Given Ulysses’ perhaps unparalleled attention to the operations of the human mind, it is unsurprising that critics have explored the work’s psychology. Nonetheless, there has been very little research that draws on recent cognitive science to examine thought and emotion in this novel. Hogan sets out to expand our understanding of Ulysses, as well as our theoretical comprehension of narrative—and even our views of human cognition. He revises the main narratological accounts of the novel, clarifying the complex nature of narration and style. He extends his cognitive study to encompass the anti-colonial and gender concerns that are so obviously important to Joyce’s work. Finally, through a combination of broad overviews and detailed textual analyses, Hogan seeks to make this notoriously difficult book more accessible to non-specialists.
Cognitive poetics is a new way of thinking about literature, involving the application of cognitive linguistics and psychology to literary texts. This book is the first introductory text to this growing field. In Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, the reader is encouraged to re-evaluate the categories used to understand literary reading and analysis. Covering a wide range of literary genres and historical periods, the book encompasses both American and European approaches. Each chapter explores a different cognitive-poetic framework and relates it to a literary text. Including a range of activities, discussion points, suggestions for further reading and a glossarial index, the book is both interactive and highly accessible. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction is essential reading for students on stylistics and literary-linguistic courses, and will be of interest to all those involved in literary studies, critical theory and linguistics.
Poetics of Cognition investigates the material effects of experimental poetics using new evidence emerging from cognitive science. It asks: How do experimental poems “think” and how do we think through them? Examining experimental modes such as the New Sentence, proceduralism, projective verse, sound poetry, and visual poetry, Jessica Lewis Luck argues that experimental poems materialize not so much the content as the activity of the embodied mind, and they can thus function as a powerful scaffolding for extended cognition, both for the writer and the reader. While current critical approaches tend to describe the effects of experimentalism solely in terms of emotion and sensation, Luck shifts from the feeling to the thinking that these poems can generate, expanding the potential blast radius of experimental poetic effects into areas of linguistic, sonic, and visual processing and revealing a transformational potency that strictly affective approaches miss. The cognitive research Luck draws upon suggests that the strangeness of experimental poetry can reshape the activity of the reader’s mind, creating new forms of attention, perception, and cognition. This book closes by shifting from theory to praxis, extracting forms of teaching from the forms of thinking that experimental poems instill in order to better enable their transformative effects in readers and to bring poetry pedagogy into the twenty-first century.
This book brings together researchers with cognitive-scientific and literary backgrounds to present innovative research in all three variations on the possible interactions between literary studies and cognitive science. The tripartite structure of the volume reflects a more ambitious conception of what cognitive approaches to literature are and could be than is usually encountered, and thus aims both to map out and to advance the field. The first section corresponds to what most people think of as "cognitive poetics" or "cognitive literary studies": the study of literature by literary scholars drawing on cognitive-scientific methods, findings, and/or debates to yield insights into literature. The second section demonstrates that literary scholars needn't only make use of cognitive science to study literature, but can also, in a reciprocally interdisciplinary manner, use a cognitively informed perspective on literature to offer benefits back to the cognitive sciences. Finally, the third section, "literature in cognitive science", showcases some of the ways in which literature can be a stimulating object of study and a fertile testing ground for theories and models, not only to literary scholars but also to cognitive scientists, who here engage with some key questions in cognitive literary studies with the benefit of their in-depth scientific knowledge and training.
The Poem as Icon resolves long-standing questions of poetic function from a cognitive perspective. Margaret Freeman shows how poetry, as one expression of the aesthetic faculty, enables us to iconically access and experience the "being" of reality.
