The Sun And Boreas: The Juxtaposition of the Dystopias by E.I. Zamyatin’s “We” And G. Orwell’s “1984” on the Basis of Metaphors of Their Characters’ Inner World

• Main Author: Yuliya Vladimirovna Golovnyova
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University) 2017-12-01
• Series: RUDN Journal of Language Studies, Semiotics and Semantics
• Subjects: метафора; базовые метафорические модели; внутренний мир человека; языковые (конвенциональные) метафоры; индивидуально-авторские метафоры; метафороподобные выражения
• Online Access: http://journals.rudn.ru/semiotics-semantics/article/view/16334

The article juxtaposes the use of conventional and creative metaphors of the human inner world in the dystopia “We” by E.I. Zamyatin with that in “1984” by G. Orwell. An analysis based on the methods of metaphorical modelling and continuous sampling reveals the basic metaphorical models of the characters’ inner world in each of the novels. There are the following basic metaphorical models of this sphere in the novel “We”: the professional ones (mathematical, mechanistic, and chemical), the household one, the natural one and the morbial one; their source domains are represented mainly by nouns in combination with adjectives. Metaphors of actions and states (whose source domains are expressed by verbs or nouns in combination with verbs) are characteristic of the novel «1984», the basic ones being metaphorical models of swallowing and physical pain. In the novel “We” the characters’ inner world is mainly represented by creative metaphors, while G. Orwell adds expressivity by other means, and conventional metaphors of the sphere under study prevail in “1984”.