The Multimodal Metonymic Construction of Emotion in The Rainbow of Time: A Perspective of Cognitive Poetics

In multimodal literary discourse, like picture books, characters' emotions are represented, rather than by expressive words, predominantly by visual spatial element such as colors and images which, collaborated with simple narrative text, act as triggers of metonymic and metaphorical mapping mechanisms, evoking empathic experience. Taking Jimmy's pictorial narrative book The Rainbow of Time as example, this paper starts with categorizing three types of multimodal metonymies of emotion:PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECT FOR EMOTION, OBJECT PERCEIVED FOR EMOTION, SCENERY FOR EMOTION, followed by generalizing the overarching system of multimodal metonymy of emotion at two dimensions: the collaborative space and synergy of multimodal metonymy. It goes further to explore the universal embodiment foundation and specific cultural motivation for the multimodal metonymies in Jimmy's book. The popularity of Jimmy's picture books, to some extent, attributes to the ingenious use of multimodal metonymy as well as metaphor, thereby to activate the universal cognitive mechanism and cultural aesthetic schema, creating indescribable aesthetic experience.