For more than two decades now, cognitive science has been making overtures to literature and literary studies. Only recently, however, cognitive linguistics and poetics seem to be moving towards a more serious and reciprocal type of interdisciplinarity. In coupling cognitive linguistics and poetics, cognitive poeticians aim to offer cognitive readings of literary texts and formulate specific hypotheses concerning the relationship between aesthetic meaning effects and patterns in the cognitive construal and processing of literary texts. One of the basic assumptions of the endeavour is that some of the key topics in poetics (such as the construction of text worlds, characterization, narrative perspective, distancing discourse, etc.) may be fruitfully approached by applying cognitive linguistic concepts and insights (such as embodied cognition, metaphor, mental spaces, iconicity, construction grammar, figure/ground alignment, etc.), in an attempt to support, enrich or adjust 'traditional' poetic analysis. Conversely, the tradition of poetics may support, frame or call into question insights form cognitive linguistics. In order to capture the goals, gains and gaps of this rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of research, this volume brings together some of the key players and critics of cognitive poetics. The eleven chapters are grouped into four major sections, each dealing with central concerns of the field: (i) the cognitive mechanisms, discursive means and mental products related to narrativity (Semino, Herman, Culpeper); (ii) the different incarnations of the concept of figure in cognitive poetics (Freeman, Steen, Tsur); (iii) the procedures that are meant to express or create discursive attitudes, like humour, irony or distance in general (Antonopoulou and Nikiforidou, Dancygier and Vandelanotte, Giora et al.); and (iv) a critical assessment of the current state of affairs in cognitive poetics, and more specifically the incorporation of insights from cognitive linguistics as only one of the contributing fields in the interdisciplinary conglomerate of cognitive science (Louwerse and Van Peer, Sternberg).The ensuing dialogue between cognitive and literary partners, as well as between advocates and opponents, is promoted through the use of short response articles included after ten chapters of the volume. Geert Br ne, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Jeroen Vandaele, University of Oslo, Norway.
In Romanticism's Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability, John Savarese reassesses early relationships between Romantic poetry and the sciences, uncovering a prehistory of cognitive approaches to literature and demonstrating earlier engagement of cognitive approaches than has heretofore been examined at length. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers framed poetry as a window into the mind's original, underlying structures of thought and feeling. While that Romantic argument helped forge a well-known relationship between poetry and introspective or private consciousness, Savarese argues that it also made poetry the staging ground for a more surprising set of debates about the naturally social mind. From James Macpherson's forgeries of ancient Scottish poetry to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, poets mined traditional literatures and recent scientific conjectures to produce alternate histories of cognition, histories that variously emphasized the impersonal, the intersubjective, and the collective. By bringing together poetics, philosophy of mind, and the physiology of embodied experience--and with major studies of James Macpherson, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and Walter Scott--Romanticism's Other Minds recovers the interdisciplinary conversations at the heart of Romantic-era literary theory.
This book sets out a framework for investigating audience responses to political discourse. It starts from the premise that audiences are active participants who bring their own background knowledge and political standpoint to the communicative event. To operationalise this perspective, the volume draws on concepts from classical rhetoric alongside contemporary research in cognitive stylistics and cognitive linguistics (including schema theory, Text World Theory, Cognitive Grammar, and mind-modelling, amongst others). It examines the role played by the speaker’s identity, the arguments they make, and the emotions of the audience in the – often critical – reception of political text and talk, using a diversity of examples to illustrate this three-dimensional approach – from political speeches, interviews and newspaper articles, to more creative text-types such as politicised rap music, television satire and filmic drama. The result of this wide-ranging application is a holistic and systematic account of the rhetorical and ideological effects of political discourse in reception.
Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures. Applying the cognitive neuroscience of categorization, emotion, figurative thinking, narrativity, self-awareness, theory of mind, and wayfinding to the study of literary works and genres from diverse historical periods and cultures, the authors argue that literary experience proceeds from, qualitatively heightens, and selectively informs and even reforms our evolved and embodied capacities for thought and feeling. This volume investigates and locates the complex intersections of cognition, literature, and history in order to advance interdisciplinary discussion and research in poetics, literary history, and cognitive science.
Christopher Collins introduces an exciting new field of research traversing evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and literary study. Paleopoetics maps the selective processes that originally shaped the human genus millions of years ago and prepared the human brain to play, imagine, empathize, and engage in fictive thought as mediated by language. A manifestation of the "cognitive turn" in the humanities, Paleopoetics calls for a broader, more integrated interpretation of the reading experience, one that restores our connection to the ancient methods of thought production still resonating within us. Speaking with authority on the scientific aspects of cognitive poetics, Collins proposes reading literature using cognitive skills that predate language and writing. These include the brain's capacity to perceive the visible world, store its images, and retrieve them later to form simulated mental events. Long before humans could share stories through speech, they perceived, remembered, and imagined their own inner narratives. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Collins builds an evolutionary bridge between humans' development of sensorimotor skills and their achievement of linguistic cognition, bringing current scientific perspective to such issues as the structure of narrative, the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the relation of rhetoric to poetics, the relevance of performance theory to reading, the difference between orality and writing, and the nature of play and imagination.
