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Cognitive Poetics 8. 1. Roots and Margins 8. 2. Beyond Reader Response Theory 8. 3. Stylistics and Rhetoric Revisited 8. 4.

Cognitive ScienceMore or Less 8. 5. Overview 1. 1. Roots and Margins If cognitive science has its roots in anthropology, philosophy, neuroscience and neurology, computer science and artificial intelligence, it has also grown to be much indebted to psychology and linguistics and also much involved in literary studies, with stylistics, pragmatics, semantics and language studies in general as favorite fields of investigation. Most of the contributions that have determined the development of such a discipline come from metaphor theory, stylistics, and narratology, and owe very much to such more specialized investigations as image schemas (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1999, Langacker 1987, 1990, 1991, Shank & Abelson 1977) or blending theory (Fauconnier 1985, Fauconnier and Turner 2002, with their mental space theory), to deixis, schema poetics and frames (Stockwell 2002), the figure/ground distinction, prototypes (Rosch 1988 and Lakoff 1987) or to the description of text worlds (Paul Werth 1999). This is, of course, much more than we can cover in this space, so our presentation since the domain of cognitive poetics is far from being very well defined, and much less clearly circumscribedwe will confine ourselves to introducing two positions (that sometimes seem to be in disagreement)Peter Stockwells (who thinks himself that cognitive poetics, the application of cognitive science to illuminate the study of literary reading, is maturing as a discipline, Cognitive Poetics and Literary Theory, web article) and Reuven Tsurs, with David Miall and others in-between. 8. 2. Beyond Reader Response Theory The above statement from Stockwellto illuminate the study of literary reading already points out that cognitive poetics is basicallyand for the time beinga poetics of the reading processes and the way audiences (Fishs interpretive communities) respond to literary texts, something that Jauss, Fish again, and Iser had explored in their reader response investigations. Thus we are still at the end of the reception stage in the process of literary communication, with creativity still in the background and at some distance too. Reuven Tsurwho may be the first to have used the concept of cognitive poetics, as far back as the nineteen-sixtiesadmits from the very beginning that the disciplines of literary criticism, literary history, linguistics and aesthetics are still very much to be taken account of; one of the problems that we will encounter again and again is where we draw the line between cognitive poetics and interpretation, and Tsur does not prove to be of much help here: cognitive poetics, he announces, attempts to find out how poetic language and form, or the critics decisions, are constrained and shaped by human information processing, or how one can account for the relationship between the structure of literary texts and their perceived effects. (web page) His book Toward a Theory of Cognitive

Poetics (1992) attempts, as a matter of fact, to illuminate the aspects of poetic structure on a wide variety of strata and from multiple angles: the sound stratum of poetry, the units-ofmeaning stratum, and the world stratum, with literary theory, once again, period style, stylistic typology, archetypal patterns, genre, etc. in the background. Large sections are devoted to poetry and altered states of consciousness and to another new concept, that of the implied critic (side by side with the older implied author and implied reader) and his mental dictionary. One of Tsurs main assumptions is neuropsychological in nature and origin: language is a predominantly sequential activity, of a logical character, and as such is known to be associated with the left hemisphere of the brain; on the other hand, the emotional processes that poetry is supposed to and does stir are reputedly placed in the right hemisphere. Thus the question isand he proposes several case studieshow emotional qualities can be conveyed by poetry; so, the effects of poetry once again, and the job of the cognitive poetician is to relate these effect to particular features and regularities that occur in the literary texts. And so the interest falls on the cognitive correlates of poetic processes which include the normal cognitive processes (that were initiallydifficult concept here evolved in poetry for non-aesthetic purposes, but rather historical, cultural, ethical, etc.), a modification of these processes by feelings and emotions aroused during reading (or creating?poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility), and their reorganization according to new principles. If one pays careful attention, the point here is still dependent on the interpretability of poetic language, with a particular emphasis upon the diffuse nature of emotions and the fact that they are associated with some deviation from the normal energy level and Tsur comes back again and again to the idea that a major assumption of cognitive poetics is that poetry exploits for aesthetic purposes cognitive processes that were evolved for non-aesthetic purposes. This probably has to do with the representative nature of initial forms of poetry and literature in general, or simply with imitation. Next he takes into account the process of categorization, which may be rapid and delayed, depending on how the verbal labels underload or overload the items in ones cognitive system; delayed categorization may involve a period of unpleasant uncertainty about what is going on in a specific passage of a poem, while rapid categorization may involve a loss of important information. This way, different categorization strategies may generate, at both ends, different categorization strategies. These two types of categorization are related to the way poetic metaphors are understood, to the implied critics decision style and the above-mentioned altered states of consciousness. On the other hand, readers and critics may differ from one another in their tolerance of delayed categorization, of various types of metaphors or various aesthetic categories (like the grotesque, for instance). The main difference we see here is between the stable, well-organized categories (in expository or scientific discourse) that convey straightforward loads of information on ones cognitive system, without any sensory (or very little), emotional information; and poetic categorization (mostly delayed, but also sometimes rapid)that allows an overload of sensory information which results (in the reader) in altered states of consciousness (generated, most likely, by similar ones in the author). Tsur is highly quotable here when he notes that this is

