,metaphor and blends as cognitive instruments to help explain character’s cognitive habit and conceptual structure in a bid to further grasp their inner world and thinking process.The thesis analyzes scholars’ interactional relationship with their objects under research by the medium of words to show that they possess objects with different cognitive models while self-cognition is impinged by objects.It reveals the cognitive relationship between scholars and objects as possessing-possessed model and reflects Byatt’s profound insight towards symbiotic and antagonistic relationship between writers and critics.First,the thesis analyzes schematic projection,metaphorical projection and intertextual projection as cognitive models for young scholars,academic upstarts and traditional pedants in understanding their objects to show respective possessive desires in various types.Then,the thesis discusses the impingement of objects on scholars by projection from target space and blended space back to source space,which makes them lose independent physical existence,normal personality and independent thinking.It leads to scholars’ blurred self-cognition at last.On this basis,the thesis talks about reconciliation between scholars and their objects.The three types of scholars in the fiction are aware of subjectivity of their cognitive understanding and desert their possessive desire.At last,they correct self-cognition and form symbiotic relationship with their objects.The thesis concludes that critics’ cognitive understanding towards writers will influence their self-cognition,reflected as possessing-possessed relationship.Byatt emphasizes that since every kind of cognitive model has its limitation,critics in the fiction need admit that they cannot reach full understanding of the things to get back to right self-cognition,which is also the solution for cognitive predicament.