Images and literary imagery

Abstract

This thesis attempts to show that the present ambiguity in the use of the term "image" causes serious confusion of thought, both in Literary Criticism and in Psychological research concerned with Literature. Part I. is an investigation of the causes of this ambiguity. It consists of an historical survey of the use of the term in English Rhetoric, Criticism and Psychology, prefaced by a consideration of the concept "image" in Greek and Latin writers. The claim is made, that the confusion does not become serious till the Nineteenth Century, when the use of image as meaning figure of speech first became general. Part II. is an account of experiments investigating the use of sensory images in figures of speech by subjects who were not imageless thinkers. Experiment I A tested the subjects' use of spontaneous analogy by means of coloured shapes drawn or verbally described after an interval for forgetting. In I B the material consisted of black shapes with inappropriate titles compelling the subject to accept or refuse the analogy therein suggested. An analogy was developed in different ways through various stages: overt comparison and consequent oscillation of attention; "unter-schiebung" involving partial unification of the images representing the objects compared; identification or coalescence of images implying unification of attention. Experiments II A and B investigated the subjects' use of images in the apprehension of figures of speech in Literature by means of introspective records. Such an apprehension demanded Imaginal activity (similar to that noted in Experiments I A and B) which attempts to eliminate the necessity for oscillation of attention. Some subjects found satisfaction in unifying the images involved, others by eliminating one element in the analogy. The adequate apprehension of the figure of speech demanded an organisation or configuration of images, modified, consciously or sub-consciously according to a definite end.