an element of suspension of boundaries between self and not-self, of immersion in a thing-free and gestalt-free quality. Altered states of consciousness are states in which one is exposed for extended periods of time to pre-categorial, or low-categorized information of varying sorts. These would include a wide range of states in which the actively organizing mind is not in full control, ranging from hypnagogic states (when one is half-awake, halfasleep), through hypnotic state, to varieties of religious experience, most notably mystic and ecstatic experiences. In the creative process, moments of inspiration or of insight too may involve such altered states of consciousness, though less readily recognized as such. Aspects of Cognitive Poetics, p.11) The hypnagogic state, or the hypnotic, or the other types of non-rational (the mind is not in full control) states may refer primarily to those of the author while creating, though they might very well characterize some moments of reading, so that what the effort here seems to be is that of distinguishing between intention (the intentional fallacy) and consciousness: nonconceptual experiences can be conveyedone way or anotherby the use of language, which (back at the beginning of this section) is conceptual in nature. Quoting psychologist Robert Orenstein, Tsur re-emphasizes that logical and rational consciousness is related to the left hemisphere of the brain, while meditative consciousness is related to the right hemisphere; the information is processed sequentially in the left hemisphere (of the language) and it comes out as compact and logical, while the right hemisphere processes information simultaneously and its output is experienced as diffuse, integrating input from many senses (orientationi.e. deixis in literature--, emotions, mystic experiences). And thus what we have in poetry is the transfer of a significant part of language processing from the left to the right hemisphere, thus rendering the related precepts more diffuse, (p.12) What cognitive poetics in this view seems to be doing is what (cognitive) criticism has been doing for the past 2500 years, i.e. attempt to find a better, clearer, more satisfactory way of saying or pointing out or suggesting what poetry has always said or communicated; and Reuven Tsur manages to be unambiguous, as, obviously, an ambiguity (of criticism) on top of another ambiguity (that of poetry) can only result in more ambiguity, so the possible cognitive stance gets to be even more distanced from the quality of meaning a poem contains: I claim that the right hemispheres output is ineffable not because no semantic features are involved, but because those features are diffuse and simultaneous. It is not the information that is not unparaphrasable, but its integration and diffuseness. Diffuseness and integration are not semantic information added, but the structure of information as it appears in consciousness. Whereas semantic information can be paraphrased, the impression that arises from its structure can only be described. (p.13) Therefore, paraphrase and description, which, together, may easily be called interpretation; all in all, what Tsur seems to be investigating in the kind of language (grammatical structures, elliptic sentences, deixisthe generation of a coherent scene or worldand orientation, prosodic structures, point of view and irony) used in poetry to produce certain effects and what other devices are used (figurative language in general and metaphor in particular, distance, self and ego, perception of space an time) to add up

