In “The Defence of Guenevere” and “King Arthur’s Tomb,” the opening poems of William Morris’s 1858 volume The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems, Morris shows through the tragic relationship of Guenevere and Launcelot how discourse systems limit the ways we can experience our lives. By representing the conceptual strug gles of Guenevere and Launcelot, whose needs, natures, and experiences greatly exceed their systems’ ability to define and categorize, Morris critiques not only the conceptual systems available during his own time but the very possibility of achieving satisfying truth or transcendence. In these early poems, conflicting conceptual systems, each of which claims full interpretive authority, plague the lovers with irreconcilable contradictions and create a kind of cognitive dissonance that threatens their selfunderstanding and even their sanity. Launcelot and Guenevere attempt several strategies for bridging the gap between language and real ity, but ultimately both succumb to the unyielding constraints of language and convention.

中文翻译：

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游荡在十个世界之间：莫里斯的格内维尔诗与话语的失败

在威廉·莫里斯 1858 年出版的《格内维尔的辩护》和《亚瑟王之墓》的开篇诗中，莫里斯通过格内维尔和朗塞洛的悲剧关系展示了话语系统如何限制了我们的体验方式我们的生命。通过代表 Guenevere 和 Launcelot 的概念斗争，他们的需求、性质和经验大大超出了他们系统的定义和分类能力，莫里斯不仅批评了他自己时代可用的概念系统，而且批评了实现令人满意的真理或超越。在这些早期的诗歌中，相互冲突的概念系统，每一个都声称具有充分的解释权威，用不可调和的矛盾折磨恋人，并造成一种认知失调，威胁他们的自我理解甚至他们的理智。朗塞洛特和格内维尔尝试了多种策略来弥合语言与现实之间的差距，但最终都屈服于语言和惯例的顽固约束。