چكيده لاتين :
1-Introduction
From a philosophical perspective, one could say that during the history of literary
criticism within the twentieth century, there have been two principal views on the
nature of literary texts: One considers literary works as self-contained esthetic
objects, which ambiguity, indeterminacy and uncertainty constitute an indispensable
part of them; the other seeks to examine literary works as to reveal a single specific
reading which represents historical consciousness in its different aspects, political,
social and so on and so forth. Among various literary criticisms, cognitive poetics
belongs to the first attitude to literary works, as it does not intend, by reducing
literary texts to the historical, political and/or social context, to obtain one single
interpretation. Rather, cognitive poetics, by describing the cognitive operations
involved in the process of reading which experienced readers trigger in their mind
while confronting literary texts, aims to study how different interpretations of one
single literary text are formed. The formation of interpretations by readers is a
cognitive operation which takes place through the unpacking of the text and
recombining it into a meaningful integrated whole.
2- Theoretical Framework and Methodology:
The present article, in a descriptive and analytic manner, and within the framework
of cognitive poetics, aims at a study of one poem by one of the Persian blank-verse
poets through an analysis of the possibilities this framework could provide for the
fact that how literary works are interpreted by different readers. The theory, which
is thus put into practice from within the cognitive poetics framework, is called the
conceptual blending theory put forward by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner
(2002). Generally speaking, according to this cognitive theory of meaning
construction, every poetic text could be considered as a conceptual blend, or a set of
conceptual blends, which is created through a number of cognitive processes such as selective projection, mapping, compression, decompression, as well as the
construction of networks called integration networks. and for a reader to reach a
particular interpretation among the possible interpretations, it is necessary for him to
repeat all these cognitive operations again in his own right in the mind. Difference
in the reconstruction of the integration networks operating behind the conceptual
blends, and also in the cognitive operations which lead to the reconstruction of the
Integration Networks, brings about different interpretations of one and the same text.
It turns out that the conceptual blending theory, taken in conjunction with some
elements from another theory within the cognitive poetics framework, namely the
conceptual domain theory proposed by Ronald Langacker (1987), provides a
powerful theoretical tool for the description and explanation of how different
readings of one and the same text emerge. Furthermore, the conceptual blending
theory offers another instrument, called optimalty principles, which can be used to
assess the extent to which one particular interpretation enjoys a well-formed
semantic structure, a theoretical tool that could also provide reasons for preference
of one reading over the other.
3- Results and Discussions:
The analysis of the selected poem, through the application of the theoretical
instruments provided by the conceptual blending theory, theoretical instruments such
as schema induction, vital relationships and their different kinds of compressions,
together with the exploitation of a number of concepts taken from Langacker's
conceptual domains theory like profiling, demonstrate that how and through what
cognitive operations readers construct different meanings of one and the same text.
Thus, during the process of meaning construction, through the operation of one
particular cognitive function or the omission of it (for example, compression of vital
relationships or selective projection of different conceptual structures), readers may
reach different interpretations of the same text. In general, the possible
interpretations of the poem selected for analysis in this inquiry can be subsumed
under two categories: Those interpretations that occur within the conceptual domain
of love. In each one of these readings, it is the conceptual domain of love that is
activated from the long-term memory into the working memory, only that in each
case a different part of the complex, intertwined network of the conceptual domain
of love is profiled. In these interpretations, according to the readings the
experimental readers have provided the researchers with, three patterns can be
distinguished, which may designated as "modest", "boastful" and "passionate" or
"romantic". The interpretations of the other category, instead of the conceptual
domain of love, activate other ones, and thus are potentially infinite.
4- Conclusions and Suggestions:
To conclude, the conceptual blending theory, in a sense, can be regarded as the
cognitivist account of the poststructuralist theory of unlimited interpretation,
providing the relativist notion of reading with a description and explanation which
are based upon empirical data. In addition, the present research demonstrates that
poetic texts are capable of ambiguity, polyphony and the possibility of different, even contradictory interpretations, and since the selected poem displays these
features, it acquires one important criterion of poeticality. In addition, although the
conceptual blending theory allows different interpretations of the same text, by
applying its optimality principles, it chooses some of them over the others as optimal
readings, and does not give all of them the same credit.
