Dreamins By The Book And Its Application In The Study Of William Wordsworth’s Poems

Cognitive science and literary criticism have been combined by literary analysts to produce a new discipline:cognitive literary criticism. Cognitive poetics is a prominent branch of cognitive literary criticism developed by literary scholars in the nineteen seventies. Cognitive poetics, a beneficial supplement to traditional literary criticism, has developed many theories that help to solve the difficult problems in literary criticism. Based on cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, cognitive poetics is an interdisciplinary approach that includes linguistics, psychology, philosophy and literary studies. It sheds new light on literary studies. And imagination is the key ingredient of cognition and literary creation, it is therefore essential to study imagination in cognitive poetics.Dreaming by the Book is one of Harvard Professor Elaine Scarry’s most important cognitive literary works. She analyzes the differences between imagination in reality and imagination in literary works. This book is composed of three parts:Making Picture, Moving Pictures and Repicturing. Elaine Scarry enumerates useful techniques in this book that help readers overcome the limitations of plain imagination. Her approaches enable readers to imagine readily and vividly. Practices, such as "material antecedent" and "calibration", help develop the vivacity of the imagined thing. Practices such as "radiant ignition","rarity","addition and subtraction" and "stretching, folding and tilting" are utilized to promote the moving of the pictures. Flowers, whose characteristics are especially favored by many writers, are an excellent medium of analysis for other objects and their movement.This thesis in the main focuses on applying Elaine Scarry’s cognitive practices to analyzing the dynamic beauty of famous romantic poems written by William Wordsworth, such as "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud","Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" and "Hart-Leap Well". Poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."1By studying the dynamic beauty of William Wordsworth’s poems from a cognitive perspective, I hope that the imagination of the reader will be enriched and the emotion more spontaneous.