Metamorphosis as a means of imagery interpretation of the eroticized human body in the English modernist fiction (a conceptual study)

Ukraine, ID LLCE2015-109

Human body has been the focus of attention of multiple scientific paradigms (both natural sciences and the humanities) since ancient times. Nowadays the representations of the body in a variety of discourses are analyzed in the humanities from various aspects as a socio-cultural phenomenon.

It was observed that in the modernist period the topic of the human body and corporeal perception of the world gets noticeable foregrounding, that finds reflection in the literary semantics. The aspects of the human body accentuated in modernist poetics embrace sensory, socialized, eroticized ones, etc.

The object of this research is the image of eroticized body in modernist fiction. It aims at the study of the means of the literary interpretation of the image of eroticized body in modernist literary prose. The research focuses on the study of the specific ways of imagery conceptualization of the eroticized body in modernist poetics and metamorphosis as one of the cognitive mechanisms of image formation that implies change, movement or transformation and the relation of conversion between the contiguous literary images.

   The aim is realized with the methods of semantic and cognitive types of linguistic analyses applied, which imply the process of reconstruction of conceptual metaphors in the text (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Kövesces 2002).

The material of the research is the texts D.H. Lawrence’s novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (2011).

The results obtained demonstrated that in the imagery system of D.H. Lawrence’s novel the eroticized body is depicted by means of the transformation of the image of a fish into a kittiwake and of an ocean/sea into a woman (female body). The metamorphosis is applied by the author in the course of the image formation process to signify the highest level of realization of female sexuality and sensuality that serve as the stimulus of transformations in the imagery space of the literary text. The direction of image conversion is substantiated by the symbolic meaning of both source and target images of metamorphosis.