Cognition and Representation in Wordsworth's London

Abstract

1. Introduction THIS PAPER IS PARTLY AN EXPLORATION OF SPATIAL PROCESSING IN LITERARY cognition and partly an analysis of Wordsworth's mimetic theory and practice in Book 7 of The Prelude, Residence in London. The yoking of these topics is less arbitrary than it may seem, though it was, I admit, fortuitous that I picked Wordsworth straight upon heels of Stephen Levinson's definitive new treatise on Space in Language and Cognition. (1) Having Levinson's study in background no doubt helped to foreground for me what is on any view a remarkable passage of spatial representation early in Book 7, in which Wordsworth bids London, Rise up and Before me flow! (149-50) and then proceeds to escort his readers (note shift to first person plural pronoun at line 169) through streets and districts of city thus conjured. (2) This seventy-line imitation of phenomenal experience of London is unusually thorough-going and consequently absorbing; obliging reader feels, for duration at least, in midst and on move, advancing through a streaming scene of buildings, people, and objects, with attention shifting here and there among clusters of visual and auditory images that give way one to next in steady succession--much as they appear to do when one is really walking in city. (3) The passage thus provides an exemplary instance of what cognitive linguists like Levinson call a body or driving tour, that is, a mental or linguistic representation of embodied movement through a spatial array, such as one pictures to oneself in wayfinding or speaks to another when giving directions. For obvious reasons, body tours and route descriptions tend to be scrupulously and single-mindedly realistic, and that Wordsworth's passage is no exception in this regard should suggest at once how exceptional it therefore is with respect not just to bulk of his verse but indeed to better part of English romantic verse in general. (4) By happy conjunction, then, I found myself possessed of a deviant text, a new descriptive apparatus, and two substantial and potentially related questions (and if that's not a recipe for a scholarly article, I don't know what is): first, how exactly does this or indeed any text work its mimetic magic in mind of reader? And second, what is function and status of this and other orders of mimesis in Book 7 specifically and Wordsworth's poetics generally? Though simply fortunate in event, I might have found my way to these important cognitive and mimetic matters more intentionally and systematically. As long ago as 1958 M. H. Abrams in The Mirror and Lamp traced development of a new psychology of art in romantic criticism and philosophy, especially English variety, which, though typically idealistic in its interpretation of psychological data, was nevertheless habitually empirical in their pursuit. As Abrams puts it, in language that suggests how deep foundations of contemporary cognitivism lie, A salient aspect of romantic era in general was sharpened 'Inner Sense,' as Coleridge called it, for goings-on of and a new power, by these poets and critics who are 'accustomed to watch flux and reflux of their inmost to venture at times into twilight realms of consciousness.' Coleridge himself had no equal as a microscopic analyst of interplay of sensation, thought, and feeling in immediate cross-section, or 'fact of mind.' ... In this aspect, English criticism, of course, participated in tendency of English empirical philosophy, which characteristically tried to establish nature and limits of knowledge by an analysis of elements and processes of mind. (5) Wordsworth, of course, is poet foremost in Coleridge's mind when he speaks of watching the flux and reflux of [our] inmost nature, and though Wordsworth writes in The Prelude that it is a Hard task, vain hope, to analyze mind, . …