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Cognitive Poetics and William Butler Yeats's Poetry

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Cognitive Poetics and William Butler Yeats's Poetry “HOW CAN WE KNOW THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?”: COGNITIVE POETICS AND WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS’S POETRY Amber Noelle Pagel Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2017 APPROVED: David Holdeman, Major Professor and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences John Peters, Committee Member Alexander Pettit, Committee Member Robert Upchurch, Chair of the Department of English Victor Prybutok, Vice Provost of the Toulouse Graduate School Pagel, Amber Noelle. “How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?”: Cognitive Poetics and William Butler Yeats’s Poetry. Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2017, 195 pp., 6 figures, bibliography, 82 titles. Cognitive poetics, the recently developed field of literary theory which utilizes principles from cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to examine literature, is applied in this study to an exploration of the poetry of William Butler Yeats. The theoretical foundation for this approach is embodiment theory, the concept from cognitive linguistics that language is an embodied phenomenon and that meaning and meaning construction are bodily processes grounded in our sensorimotor experiences. A systematic analysis including conceptual metaphors, image schemas, cognitive mappings, mental spaces, and cognitive grammar is applied here to selected poems of Yeats to discover how these models can inform our readings of these poems. Special attention is devoted to Yeats's interest in the mind's eye, his crafting of syntax in stanzaic development, his atemporalization through grammar, and the antinomies which converge in selected symbols from his poems. Copyright 2017 by Amber Noelle Pagel ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people are owed gratitude for their support and guidance as I have travelled my journey to this degree. Over the years my friends, family, colleagues, and professors have supported me in this endeavor, and for this I am profoundly grateful to them. I cannot express enough love and appreciation to those who have sustained and encouraged me through this labour. First to my parents, Cecil and Phyllis Pagel, with whom all of my academic success began in the excellent educational foundation which they provided me. They taught me a love of reading, a desire to learn, and a duty to think critically and analytically. To my husband Aaron Hatch for the years of patience, the emotional support, the listening ear, the steadfast love, the sanctuary of our home…as well as driving me around the tiny roads of Ireland—on the left side! To Dr. Holdeman, whose expertise has been invaluable, his expectations challenging, and his passion for Yeats inspiring. To Dr. Pettit and Dr. Peters for their time, encouragement, and guidance. To Dr. Nancy Price, my friend and mentor, who has guided and uplifted me since my undergraduate days. To my dearest friend and kindred spirit Amelia Beason for her unwavering belief in me, the late nights and many glasses of wine, and her constant strength which bolstered me up through the stages of tears and discouragement. To my PhD buddy Dr. Heather Robinson! All of those encouraging texts and notes, the sweet cards, and the wise advice carried me through to the end. To Rachel Wolf, my dean who first gave me my professorship, but who then fast became my friend, a friend who has given me so much more: wisdom, solace, and confidence. And finally to my felines, my dear writing buddies—Queen Freya and Mr. Mugsy—who through my days and nights of reading and writing warmed both my lap and my spirit. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................... iii LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................................. vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 The Terminology of Cognitive Linguistics: .......................................................................... 9 Embodiment Theory ......................................................................................................... 10 Conceptual Metaphors ..................................................................................................... 13 Image Schemas ................................................................................................................. 18 Mental Spaces ................................................................................................................... 20 Cognitive Grammar ........................................................................................................... 22 Trajectory of this Project .................................................................................................. 23 CHAPTER 2. EMBODIMENT AND THE MIND’S EYE ....................................................................... 27 Embodiment in Conceptual Metaphors and Image Schemas in “Easter, 1916” .............. 36 The Mind’s Eye .................................................................................................................. 44 CHAPTER 3. COGNITIVE MAPPINGS AND MENTAL SPACES .......................................................... 65 Conceptual Metaphor Mappings ...................................................................................... 65 “The Second Coming”: Complications of Image Schemas and Metaphors ...................... 83 Mental Spaces and Space Building: .................................................................................. 91 CHAPTER 4. COGNITIVE GRAMMAR: SYNTAX AND TIME ........................................................... 109 Sentence and Stanza ....................................................................................................... 115 Grammar that Defies Time ............................................................................................. 130 Grammar, Time, and Manuscript Revisions ................................................................... 146 CHAPTER 5. ANTINOMIES AND CONCLUSIONS .......................................................................... 152 The Winding Stair, the Gyres, and the Tower ................................................................. 153 The Sacrifice of Attis ....................................................................................................... 169 Byzantium ....................................................................................................................... 171 The Dancer ...................................................................................................................... 181 iv Conclusions ..................................................................................................................... 185 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................ 191 v LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 3.1: Double Gyres ............................................................................................................... 84 Figure 3.2: Mental Spaces in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” ............................................................ 96 Figure 4.1: Subject-Verb-Object Pattern in “The Cap and the Bells” ......................................... 120 Figure 4.2: In the Winding Stair of Thoor Ballylee ...................................................................... 140 Figure 4.3: The Swans of Coole Park ........................................................................................... 143 Figure 5.1: The Tower ................................................................................................................. 161 vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Since the 1980s when cognitive linguistics emerged, it has been seeking to explain scientifically the making of meaning in the mind. Cognitive linguistics contends that our minds’ understanding of the abstract, the metaphorical, the imaginary is accomplished through relating those intangible domains to physical ones which we have actually experienced with our corporeal selves; many of the concepts from cognitive linguistics have now been applied to literature by cognitive poetics. Cognitive linguistics presents us with “a reconsideration of the extent to which language use is non-arbitrary” and allows us to reexamine literary studies through a model which has rejected a strictly structuralist approach to language.1 Contrary to the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy, the cognitive linguistics model adopted by cognitive poetics views language as an embodied experience, a place where the mind and body merge in the act of cognition. Through much of William Butler Yeats’s work we can likewise perceive frequent, controlling themes of dualities and oppositions—or as Yeats called them, antinomies—such as the self and soul, the objective and subjective, the masculine and feminine, the body and mind, the sun and moon, youth and age, and many others.2 However, to Yeats these oppositional forces are not discrete dualities, but exist as a state of conflict one with the other, dependent upon each other for existence. As Brian Arkins explains, Yeats believed “all things are made of the conflict of two states of consciousness” and drew heavily 1 John R. Taylor and Jeannette Littlemore, “Introduction” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics, eds. Jeannette Littlemore and John R. Taylor (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 10.
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