NOVEL IMAGES IN THE IMAGERY SPACE OF AMERCAN POETIC DISCOURSE: A COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE

INTRODUCTION The change of paradigms in the study of a text as a verbal object – from language-centered through text-centered to knowledge-centered – has brought to the forefront the assumption that text formation as well as the function of textual elements are regulated by certain cognitive mechanisms. This research focuses on revealing the nature of verbal poetic image from a cognitive perspective and aims at building an original typology of images in American poetry. It highlights cognitive mechanisms that lead to the emergence of novel poetic images which cause a possible breakthrough in the conceptualization of the world. In the framework of cognitive linguistics a poetic image is viewed as a textual construal and a cognitive structure which has two planes – conceptual and verbal. The conceptual plane of the image is understood as a unity of the eidetic (holistic) and the logical (discrete). The idea of discreteness has been laid at the basis of conceptual analysis of verbal poetic images within the framework of idealized cognitive models or image-schemas 1 . Conceptual analysis of rich empirical data obtained from contemporary American poetry suggested figuring out two groups of verbal poetic images: the old (archetypes and stereotypes) and new ones (idiotypes and kainotypes). In this article I share the view 2 that the frequent use of a particular kind of verbal poetic image depends on the prevalence of a certain type of artistic conscience (mythological, traditional, rational or irrational, and modern individually-creative) as well as of the kind of poetic thinking (analogical, associative, paradoxical, parabolic, and essayistic) governing in the definite cultural period. A poetic image is a verbal embodiment of the configuration of various conceptual schemas (metaphoric, metonymic and oxymoronic). Similar to