| This dissertation, on W. H. Auden's mind and body metaphors in the Collected Poems, tries to answer a question Auden saw behind every poem: “Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?” The answer involves analyzing figurative language, and recent findings in cognitive linguistics make it easier to re-examine how poems “work.” Insights from this field enable refined analyses of metaphors. This study draws on metaphor research by cognitive linguists such as Mark Turner, Gilles Fauconnier, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Eve Sweetser, and Joseph Grady, because their findings indicate ways to identify nonarbitrary patterns in Auden's metaphors. After a short introduction, I define central terms such as metaphor, domains, mapping, and conceptual integration in chapter one. In chapter two, I trace Auden's use of three spatial metaphors: body-as-habitat, body-as-landscape, and body-as-city. The “opaque enigmas” Auden called our bodies in the poem, “In Sickness and In Health,” turn out to be represented in some very interesting ways. Based on data from many texts, I demonstrate that conceptualizing the body in terms of organized spatial structures reveals constraints on, and motivations for, such mappings. In chapter three, I show how Auden's attention to body language creates a body that is not the target but the source of metaphors for the mind. Because comprehending body language requires having what developmental psychologists call a “theory of mind,” we normally hold that a body communicates to us something about the mind it houses. Thus, body becomes source as mind becomes target in Auden's mind-as-body conceptualizations. In chapter four, Auden's habit of turning mind and body into personified agents is analyzed in light of what cognitive scientists call our “intentional stance” in the world. I reveal that Auden unites body and mind by choosing personification to represent them both. However, given the strong metonymic links between people and bodies, personified source domains are rather unique in nature. Refining current views of personification, I posit a conceptual integration model that accounts for Auden's tropes. In chapter five, before discussing the future of cognitive poetics in general, I address particular concerns readers may have with a cognitive poetic approach to Auden by arguing that such an approach reveals how consistent and systematic Auden's mind and body metaphors really are. |
