IMAGERY
IMAGERY
Objectives:
The student will identify imagery in a story or poem.
The student can use imagery to improve his/her writing.
Imagery involves one or more of your five senses (hearing, taste, touch, smell, sight). An author uses a word or phrase to stimulate your memory of those senses. These memories can be positive or negative which will contribute to the mood of your poem (We'll get to that later!). Be careful what you write about!
Definition: Imagery is the use of vivid description, usually rich in sensory words, to create pictures, or images, in the reader's mind.
Figurative language is the language that uses imagery and such figures of speech as similes, metaphors, and personification
Uses
Imagery is used in literature to refer to descriptive language that evokes sensory experience. Such images can be created by using figures of speech such as similes, metaphors, personification, and assonance. Imagery can also involve the use of relatable action words or onomatopoeias that trigger images in the reader’s mind.[1]
Other uses
The term imagery is also used in psychology and everyday discourse to refer to mental images, i.e., the making (or re-creation) of any experience in the mind — auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, taste, kinesthetic, equilibrioception. This is a cognitive process employed by most, if not all, humans.
Forms of imagery
Imagery can be in many forms such as metaphors, similes and puns.
A Simile is a literary device where the writer employs the words "like" or "as" to compare to different ideas.
He flew like a dove
I am as bold as a lion
A Metaphor is similar to a smile however this literary device makes a comparison without the use of "like" or "as".
He has a hyena's laugh
Guided imagery is a psychotherapeutic technique in which a facilitator uses descriptive language intended not to psychologically beneficial mental imagery, often involving several or all sense modes, in the mind of the listener.
Noun
imagery(plural imageries)
The work of one who makes images or visible representation of objects; imitation work; images in general, or en masse.
(figuratively) Unreal show; imitation; appearance.
The work of the imagination or fancy; false ideas; imaginary phantasms.
Rhetorical decoration in writing or speaking; vivid descriptions presenting or suggesting images of sensible objects; figures in discourse.
Mental Imagery
First published Tue Nov 18, 1997; substantive revision Tue Sep 4, 2007
Mental imagery (varieties of which are sometimes colloquially refered to as “visualizing,” “seeing in the mind's eye,” “hearing in the head,” “imagining the feel of,” etc.) is quasi-perceptual experience; it resembles perceptual experience, but occurs in the absence of the appropriate external stimuli. It is also generally understood to bear intentionality (i.e., mental images are always images of something or other), and thereby to function as a form of mental representation. Traditionally, visual mental imagery, the most discussed variety, was thought to be caused by the presence of picture-like representations (mental images) in the mind, soul, or brain, but this is no longer universally accepted.
Very often, imagery experiences are understood by their subjects as echoes, copies, or reconstructions of actual perceptual experiences from their past; at other times they may seem to anticipate possible, often desired or feared, future experiences. Thus imagery has often been believed to play a very large, even pivotal, role in both memory (Yates, 1966; Paivio, 1986) and motivation (McMahon, 1973). It is also commonly believed to be centrally involved in visuo-spatial reasoning and inventive or creative thought. Indeed, according to a long dominant philosophical tradition, it plays a crucial role in all thought processes, and provides the semantic grounding for language. However, in the 20th century vigorous objections were raised against this tradition, and it is now widely repudiated
1. Meanings and Connotations of ‘Mental Imagery’
Mental imagery is a familiar aspect of most people's everyday experience (Galton, 1880; Betts, 1909; Doob, 1972; Marks, 1972, 1999). A few people may insist that they rarely, or even never, consciously experience imagery (Galton, 1880, 1883; but see Brewer & Schommer-Aikins, 2006), but for the vast majority of us, it is a familiar and commonplace feature of our mental lives. The English language supplies quite a range of idiomatic ways of referring to visual mental imagery: ‘visualizing,’ ‘seeing in the mind's eye,’ ‘having a picture in one's head,’ ‘picturing,’ ‘having/seeing a mental image/picture,’ and so on. There seem to be fewer ways to talk about imagery in other sensory modes, but there is little doubt that it occurs, and the experiencing of imagery in any sensory mode is often referred to as ‘imagining’ (the appearance, feel, smell, sound, or flavor of something). Alternatively, the quasi-perceptual nature of an experience may be indicated merely by putting the relevant sensory verb (‘see,’ ‘hear,’ ‘taste,’ etc.) in actual or implied “scare quotes.”
Despite the familiarity of the experience, the precise meaning of the expression ‘mental imagery’ is remarkably hard to pin down, and differing understandings of it have often added considerably to the confusion of the already complex and fractious debates, amongst philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists, concerning imagery's nature, its psychological functions (if any), and even its very existence. In the philosophical and scientific literature (and a fortiori in everyday discourse), the expression ‘mental imagery’ (or ‘mental images’) may be used in any or all of at least three different senses, which are only occasionally explicitly distinguished, and all too often conflated:
Visual imagery:
Visual imagery is the strongest developed form of imagery in humans. Everyone can improve their memory by making greater use of imagery. When two ideas are connected, images can help them connect more vividly, directly and memorably. Associative imagery is the basis of the evolution of memory and thought, and made a large contribution to the survival chances of our primitive ancestors.
Only relatively recently have humans started to use imagery to recall such things as phone numbers, concepts and mathematical formulae, all of which are poor in imagery and are hard to remember. By making deliberate use of the natural visual associative capability of memory, everyone can improve their thinking effectiveness. This is an increasingly precious and valuable skill in a knowledge-based economy within an information society.
The Relation to Perception:
There are further potential problems, however, with the brief characterization of imagery given in our introduction. Not only does what is said there duck the difficult (and rarely considered) task of specifying what dimensions and degrees of similarity to perception are necessary for an experience to count as imagery; it also elides the controversial question of whether, despite the surface resemblance, imagery is a sui generis phenomenon, conceptually quite distinct from true perceptual experience, or whether imagery and perception differ only in degree rather than in kind.
Some, such as Hume (1740), hold that percepts (impressions in his terminology) and images (ideas) do not differ in kind, but only in their causal history and their degree of “vivacity”or vividness. This view has frequently been criticized, however, most recently by McGinn (2004). An alternative view, implicit in many discussions (and explicitly defended by Thomas (1997a, 1999b; see also Jastrow, 1899)), is that imagery lies at one end of a spectrum stretching from veridical, highly stimulus-driven and stimulus-constrained perception at one end, to “pure” imagery (where the content of the experience is generated entirely by the subject, and is quite independent of any current stimulus input) at the other. Several varieties of imaginative preceptual experience may be taken to fill in the continuum between these extremes: mistaken or illusive perceptions (imagining, for instance, that the bush seen indistinctly in the darkness is a bear), and various types of non-deceptive seeing as or seeing in (such as imagining a cloud to have the shape of a camel, weasel, or whale; seeing a Laughing Cavalier in paint on canvas; seeing someone's sadness in their eyes; or seeing the notorious duck-rabbit figure as a duck [or rabbit]).
The Duck-Rabbit
References
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/
http://www.readprint.com/article-5
http://volweb.utk.edu/school/bedford/harrisms/imagery
http://www_camsp_com-cornerstone-assets-images-product-remember_sm_png.mht
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