Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 8-20-2013 12:00 AM Metaphor and Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer and Cognitive Transformation in British and Irish Modernism Andrew C. Wenaus The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Dr. Jonathan Boulter The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Andrew C. Wenaus 2013 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Continental Philosophy Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Modern Languages Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Philosophy of Mind Commons Recommended Citation Wenaus, Andrew C., "Metaphor and Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer and Cognitive Transformation in British and Irish Modernism" (2013). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 1512. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/1512 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Metaphor and Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer and Cognitive Transformation in British and Irish Modernism (Thesis Format: Monograph) by Andrew C. Wenaus Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Andrew C. Wenaus 2013 ABSTRACT This dissertation contributes to the critical expansions now occurring in what Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz have termed New Modernist Studies. This expansion is temporal, spatial, and vertical. I engage with the latter in a literal way: what effects can Modernist texts have on lived experience, the extra-diegetic space of the reader that rests “above” the page. My study analyzes the structural similarity of linguistic metaphor and the mind as considered by cognitive scientists. Working from the conceit that the human mind is linguistic and that language is an artifact of the human mind, my research extrapolates upon what I call the “psycho-ecology” of reading, a knot of reflexive level-crossing between text and mind as the constituent of lived experience. Far from being a remote, abstract process, psycho-ecology is concrete and the closest of presences: unique textual engagement is equated with a transformation in perception. The project opens with an introductory chapter tracing a lineage between modernist aesthetics, phenomenology, and the appearance of the cognitive sciences. The first chapter considers the relationship between two narrative levels in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The logic of this diegetic relationship is monstrous yet proceeds elegantly. The second chapter is a reading of Virginia Woolf’s experimental treatment of temporality in her novel To the Lighthouse (1927). By considering Woolf’s temporal experimentation in relation to Martin Heidegger’s formulation of being-in-the-world and being-as-time I suggest that both the novel and Heidegger’s philosophy act to disclose our experience with language as temporal and uniquely finite. Ultimately, our experience with Woolf’s narrative is predicated upon an intimacy between reader and text whereby the reader extends a kind of physicality into the text itself effectively making manifest the singular importance of being-as-time and being-as-text. The third chapter examines the “sentimental information” of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) from a phenomenological approach to information theory as a response to Robert Scholes’ reprinting of Clive Hart’s call for investigation into this mode in Joyce’s work. With Joyce’s self-negating sentimentality, experience is dynamically mutative and such metamorphoses reveal to the agent that they proceed by themselves. The final chapter analyzes Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957) as a zero-player game: a computerized game that proceeds by code without the input of human players. Meditating upon Beckett’s utterance, “something is taking its course,” I suggest that this multi-diegetic architecture reveals the finitude of extra-diegetic experience. The dissertation follows a trajectory beginning with the intimacy a reader has with text towards the increasing experience of exclusion, or illiteracy, when encountering digital code. The movement of the analysis is metonymical for a shift from textual, alphanumeric narratives to digital narratives. Finally, new languages of code and programming suggest the dawn of new arts. ii KEY WORDS British and Irish Modernism; Phenomenology; Oscar Wilde; Virginia Woolf; James Joyce; Samuel Beckett; Martin Heidegger; Douglas Hofstadter; Vilém Flusser; Strange Loop; Self-Reflexivity; Self-Representation; Cognitive Sciences; Functionalism; Linguistic Determinism; Psycho-Ecology; Sentimentality; Literature and Philosophy. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank all those who have supported, assessed, and encouraged me throughout this project. For those with whom I have had both formal and informal discussion, I thank Rasmus Simonsen, Michael Sloan, Brad Bannon, Zeinab McHeimech, Samanta Thirakul, Tim deJong, Peter Schwenger, Michael Groden, and Thy Phu. I would also like to thank Călin-Andrei Mih ăilescu and Seán Kennedy. In particular, I would like to thank my supervisor, Jonathan Boulter, for his support, criticism, humour, and, uniquely, his radiant scorn that is at once encouraging and, yet, can alter the barometric pressure of the local environment. Many thanks, of course, also to my family. Finally, I would like to thank Christina Willatt, with love, for her support, solace, and counsel. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page……………………………………………………………………………...……..i Certificate of Examination……………………………………………………..……...ii Abstract……………………………………………………………….……………....iii Key Words…………………………………………………………………..…..........iv Acknowledgements…………………………………………………..………….........v PROLOGUE ……………………………………………………………………..…1-41 CHAPTER ONE monstrorum artifex : D IEGETIC LEVEL -CROSSING A ND U NCANNY N ARRATIVE CONTEXTURE I N THE P ICTURE O F D ORIAN G RAY …………………………...42-89 CHAPTER TWO “S OMETHING P ROFOUNDLY I NTIMATE ”: T HE R EADER A S T IME , H EIDEGGER , AND V IRGINIA WOOFL’S TO T HE L IGHTHOUSE …………………………….90-144 CHAPTER THREE BABELIAN A CT O F F ECUNDITY : I NELUCTABLE M ODALITIES A ND J OYCE’S SENTIMENTAL I NFORMATION ………………………………………………145-201 CHAPTER FOUR “Z ERO , ZERO , AND ZERO ”: Z ERO -PLAYER G AMES , P ROCEDURALISM , AND SAMUEL B ECKETT’S ENDGAME ………………………………………….…202-282 EPILOGUE ……………………………………………………………..............283-286 v Prologue Metaphor and Metanoia ___________________________ To study metaphor is to be confronted with hidden aspects of one’s own mind and one’s own culture. -George Lakoff and Mark Turner Disappear and reappear at another place. Disappear again and reappear again at another place again. Or at the same. Nothing to show not the same…As one in his right mind when at last out again he knew not how he was not long out again when he began to wonder if he was in his right mind. -Samuel Beckett Where word breaks off no thing may be. -Stefan George The following analysis is a study of Modernist texts via the structural self- similarity between linguistic metaphor as conceived in cognitive linguistics and the mind as considered by cognitive science. I unite this lineage with the philosophical school that is in explicit conversation with both: phenomenology. A leading feature of Modernist literature is the marked emphasis on how we perceive our surroundings over what that environment may objectively be; this preoccupation tends towards reflexivity so that literature inquires into its own function to such a degree that these literary experiments in perception may transform the representation of objective environments. Emerging in the 1980s, the field of cognitive linguistics and its literary branch, cognitive poetics, takes the premise that the conceptual structures constituted by the affective materiality of the brain are determined by language; the reverse simultaneously operates. This conceit is shared by phenomenologists of the early twentieth century, notably in the work of Martin Heidegger. Rather than the paradox of infinite regress, a vocal phenomenological criticism of self-representation, this process offers a variety of diegetic level-crossings—between vehicle and tenor, 1 object and percept, language and mind, levels of narrative—that characterize a metamorphosis. I call this knot a “psycho-ecology.” Concepts are possible because they are systemically linguistic; language is possible because it is systemically conceptual. A variety of diegetic level-crossings—between vehicle and tenor, object and percept, language and mind—characterize this kind of metamorphosis. Self- reflexive literary experiments are possible, in this sense, because they transform language in a structurally self-similar manner to a transformation in the conceptual system of the mind; or, creative use of metaphor, to speak of one thing using the terms of another, results in metanoia, a change of mind. Here, there is a kind of structural and conceptual self-similarity between the reflexivity of Modernist literature, phenomenology, and cognitive linguistics in the sense that a transformation of language is equated with