1997 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
The Image of Man in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth, Centuries in Britain
| Project/Area Number |
07610463
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
英語・英米文学
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| Research Institution | Nagoya University |
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Principal Investigator |
KAMIO Mitsuo Nagoya University, Faculty of Letters, Professor, 文学部, 教授 (50036430)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1995 – 1997
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| Keywords | consciousness / imagination / perception / the frame of refernce / sentiment |
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| Research Abstract |
The typical epistemological change in the transition from classic to Romantic in English literature includes the problem of perception. Perception consists of the reciprocal working between the consciousness and reality. How does the mind function to perceive things in the real world? The conflict between the mind and phenomena forms the semantic field of perception. In this world things cannot be perceived as they really are. Objects which incite perception should be in terms of ontological aspects. However, what the mind accepts is so called ideas, or impressions, when objects are presented to it. There is and unfathomable chasm between perception and the real world, and so the mind is always isolated from proper understanding. What is called understanding is only possible by the memory maintaining perceived ideas, but the mind can never reach the original source of these ideas. In this sense, the origin of perception remains absent forever. This brings forth a sense of loss, which e
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nables the setting up of the perspective functioning of memory. This is an act of moving back towards the unrecoverable origin. However, retrogression into the past is an act of recovering integral order as a whole, because the original perception bears an inarticulate wholeness. The repetitive function of memory serves to understand obsessions with memory. The repetition of perception becomes a writing for Wordsworth, one which he revises again and again. The process of revision urges the poet to seek an understanding of his own existence, which results in an overflow of stimulating self-consciousness. This forms the masculine phase of the image of man. There is another phase of the image of man, that is, the twilight realms of femininity. This is shown by the Gothic heroine, who is put in the undistinguished state between the environment and herself. She needs to have mother as the imago in order to understand the otherness which she inhabits. These two phases formulated the complex image of man around the turn of the eighteenth century. Less
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