Actualization of the concept SECLUSION in the fiction of K. Vonnegut, K. Kesey, J. Fowles and V. Holt

Abstract

The article aims to reveal linguistic and cognitive features of the concept seclusion in the novels by K. Vonnegut, K. Kesey, J. Fowles, and V. Holt. Such notions as loneliness, solitude, isolation, alienation have been the subject of philosophical, linguistic, psychological, sociological, and literary research. The concept under analysis is seen as a unit that tends to combine various senses of the notions mentioned above. This article is written in the framework of cognitive linguistics. Generally, a concept is recognized as a unit of our cognition and memory. Concepts reflect and shape our experience and knowledge about the world in the form of verbal signs and mental construals. The verbal embodiment of a concept in a text is a verbal poetic image, which is defined as a linguo-cognitive text construct which has preconceptual, conceptual and verbal planes. Therefore, we treat the concept seclusion as a linguocognitive construction, which integrates the above-mentioned aspects. Since “our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature”, the approach to the studying of such an abstract concept as seclusion by means of the reconstruction of the main metaphorical structures underlying the given concept comes in very handy. Thus, primary attention is paid to the conceptual analysis of selected verbal poetic images with the purpose to reconstruct various conceptual schemes underlying such images.

The research revealed that the presentation of the concept in the analyzed fiction is highly stereotypical (used by the most part of the authors). The concept is tied with such stereotypical metaphorical concepts as container (cage / prison, trap), good (happiness / luck / safety), and bad (unhappiness, down, darkness). Many of the metaphors are the authors’ individual variations of the common ones (e.g. seclusion is a prison cell / crypt / lunatic asylum / cacoon / killing bottle / waiting room / aviary / menagerie / valuable commodity etc.). There were singled out a number of metaphors which are closely linked to the concept of seclusion: seclusion is a separate world, people are islands, time is thick liquid / syrup / amber, heart is a container for loneliness, to name just a few.