'According to my bond': King Lear and re-cognition

Abstract

The theory of cognitive metaphor, applied in an analysis of King Lear's opening scene, shows that the scene's figurative language depends upon metaphoric projection from the schemata — skeletalised structures of knowledge — of BALANCE and LINKS into the abstractions of filial love and family relationships. The metaphors arising from the BALANCE schema, in particular, are organised into a scenario, an interpretive framework, of financial accounting. Lear understands his relationships with his daughters in terms of the debits and credits of fiscal accounts; the Fool identifies him as 'an 0 without a figure'; Regan and Goneril destroy their father by the very numbers he so relishes. Cordelia tries and fails to get Lear to 'recognise' parental love and filial duty in terms of the LINKS schema, beginning with language interpretable within both ('I love you according to my bond', where 'bond' is both a financial obligation and a linking medium). Lear must learn to understand the world in terms of LINKS through action, most strikingly portrayed when he strips off his clothes and joins Tom o'Bedlam in nakedness. We understand this and other dramatic action, the plot structure, and the play's other abstract elements through the same cognitive apparatus that we use to understand its textual metaphors: projection into those abstract entities from schematised bodily experience. In the theory of cognitive metaphor, 'interpretive communities' are constrained by the embodied imagination.An emerging theory of cognitive metaphor provides a promising basis for analysing figurative language in literary works. In particular, cognitive metaphor provides accounts of language patterns that are isomorphic with larger imaginative literary structures, as well as particular interpretations that are more explicit and falsifiable than existing interpretations founded upon the language of literary works. I want to demonstrate this theory in a reading of King Lenr that focuses on its opening scene, where metaphorical structures arise from a competition between the framing bodily experiences of balance and linking that define ways of understanding crucial to the larger patterns of the play. I Metaphor and schematised bodily experience The salient features of earlier research in the theory of metaphor are epitomised in the work of Samuel R. Levin, who argued in a seminal essay that, for example, to interpret a metaphor like 'a grief ago' we in effect import the

There goes the other foot - a reply to Short et al.

“…(Leech and Short, 1981: 46-7) (iv) … these analytical claims can be confirmed or disconfirmed according to the accuracy with which those elements and structure and their projection are articulated. The same falsifiability applies, mutatis mutandis, to claims made for … (Freeman, 1993: 15) (v) … explicit, analytical, retrievable and 'scientific' procedures. (Carter and Simpson, 1989: 7)…”

Stylistics, criticism and mythrepresentation again: squaring the circle with Ray Mackay's subjective solution for all problems

“…King Lear contains many instances of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor. Yet Freeman claims that this pattern of metaphors is less significant than BALANCE and LINKS metaphors (see Freeman, 1993a: 15 for details). This claim can be challenged by anyone who can make a case for the proposition that the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor is indeed connected to significant elements, and more of them, at all levels of Shakespeare's King Lear.…”

“…How curious to find the very same nautical metaphor here that Fish (1980: 246) It is salutary to compare Mackay's discussion of Freeman (1993a) with that of Downes (1993), whose position is more interesting and much more tightly argued. Freeman responds to Downes in Freeman (1993b).…”

The Artification Hypothesis and Its Relevance to Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Aesthetics, and Neuroaesthetics

“…Besides many applications to poetry -not our focus here -a number of case studies explores image-schematic aspects around which a narrative theme crystallizes in a novel or drama (e.g., Freeman 1993, Turner 1996, Popova 2002, in most cases based on metaphor analysis. Yet, current scholarship suffers from at least three deficiencies: -Many analyses expose themselves to the criticism voiced by Downes (1993) of using image schémas rather arbitrarily.…”