The Creative Processing Mechanism of YiXiang(Imagery) Reconstruction in Classical Chinese Poetry

Abstract: Reading and appreciating Chinese classical poetry is a psychological process of readers' aesthetic re-creation. This creative processing targets the artistic YiXiang (意象) constructed by poets through "blending sentiment into scenery", and featuring three psychological processing characteristics: cognitive metaphoricality, emotional loadability, and mutual integration of sentiment and scenery (情景交融). And this creative processing produces the aesthetic Yixiang which has both the objective perceptual representation and readers' subjective thoughts and emotions. Reconstructing artistic Yixiang into aesthetic Yixiang constitutes the core creative processing of reading and appreciating Chinese classical poetry. And its psychological mechanism involves information activation and selective integration in readers' long term memory systems. Specifically, with the support of semantic memory and episodic memory, readers understand the emotion-ladened meaning of Yixiang through semantic association and image construction, and activate corresponding subjective emotional experiences (emotional elements), and generate a situation model of poetry discourse (cognitive elements). On this basis, readers selectively integrate relevant cognitive and emotional elements with their self-related schema in autobiographical memory under an aesthetic goal, thereby establishing novel connections and generating new ideas and concepts. This process is mainly constrained by the novelty of the artistic YiXiang and the readers' capability of creative imagination. This interdisciplinary theoretical study calls on creativity researchers to pay attention to the creative processing on the view of Chinese traditional cultural and focus on the hot-cognitive process of creativity.