Languages & Linguistics
Personification
Personification is a literary device that attributes human qualities, emotions, and actions to non-human entities such as animals, objects, or natural phenomena. It is often used to create a more vivid and engaging description of the subject, and to convey a deeper meaning or message to the reader. Personification is commonly used in poetry, fiction, and advertising.
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4 Key excerpts on "Personification"
eBook - PDFAnimals and Other People
Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century
- Heather Keenleyside(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- University of Pennsylvania Press(Publisher)
Eighteenth-century discussions of Personification follow Descartes in taking both speech and action to be the constitutive attributes of human personhood, and thus in aligning animals with things, as inanimate objects moved from without. But with their extensive lists of the kinds of actions that Personification might bestow, these accounts also register uneas-iness with Descartes’s conclusions, embedding epistemological and ontolog-ical questions about animal life and motion in their rhetorical definitions. Later literary critics and historians, by contrast, repeatedly imagine personi-fication to operate as though the Cartesian divide between human and non-human, person and thing, were straightforward and set. Personification, in The Person 27 the Princeton Encyclopedia ’s quite standard definition, is “a manner of speech endowing nonhuman objects, abstractions, or creatures with life and human characteristics.” 21 Understood according to this sort of definition, the figure of personifica-tion can appear duplicitous, cloaking ontological uncertainty in a rhetorical move. Writing about Wordsworth’s attitude toward (at least some types of ) Personification, Frances Ferguson suggests that for Wordsworth, “personifi-cation in its simplest forms fails to recognize the difficulty of comprehending humanness” by suggesting “that there is a stable form to be projected.” 22 Or, as Adela Pinch puts it, “Personifications can suggest that we know what a person is.” 23 On this formulation, the ontological uncertainty that Personification conceals concerns the human being, who is falsely reduced to a set of con-ventional characteristics. If this formulation underlies Wordsworth’s objection to Personification, it elides the more extensive uncertainty on which poets like Thomson (as well as rhetoricians like Kames, Beattie, Priestley, and Blair) insist. Thomson acknowledges that we may not know what a person is.
eBook - PDFArtefacts of Legal Inquiry
The Value of Imagination in Adjudication
- Maksymilian Del Mar(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Hart Publishing(Publisher)
52 In their introduction to a multi- and inter-disciplinary new collection on Personification , Walter Melion and Bart Ramakers insist that Personification must be seen to be operating in ‘multiple registers: sensory and spiritual, visible and invisible, concrete and abstract’, and dealing in ‘facts, opinions, and beliefs’. 53 Personification, which they define as ‘the rhetorical figure by which something not human is given a human identity or face’, ‘bodied forth’ processes of ‘thinking, feeling and experiencing’, 54 and did so in many different ways, across many different media and in a bewildering array of forms and genres. Far beyond language, Personification can be found in all the arts, visual, sculptural, and architectural, and in objects with wide cultural circulation, such as posters, coins, and banknotes. For many centuries, many of these Personifications were, and in many respects remain, highly gendered. Indeed, almost all of them were feminine. As Ernst Gombrich has noted: … we tend to take Personification for granted rather than to ask questions about this extraordinarily predominantly feminine population which greets us from the porches of cathedrals, crowds around our public monuments, marks our coins and banknotes, and turns up in our cartoons and our posters. 55 Others, too, such as Marina Warner, have noted the highly feminine character of the history of Personification, arguing that this was specifically designed to have persuasive effects on an audience taken to be male. 56 Feminine Personifications, Warner says, were Approaching Figures 343 57 Ibid, xx. Quoted in Melion and Ramakers (2016b), 13. 58 Bocharova (2016). 59 Ibid, 47. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid, 65–66. The example comes from Spenser’s The Faerie Queen . designed ‘to lure, to delight, to appetise, to please’; they were, she adds, ‘a weapon of delight’, functioning ideally ‘as the spur to desire, as the excitement of the senses’.
eBook - PDF- K. Stock, K. Thomson-Jones, K. Stock, K. Thomson-Jones(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Is Personification unique, say, to images, to British novels, or to music of the ‘long nineteenth century’? In the books just mentioned, discussion of Personification is limited to a single art or era; it is unclear whether the authors thereby mean to suggest that Personification itself is limited to that art or era. I take the similarity 226 Personifying Art of their claims across diverse fields as evidence that it should not be so lim- ited. This suggests a first thing Personification is not: it is not unique to any one of the arts. I mean this not as proof but as a working goal in what follows, where I will try to offer an explanation for Personification across the arts. That this goal is a specifically philosophical one suggests why it is not shared by any of the books just mentioned, all of which come from out- side of the field of philosophy. On the other hand, this goal has seldom been made explicit even within philosophy. One notable, if brief, exception comes from the work of Garry Hagberg, who uses Charles Taylor’s capacities of per- sonhood as a standard against which to test the purported analogy between persons and artworks. 9 For Hagberg, the analogy is strong: all of the claims already suggested—that artworks can speak, listen, think, and desire—find support in his argument. As he maintains, the work of art ‘is without ques- tion a bearer of rights’; it (often) exhibits an ‘internally generated coherence’ akin to Taylor’s ‘sense of self’; the artwork can, in his words, ‘frame repre- sentations of things,’ ‘hold values,’ and exhibit a ‘capacity to respond’ when addressed; more, the work, like a person, is an appropriate object of address, even of love—Hagberg quotes Eva Schaper’s belief that ‘the closest analogue to the regard for an object of aesthetic preference is that of the love in which one person can hold another.’ 10 Hagberg freely admits that artworks do not, say, respond or hold values quite as persons do.
eBook - ePub- Giyoo Hatano, Kayoko Inagaki(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
In contrast to Piaget (1929), who regarded personifying or animistic responses as a sign of immaturity, we consider Personification to be a form of plausible reasoning that generates “educated guesses”; we see it as adaptive in nature, especially when a cognizer does not possess rich knowledge about the target entity or its close neighbors. Moreover, Personification can often be used as a sort of inference in the biological mode for understanding biological phenomena. Next, we present experimental evidence from our studies to support our idea of constrained Personification. In the third and fourth sections, we discuss the essential roles Personification plays in the construction of naive biology, specifically in the acquisition of the concept of living things and the expansion of biological knowledge, respectively. Young Children’s Constrained Personification Why do Young Children use Personification? As revealed in Chapter 2, young children have the factual knowledge needed to distinguish between humans, nonhuman animals, plants, and typical nonliving things. However, compared with adults, children’s experience is generally so limited that their specific knowledge about animals and plants is still scarce and not always hierarchically structured; they do not have enough knowledge to make correct or reliable predictions about specific objects’ attributes and behaviors. In contrast, even young children have fairly rich knowledge about humans, because they themselves are humans, and it is humans as conspecifics that they most often interact with in their life. In the R. Gelman et al. (1983) study described earlier, almost all the 3-year-olds correctly attributed to a person those properties that humans possess, such as body parts (e.g., ears, stomach), overt actions (e.g., walk, eat), or mental states and acts (e.g., feel sad, think)
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