these effects to an overall one; as we can see, there still are many gaps to be filled and many questions to be asked. 8. 3. Stylistics and Rhetoric Revisited Peter Stockwells Cognitive Poetics and Literary Theory argues that cognitive poetics is best seen as the latest development in the progressive evolution of stylistics, while the endpoint of the process represents the return of rhetoric to the centre of literary scholarship(p.1). So our concepts are cognitive poetics, literary theory, literary scholarship, stylistics and rhetoric, with cognitive poetics providing a descriptive account of how readers construct propositional content from literary reading; and thus, once again, reception theory and reader response. Like tsur, whom he often quotes, Stockwell adds aesthetic analysis and emotional involvement, plus capturing the interaction of meaningfulness and felt experience in literary reading. (p.1) In stylistics itself, the general trend seems to have been away from formalism (Leo Spitzer, Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Stephen Ullman, later Leech, Short, and Widdowson in Britain) towards a more contextualized stylistics, and thus reconnecting more fully with the older and longstanding rhetorical tradition; (p.2) other developments have been in text linguistics and pragmatics, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, computational and corpus linguistics; to all these, cognitive poetics also adds a psychological and sociocultural dimension. The picture is almost complete with renewed interest in conceptual metaphor, figure and ground, schema- and world-theories: Conceptual metaphor theory suggested new ways of examining creative language in poetry and ways of understanding extended metaphors and thematics in longer fiction. The work on figure and ground had obvious implications for understanding literary foregrounding, significance, deviance and value. Schema theory and various theories of world-building offered ways on which fictional worlds and performed poetic personas could be better understood. Schema theory, possible worlds theory and text world theory all suggested various ways to explain the fact that interpretive communities could share roughly consensual readings at the same time as individual readers could hold varying interpretations.(p3) Drawing as it does on cognitive science, cognitive poetics relies on the same principles as its source discipline: the concept that meaning is embodied (mind and body are continuous); the notion that categorization (see Tsur before) is a feature of prototype effects, while categories are provisional; finally, the idea that language and its manifestations in reading and interpretation is a natural and universal trait in humans. Peter Stockwells own Cognitive Poetics (2002) describes first the micrological dimensions of cognitive poetics (figure and ground, prototypes, deixis, cognitive grammar) and then the macrological dimensions (schema poetics, possible worlds, mental spaces, metaphor and parable, text world theory and models of global comprehension; all of these are used to explore such issues as literariness (with fewer and fewer adepts lately), defamiliarization, intertextuality, deviance, canonization, characterization, perspective, fictionality and so on and so on.

Tsurs problem continues to attract attention, namely that lesser advances have been recorded in accounting for aesthetic effects, side by side with the role of feelings, and emotions, while the main focus remained on matters of meaningfulness; text world theory (Stockwell, Werth and Gavins) seems to be a solution here, in that it explores the ways in which a certain word or universe is enriched and experienced emotionally in the process of reading: My point here is that world-based models go beyond a simple propositional account and start to draw in considerations of felt experience, empathy, identification, atmosphere, and impact. These are all dimensions that are a crucial part of the literary reading experience, but they have not really been systematically addressed until recent and forthcoming cognitive poetic work.(Stockwell, p.6) Not accidentally, some fruitful work has recently been done here in the analysis of drama: the complexities of the discourse world of the theatre, audience, stage and actors and the interaction of these elements with counterparts in the constructed text worlds generated in the course of a dramatic performance (Dan McIntyre, E. Lahey, T. Cruickshank) This may be explained by the fact that dramatic texts may be pointing to a continuity between literary and non-literary settings of language use, so that a new principle of cognitive poetics emerges: there is no such thing as an exclusive literary language, i.e. there is no such thing as literariness; both everyday and natural language have a prominent creative dimension, so that no clear disjunction is accepted between poetic and non-poetic language; and thus a certain principle in certain types of stylistics ends here. One author (Derek Attridge, 2002) suggests the use of singularity as the sense a reader gets that the literary experience is not quite like anything else; it is not a feature, but an event that takes place in reception. Like Tsur again, Stockwell seems to be interested in the application of cognitive frameworks in the understanding of literary effects and, implicitly, of aesthetic value. His distinction is between professional readers and unprofessional ones, or readers who read for readings sake, not for some ulterior purpose: Literary study in universities bears little resemblance to the sorts of things non-professional readers (i.e. the huge majority of readers//we ourselves have started questioning the existence of this huge majority) do in literary reading.(p.10) What he has in mind is such features that are barely discussed in university lectures and seminars: atmosphere, tone, identification, excitement, involvement, resistance, disgust, i.e. the motivating factors for literary reading. Readerly involvement, the sense of transformation and self-implication received quite a lot of attention in recent years (Richard Gerrig, D. S. Miall, D. Kuiken) Stockwells final question is also hesitant: If cognitive poetics can account for any reading, then to what extent is it a theory at all? Well, recourse to prototype again, since cognitive analyses can identify prototypical readings produced either by individuals or by communities; some readings may be widely shared and conventional others are idiosyncratic and eccentric, i.e. they diverge from the norm, in which case we could speak of a stylistics of reading or reader response. Nothing seems to be very new here, whence the unsurprising conclusion:

