EMILY DICKINSON'S METAPHORIC ART
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation is to link the exhilaration of Emily Dickinson's language with her metaphoric art then to find how the poet's metaphors achieve such vitality. Throughout, this study makes use of modern theories which describe metaphor as a process of interaction, the outcome of which is new meaning. Part One (Chapters I-IV) examines Dickinson's use of traditional rhetorical categories of metaphor (simile, personification, etc.) within the larger structural/linguistic unit of four poems. Chapter I on "I taste a liquor never brewed" (#214) highlights the metaphorical process itself by considering how individual metaphors actually function in a literary work. In Chapter II, a reading of "It was not Death, for I stood up" (#510), three metaphoric strategies--simile, negation, and category confusion--are studied together as expressions of indeterminacy. Chapter III interprets #512, "The Soul has Bandaged moments," as the drama of the self, emphasizing the device of sustained personification which the poet uses to transform inner experience into exterior action. Chapter IV analyzes "As imperceptibly as Grief" (#1540) in which the predominant metaphoric mode is noun abstraction. Part Two, while not entirely disregarding context, focuses more on the linguistic-syntactic modality of figuration and its effect on meaning. The last three chapters trace certain grammatical and syntactic patterns repeated throughout a sample of twenty poems to establish the significant variant use of each. Chapter V makes evident that Dickinson exploits the copula, or the verb "to be," for metaphor by illustrating variations on the usual "A is B" pattern and the resultant changes in the equation's tone and/or meaning. The study in Chapter VI is organized around the grammatical forms of the genitive and the variety of metaphoric relationships each makes possible. The final chapter discusses Dickinson's use of transitive and intransitive verbs to create hyperbole, to dehumanize the human, to animate the inanimate, to personify the non-human, and to concretize the abstract. Several examples of extended verb metaphor are also considered.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
American literature
Off-Campus Purdue Users:
To access this dissertation, please log in to our
proxy server.