A Greimassian Reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

IF 0.1 0 LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM

American, British and Canadian Studies Pub Date : 2022-06-01 DOI:10.2478/abcsj-2022-0011

F. Rahmani, Hossein Pirnajmuddin

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Abstract

Abstract Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, first appearing as the opening poem to Lyrical Ballads, has proved to be highly enigmatic since its publication. The blending of supernatural and reality along with the intricacy of the underlying structure seem to have added to the complication. The present article is an attempt to read the poem through the lens of Algirdas Julien Greimas’s actantial model and semiotic square to shed some light on the semantic richness of the poem. The results seem in line with Coleridge’s idea of imagination as the Mariner’s imagination in co-presence with his will, along with the Moon as the source of Nature’s benignity and his muse, assist him with his object-value: the unity between man, Nature, and the Creator. Moreover, the Mariner’s suffering and atonement could be attributed to his moments of reasoning and free-will, devoid of imagination or spirituality and associated with the presence of the sun or diurnal elements. Greimas’s model offers the possibility to elucidate the moments of confusion as ‘void’ or ‘all’ phoric states of passion in which the absence of diurnal and nocturnal elements or their co-presence could justify the Mariner’s wanton murder of the Albatross or his survival.

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《古水手诗咏》的格莱马西式解读

塞缪尔·泰勒·柯勒律治的《古水手咏》作为《抒情歌谣》的开篇诗首次出现，自问世以来就被证明是高度神秘的。超自然和现实的混合以及潜在结构的复杂性似乎增加了复杂性。本文试图通过格利马斯的现实模型和符号学方阵来解读这首诗，以揭示这首诗的语义丰富性。结果似乎与柯勒律治的观点一致，他认为想象力是水手的想象力，与他的意志共存，月亮是大自然仁慈的源泉和他的缪斯，帮助他实现他的目标价值:人、自然和造物主之间的统一。此外，水手的痛苦和赎罪可以归因于他的推理和自由意志的时刻，缺乏想象力或灵性，并与太阳或昼夜元素的存在有关。Greimas的模型提供了一种可能性，可以将困惑的时刻解释为“空虚”或“所有”激情的精神状态，在这种状态下，白天和夜间元素的缺失或它们的共同存在可以证明水手肆意谋杀信天翁或他的生存是正当的。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

American, British and Canadian Studies Arts and Humanities-Literature and Literary Theory

CiteScore

0.20

自引率

0.00%

发文量

审稿时长

10 weeks

期刊介绍： Founded in 1999, American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, is currently published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Re-launched in refashioned, biannual format, American, British and Canadian Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, ABC Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.