Metaphor, Empowerment, Enslavement, and Transformation: The Thing-Narrative in The Winter’s Tale
Journal: Arts Studies and Criticism DOI: 10.32629/asc.v6i1.3600
Abstract
Previous studies on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale tend to lay emphasis on an anthropocentric perspective, with little attention to different “things” that come through in the play. This essay discussed the agency of objects through the lens of thing-narrative so as to glimpse into their hidden features. This essay constellates four functions of things, namely metaphor, empowerment, enslavement, and transformation to elucidates how things construct human identity, advance the story, and change the tone. It also reveals how things are uniquely placed to enhance their subjectivity, create an organic unity in which humans and non-humans interact with each other, and further give the play a deeper vitality.
Keywords
The Winter’s Tale; thing-narrative; metaphor; empowerment; enslavement; transformation
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[3]Breu, C. Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics[M]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
[4]Fu Xiuyan. Literature Is the Study of Thing as well as of Man — Thing Narrative and the Coming into Being of the World of Meaning [J]. Tianjin Social Sciences, 2021, (05): 161-173.
[5]Han Qiqun. The Material Turn:A Keyword in Critical Theory [J]. Foreign Literature, 2017, (06): 88-99.
[6]Latour, B. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory[M]. Oxford: Oxford University Press,2005.
[7]Marx, K. Capital Volume I[M]. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
[8]Shakespeare. The Winter’s Tale [M]. Translated by Li Huaying. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2021(02).
[9]Susan C. Staub. Botanomorphism and Temporality: Imagining Humans as Plants in Two Shakespeare Plays[C]//Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2023.
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[11]Tang Weisheng. Speculative Realism and the Construction of Ontological Narratology [J]. Academic Forum, 2017, 40(02): 28-33.
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[13]Yin Xiaoxia, Tang Weisheng. Cultural Signs, Agency, and Realism: Three Roles Things Play in Fictional Narratives [J]. Shandong Foreign Language Teaching, 2019, 40(02): 76-84.
[14]Zhou Yijun. The Narrative of “Animal Metamorphosis” in Chinese and Western Literature [J]. Jiangxi Social Sciences, 2022, 42(11): 89-96.
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