A theory of literary reading (cognitive poetics) is merely a specific part of a general theory of language, and this general theory is grounded in empirical evidence. This is not to say that cognitive poetics in itself is a scientific theory in a straightforward sense, but it does assert that there is a scientific basis for the tools which cognitive poetics provides for explorations in literary reading. (p.11) Reuven Tsur shares in Stockwells skepticism, but he takes one step further and denies Stockwells contribution itself, especially in what regards the latters work in deictic categories; what Stockwell seems to be doing is classify, label and illustrate these categories, when the task of cognitive poetics is to shift attention from labeling and classifying them to accounting for their effect; in other words, Stockwell is too much preoccupied with meaning (in a discussion of Shelleys Ozymandias) and too little with feeling; according to Tsur, in Stockwell/s practice cognitive analysis sometimes consists in rechristening well-worn terminology into new, cognitive terms. And more: Everything that is language or literature goes through the cognitive system of authors, readers, and critics. However, a discussion becomes cognitive not when it resorts to a certain terminology, but when certain problems are addressed which cannot be properly handled without appealing to some cognitive process or mechanism. (Tsur above, p.18) 8. 4. Cognitive ScienceMore or Less If interpretation is the aim of reading, inferencing is central to the process of reading, so David S. Miall (very often with Don Kuiken) dedicates much of his work to inferencing. Since all writers can mean more that they say, inferencing is highly important in discourse processing, and he quotes Arthur C. Graesser, a psychologist who, in several articles, considers the categories of knowledge-based inferences that map onto the representation of the narrative, for instance, in working memory: referential (like the anaphoric he, she, it) role assignment for each verbal category (time, space, object, agent, patient), causal relationships (linking one proposition to what went on before), character motivation, theme, characters emotion, consequence, author intent, reader emotion Such a theory of inference is not only usable in discourse processing, but also I n a number of other poetic domains like understanding the minds of characters or in metaphoric mappings (Lakoff and Johnson), in deixis theory (keeping track of space and time, the characters perspectives and relationships among them), the role of time itself in narrative (not only story time and discourse time, but also the time of the reader, the time of the narrator, the time of the plot, the time of actions at discourse level, the time of events at story level, the time of characters, plus variation in time of the narrative discourse, including the well-known scene/summary distinction), foregrounding and defamiliarizing, character understanding (spaces in which they are embedded, relative position and importance in the story, literary characters as mental models, psychological traits, their aims and emotions, etc.) The problem of inferencing in this authors view seems to be typical of the field of cognitive poetics as a whole. Very much like Tsur, Miall avoids emphasis on interpretation, and points out the role of feeling in literary response, though, he thinks, this remains a largely uncharted area. For cognitive poetics, the question is not What is this poem/drama/novel saying?, which will

