Cognitive Analysis Of The City Image In Joyce Carol Oates’ Novel Them

City is the place where most people live in the world now because of urbanization as a result of industrialization and modernization.In the novel them,Oates describes the Wendall family’s life in the city of Detroit to show the readers who the group of people called “them” are and how they struggle in the city.The relationship between city and people is complicated: there is a causal relation of city evolution and people’s life,and the people’s life helps reshape the stereotype of American industrial city.The image of the city of Detroit is the key element for the understanding of the relationship between the city and people.This thesis studies the relationship between city and people by analyzing the image of the city and examining the forming of it in the book and in people’s conception,and explores the image of the city in people’s mind so that we can rethink human thoughts,culture,economy,science and technology,mode of social development through the inheritance of the spirit of city culture in the quest of human survival crisis and its social roots.In order to make the abstract city image clear,many metaphors are used by Oates in the book.Cognitive Linguistics perspective,Image Schema and Conceptual Metaphor in particular,is used to analyze the city image in this thesis.First,the content of the whole book is combed through and 57 which contain images of the city formed in ordinary workers lived in the city of Detroit are found and categorized according to the different topics they are about.Then,the 57 of them are analyzed using image schema and conceptual metaphor theories to abstract the metaphors about the city image.After that,the metaphors are put into groups and analyzed to conclude the city image of Detroit in the cognition of white workers who account for the biggest part of population in Detroit,so as to resolve both physical and mental influence of a rapidly developing city on people living in it.The formation of the city image dwells in every aspect of people’s life in it,and people also forges and changes the city at the same time.By analyzing metaphors from the novel them,the image of the city of Detroit turns out to be suffocating,dangerous,hopeless and not suitable for people to live in.The city influenced people both physically and psychologically.To “them”,the working class city residents,Detroit has no place that can be called home;they are deprived of their hope and the city never makes responses to their expectations no matter how hard they try.There is no harmony between the city and human beings in them.They want to escape,to get out of the city but couldn’t find the way,and they realize that there is no other place for them to live than the city and they are not able to leave the city after all.The only thing they can do is to influence and even change the city they live in with the however weak power they own,and here lies the hope of harmony between the city and the people.