Belekhova L. Image Space of American Poetry: A Cognitive Perspective.

The dissertation suggests a new integrative approach to the evolution of verbal poetic images viewed through the mereological model of poetics, from antique, universalistic, to cognitive. The research focuses on revealing the nature of verbal poetic image from a cognitive perspective and aims at building an original typology of images in American poetry. It highlights cognitive mechanisms that lead to the emergence of new poetic images which cause a possible breakthrough in the conceptualization of the world. It is proved that the mechanisms of new verbal poetic images formation in poetic texts are predetermined by cognitive operations of mapping, extension and modification alongside with cognitive procedures of generalization, compression, intertextualization, and perspectivization. Contours of the image space in American poetry are revealed via the analysis of conceptual and functional properties that characterize different types of verbal poetic images. The integrative approach to the theory of imagery helped to update the techniques of conceptual analysis of verbal poetic images and to work out the integrative cognitive model of verbal poetic image and image space reconstruction.