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Iconicity in conceptual blending

Material anchors in William Morris’s News from Nowhere
  • Wilson David Glyn
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Semblance and Signification
This chapter is in the book Semblance and Signification

Abstract

In 1890, William Morris, pioneering writer, designer, and revolutionary socialist, published News from Nowhere. In this utopian romance, he expresses his aesthetic and social convictions most convincingly not through propositional argumentation, but instead through iconic conceptual/material anchors set up to support conceptual blending networks through which the reader is guided to conjure up human-scale scenes and contexts. These conceptual integration networks achieve compression (and decompression) of vital relations (such as identity, change, or time) in blended mental spaces, heightening the aesthetic, emotional, and hence persuasive potential of the text, often at key points in its structure. This paper explores several passages from News from Nowhere, arguing that motivated non-metaphorical conceptual/material anchors can be just as iconic as metaphorical ones.

Abstract

In 1890, William Morris, pioneering writer, designer, and revolutionary socialist, published News from Nowhere. In this utopian romance, he expresses his aesthetic and social convictions most convincingly not through propositional argumentation, but instead through iconic conceptual/material anchors set up to support conceptual blending networks through which the reader is guided to conjure up human-scale scenes and contexts. These conceptual integration networks achieve compression (and decompression) of vital relations (such as identity, change, or time) in blended mental spaces, heightening the aesthetic, emotional, and hence persuasive potential of the text, often at key points in its structure. This paper explores several passages from News from Nowhere, arguing that motivated non-metaphorical conceptual/material anchors can be just as iconic as metaphorical ones.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Preface and acknowledgements ix
  4. Introduction xi
  5. Part I. Word forms, word formation, and meaning
  6. Toward a phonosemantic definition of iconic words 3
  7. Iconic thinking and the contact-induced transfer of linguistic material 19
  8. Ezra Pound among the Mawu 39
  9. Cognitive iconic grounding of reduplication in language 55
  10. Imagic iconicity in the Chinese language 83
  11. Words in the mirror 101
  12. Part II. General theoretical approaches
  13. Un mélange genevois 135
  14. How to put art and brain together 149
  15. Image, diagram, and metaphor 157
  16. Part III. Narrative grammatical structures
  17. The farmers sowed seeds and hopes 175
  18. Non-iconic chronology in English narrative texts 191
  19. A burning world of war 211
  20. Part IV. Cognitive poetics
  21. Aesthetic qualities as structural resemblance 233
  22. Mental space mapping in classical Chinese poetry 251
  23. Iconicity in conceptual blending 269
  24. Part V. Acoustic and visual iconicity
  25. Thematized iconicity and iconic devices in the modern novel 291
  26. Iconicity and intermediality in Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy 313
  27. Words, like shells, are signs as well as things 327
  28. Unveiling creative subplots through the non-traditional application of diagrammatic iconicity 343
  29. Part VI. Intermedial iconicity
  30. The iconic indexicality of photography 355
  31. Unbinding the text 369
  32. Argumentative, iconic, and indexical structures in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin 389
  33. John Irving’s A Widow for One Year and Tod Williams’ The Door in the Floor as ‘(mult-)i-conic’ works of art 405
  34. Author index 423
  35. Subject index 425
https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.10.15wil

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Preface and acknowledgements ix
  4. Introduction xi
  5. Part I. Word forms, word formation, and meaning
  6. Toward a phonosemantic definition of iconic words 3
  7. Iconic thinking and the contact-induced transfer of linguistic material 19
  8. Ezra Pound among the Mawu 39
  9. Cognitive iconic grounding of reduplication in language 55
  10. Imagic iconicity in the Chinese language 83
  11. Words in the mirror 101
  12. Part II. General theoretical approaches
  13. Un mélange genevois 135
  14. How to put art and brain together 149
  15. Image, diagram, and metaphor 157
  16. Part III. Narrative grammatical structures
  17. The farmers sowed seeds and hopes 175
  18. Non-iconic chronology in English narrative texts 191
  19. A burning world of war 211
  20. Part IV. Cognitive poetics
  21. Aesthetic qualities as structural resemblance 233
  22. Mental space mapping in classical Chinese poetry 251
  23. Iconicity in conceptual blending 269
  24. Part V. Acoustic and visual iconicity
  25. Thematized iconicity and iconic devices in the modern novel 291
  26. Iconicity and intermediality in Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy 313
  27. Words, like shells, are signs as well as things 327
  28. Unveiling creative subplots through the non-traditional application of diagrammatic iconicity 343
  29. Part VI. Intermedial iconicity
  30. The iconic indexicality of photography 355
  31. Unbinding the text 369
  32. Argumentative, iconic, and indexical structures in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin 389
  33. John Irving’s A Widow for One Year and Tod Williams’ The Door in the Floor as ‘(mult-)i-conic’ works of art 405
  34. Author index 423
  35. Subject index 425
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