Semiotic Interpretation of Literary Metaphors in Henry James’ Psychological Fiction under the Semantic Association Network Modeling

Abstract

Abstract Henry James enriched the representation of realism with the aesthetic practice of psychological realism theory, and his literary metaphors revealed the colorfulness of the human consciousness field. In this paper, under the background of semiotics, based on two algorithms, Semantic Association Network, Associative Component Analysis, and Dependent Syntax, we constructed a tensor representation model of literary text, extracted the symbolic information of sentences in the scholarly text, and combined the information of textual words through the association coefficients for the tensor representation of sentence metaphors. Quantitatively calculating the metaphoric semantics in the extracted literary sentences is followed by labeling and recognition of the literary sentences based on the metaphoric information. Take Henry James’, the Aristocats as an example and interpret the symbolic information in it using the model constructed in this paper. The symbolic scene of the “garden” in the novel represents the meaning of innocence and simplicity, which has the highest conceptual similarity enhancement of 3.415. Most of the emotions behind the readers’ evaluations of Henry James’s novels have positive metaphors, and the favorable rating range is mainly concentrated in the range of 0-100. In Henry James’s novels, the emotional metaphor of “repression” is more characteristic than other metaphors, with a maximum of 1.896. This paper investigates the interpretation of metaphors in Henry James’s novels, which can assist in the comprehension of the books.