result in multiple interpretations, but rather what were your feelings and emotions while reading it?; feeling situates readers in relation to complex modes of experience, memory, and social understanding, just as literature in general can change readers modes of feeling an modify them, side by side with the readers self-concept. Consequently (and again), empirical research on reading must be seen as the centre of cognitive poetics. Miall and Kuiken propose that feelings during literary reading be characterized at four levels: suspense and amusement as reactions to an already interpreted narrative; feelings that derive from perceived affinity with an author, narrator, or narrative figure (I like Dostoyevski, or I like Hamlet, and thats it); feelings of appreciation, which are, in fact, aesthetic reactions; and the fourth level, the most complex one, which involves the modifying power of feelings (see above) that appear to be triggered by the narrative and formal components of literary texts (phonetic iconicity among them, i.e. the sound patterns of the text, especially in poetry or poetic prose). So, during reading, these feelings interact, sometimes in the form of metaphors of personal identification, to modify the reader and his self-understanding. There are, of course, typologies of feeling responses, but the main point is that of understanding the role or roles that feeling performs during reading. Summing up their view on the contributions of feeling to literary reading, Miall and Kuiken (A Feeling for Fiction, 2001) re-emphasize these four domains: (1) evaluative feelings toward the text as a whole, such as the overall enjoyment, pleasure, or satisfaction of reading a short story; (2)narrative feelings toward specific aspects of the fictional event sequence, such as empathy with a character or resonance with the mood of a setting; (3) aesthetic feelings in response to the formal (generic, narrative, or stylistic) components of a text, such as being struck by an apt metaphor; and (4) selfmodifying feelings that restructure the readers understanding of the textual narrative and, simultaneously, the readers sense of self. While there is no sharp demarcation between these four domains in readers experiencea given moment may contain elements of more that one feeling processwe propose that each feeling domain depends upon characteristically different structures and processes. (p.3) They next investigate some properties of modifying feelings, the generative power of feelings, and the catharctic relationship, all of these on the basis of empirical evidence from one of two stories. A special section is dedicated to anticipation and feeling, on the premise that the prefrontal cortex is responsible for anticipation (see the numerous studies in the past decades on beginnings): other responses are likely to be mediated by the right hemisphere (see above), such as prosodic aspects of foregrounding, figurative language, and narrative structure. We may end up our not very convincing tour among representatives of cognitive poetics by briefly referring to Raymond W. Gibbss The Poetics of Mind (1994) whose main assumption (very much like that of Mark Turner about narrative) is that everyday language is widely and ineradicably metaphoric; so, not only is there nothing like literariness (or metaphoricity, for that matter), but we understand absolutely all linguistic constructions in terms of what might be called, rather technically, figural projections of image schemas. Everyday mind, continues Gibbs, is fundamentally shaped by various poetic and figurative processes which, incidentally, develop very early in children (a special chapter on The Poetic Minds of Children). As a result,

Cognitive science cannot approach adequate explanations of human mind and behavior until it comes to terms with the fundamental poetic character of everyday thought.(p.454) Figurative imagination is a part of human cognitive processes in general, so cognitive poetics is almost equivalent to cognitive science, something that is meant to make it either simpler, or infinitely more difficult to characterize. 8. 5. Overview The main focus of cognitive poeticsin order to justify its cognitive dimensionis on how readers process the language of text, so that psychology (processing), linguistics (language), and text interpretation are very much part of its investigative purposes. We have seen, in more that a couple of instances, that what it does more than other approaches to literature is to explore the emotional aspects of information processing in reading. A summing up of the principles underlying cognitive poetics is difficult at this point, since there seems to have been no systematic approach to all the elements of poetics (author and implied author, reader and implied reader, the graphitic, semantic, syntactic, and figurative levels, narrator and narrate, point of view, perspective and focus, characters, situations and events, symbolism, allegory and parable) in order to see how each of them is part of a cognitive project. A list can however be proposed, and it contains the oldest principle of the embodied mind (Mark Johnsons The Body in the Mind, Varela, Thompson and Roschs The Embodied Mind, George Lakoff, E. Sweetser, etc.); form and iconicity (mainly in poetry); the cognitive consciousness (conceptualization, intuition, feeling, and emotion); metaphorical thought; creativity (creating emergent structures by the process called blendingFauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think); distributed cognition; the role of audiences (interpretive communities) DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES, Ed. Universitas XXI, Iai, 2010

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