Incarnation As A Means To Generate Meaning

Incarnation, as a religious concept, refers to the entering of God into human history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth (the name of an old place in Palestine). But it is also used in literature, either conferring a living feature upon language or as a way of epiphany conveying abstract ideas of ordinary objects or translating a traditional literary work into a specialized form. As a literary technique, incarnation plays an important role in literary creation. This study attempts to analyze the roles of incarnation in William Wordsworth's long autobiographical poem The Prelude from the point view of modern hermeneutics. Chapter One examines the philosophic and religious contexts in which Wordsworth's idea of incarnation was formed. From the perspective of philosophy, several philosophers have some major influence on the formation of Wordsworth's incarnational poetics, although the extent of their influence is different. First, Shelling's idealist idea of nature had some influence upon the idea of Wordsworth's pantheistic nature. Second, Wordsworth's poetic imagination is resonant with Spinoza's third way of knowing. Third, because of his disillusionment about French Revolution and the loss of his relatives, Wordsworth turned to Kant's morality in his later years, and duty became the keynote of his thought. To Wordsworth, "ethics" is incarnational and opposed to the representational and an adequate morality will compensate for an inadequate system of representation. Finally, Hegel took the religious incarnation as "the focal point of dialectic of Spirit coming to consciousness and realizing itself in the world," and Wordsworth applied this principle to the establishment of his poetic incarnation. From the point view of religion, Wordsworth's incarnation is connected with English Anglicanism. As a middle way between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, Anglicanism compromises the two extremes, taking into account both the transcendental origin and the earthly incarnation in a flexible way. Wordsworth, being identified with Anglicanism, settled his incarnation on the bases of reality, and distinguished it from that of medieval theology. Chapter Two studies Wordsworth's incarnational idea about the relation between language and thought. In the Middle Ages in Europe, such Scholastic philosophers as Augustine interpreted God as the word in our language. To these people, word was not the tool for our thought but living things in our life. Thus word was promoted to the position of ontology, and became the basis for everything in the world. Modern hermeneutics in the 20th century further strengthened the ancient notion of incarnate language. For example, Gadamer believes that language is not a delimited realm of the speakable, against which other realms that are unspeakable might stand. Rather, language is all encompassing. Wilhelm von Humboldts also insists that every language should be a point of view of the world, not only because tradition is located in language, but also because language is a way of thinking and reasoning. Wordsworth inherits this tradition and believes that word is an active living thing; otherwise it would become the counter-spirit. Incarnation in The Prelude is equally refracted in other aspects besides language. "Spots of time" is a very useful means to generate meanings. Chapter Three begins with Wordsworth's own definition of "spots of time"; then, in the second section of this chapter I will trace the development of this notion in history. After that, I will classify two main kinds of "spots of time" in The Prelude: the "spots of time" with the sense of weight of ages and the "spots of time" of supernaturalism. The former shows the poet's worry and anxiety about human life, but their forms to express these feelings are supernatural; the latter expresses the poet's dream and illusion, but they have their firm realistic bases; and for the "spots of time" with both the supernatural and realistic forms, what they illustrate must be set...