Expressive Minds and Artistic Creations


Book Description

Expressive Minds and Artistic Creations: Studies in Cognitive Poetics presents multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research papers describing new developments in the field of cognitive poetics. Among other leading researchers, many contributors are world-famous scholars of psychology, linguistics, and literature, including Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Zoltán Kövecses, and Reuven Tsur.




Expressive Minds and Artistic Creations


Book Description

Expressive Minds and Artistic Creations: Studies in Cognitive Poetics presents multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research papers describing new developments in the field of cognitive poetics. The articles examine the complex connections between cognition and poetics with special attention given to how people both create and interpret novel artistic works in a variety of expressive media, including literature, music, art, and multimodal artifacts. The authors have diverse disciplinary backgrounds, but all of them embrace theories and research findings from multiple perspectives, such as linguistics, psychology, literary studies, music, art, neuroscience, and media studies. Several authors explicitly discuss empirical and theoretical challenges in doing interdisciplinary work, which is often considered as essential to future progress in cognitive poetics. Scholars address many specific research questions in their articles, including most notably, the role of embodiment and simulation in human imagination, the importance of conceptual metaphors and conceptual blending processes in the creation and interpretation of literature, and the function of multiperspectivity in poetic and multimodal texts. Several new ideas are also advanced in the volume regarding the cognitive mechanisms responsible for artistic creations and understandings. The volume overall offers an expanded view of cognitive poetics research which situates the study of expressive minds within a broader range of personal, social, cultural and historical contexts. Among other leading researchers, many contributors are world-famous scholars of psychology, linguistics, and literature, including Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Zoltán Kövecses, and Reuven Tsur, whose defining papers also survey the roles and significance of conceptual mechanisms in literature.




The Arts and the Creation of Mind


Book Description

Learning in and through the visual arts can develop complex and subtle aspects of the mind. Reviews in: Journal of aesthetic education. 38(2004)4(Winter. 71-98), available M05-194.




Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities


Book Description

This book argues that fans’ creative works form a cognitive system; fanfic, fanvids, and gifs are not simply evidence of thinking, but acts of thinking. Drawing on work in cognitive linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive philosophy, and psychology—particularly focused on 4-E cognition, which rejects Cartesian dualism–this project demonstrates that cognition is an embodied, emotional, and distributed act that emerges from fans’ interactions with media texts, technological interfaces, and fan collectives. This mode of textual engagement is deeply physical, emotional, and social and is enacted through fanworks. By developing a theory of critical closeness, this book proposes a methodology for fruitfully putting cognitive science in conversation with fan studies.




Time Representations in the Perspective of Human Creativity


Book Description

In recent years, the study of the conceptualization of time has seen a considerable growth, providing a basis for exploring the cognitive foundation of metaphor. But if metaphorical representations of time are established in the cognitive system, how are they manipulated when humans are engaged in creative expression? This is the question that the present volume addresses, on the assumption that by interrogating creativity, new insights into our understanding of time may be gained. Our view of creativity, which informs the ten chapters that compose this volume, endorses not only the extraordinary instances found in poetry and the arts (cinema, music, graphic novels, etc.), but also its more ‘mundane’, everyday manifestations that appear in ordinary language use, political discourse, or TV news. Spanning across modalities (verbal, pictorial, auditory, and gestural), the exemplary expressions herein are intended to reflect the richness and diversity vis-à-vis the creativity of time representations while also pointing to the common underpinnings that motivate and constrain creativity.




Probability Designs


Book Description

In Probability Designs, Karin Kukkonen presents the predictive processing model of cognition as a means of exploring narrative structure and reader experience. Utilizing the literary canon of various cultures, Kukkonen combines theory and cognitive science to analyze how reader expectation and prediction shape literature, and how literature accomplishes cognitive feats that determine the human capacity for free, exploratory thought.




Performing Metaphoric Creativity across Modes and Contexts


Book Description

The creative potentiality of metaphor is one of the central themes in research on creativity. The present volume offers a space for the interdisciplinary discussion of the relationship between metaphor and creativity by focusing on (re)contextualization across modes and socio-cultural contexts and on the performative dimension of creative discourse practices. The volume brings together insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, (Critical) Discourse approaches to metaphor and Multimodal discourse analysis. Creativity as a process is explored in how it emerges in the flow of experience when talking about or reacting to creative acts such as dance, painting or music, and in subjects’ responses to advertisements in experimental studies. Creativity as product is explored by analyzing the choice, occurrence and patterning of creative metaphors in various types of (multimodal and multisensorial) discourses such as political cartoons, satire, films, children’s storybooks, music and songs, videos, scientific discourse, architectural reviews and the performance of classical Indian rasa.




Beckett and the Cognitive Method


Book Description

"How can literature enhance, parallel or reassess the scientific study of the mind? Or is literature instead limited to the ancillary role of representing cognitive processes? Beckett and the Cognitive Method argues that Beckett's narrative work, rather than just expressing or rendering cognition and mental states, inaugurates an exploratory use of narrative as an introspective modeling technology (defined as "introspection by simulation"). Through a detailed analysis of Beckett's entire corpus and published volumes of letters, the book argues that Beckett pioneered a new method of writing to construct (in a mode analogous to scientific inquiry) "models" for the exploration of core laws, processes and dynamics in the human mind. Marco Bernini integrates models, problems and interpretive frameworks from contemporary narrative theory, cognitive sciences, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind to make a case for Beckett's modeling practice of a vast array of processes including: the (narrative) illusion of a sense of self, the hallucinatory quality of inner speech, the dialogic interaction with memories and felt presences, the synesthetic nature of inner experience and mental imagery, the developmental cooperation of language and locomotion, the role of moods and emotions as cognitive drives, the layered complexity of the mind and the emergent quality of consciousness. Beckett and the Cognitive Method also reflects on how Beckett's "fictional cognitive models" are transformed into reading, auditory or spectatorial experiences generating through narrative devices insights on which the sciences can only discursively or descriptively report. As such, the study advocates for their relevance to the contemporary scientific debate towards an interdisciplinary co-modeling of cognition"--




Comics and Cognition


Book Description

"Comics and Cognition: Towards a Multimodal Cognitive Poetics develops an analytical approach to multimodal communication in comics through insights from embodied cognitive science, especially cognitive linguistics and visual psychology. It extends previous cognitive poetic frameworks to the study of multimodality in comics, providing a cohesive analytical framework that also connects comics to other literary and artistic interests. The approach highlights the embodiment of cognition, and how this structures knowledge in long term memory, and activates it through perception, mental simulation, and creative blending. These cognitive processes allow readers to make impressions, predictions, inferences, and eventually conclusions and interpretations about a text. Many of these processes of reader comprehension are unconscious, but emerge into a conscious experience of the multimodal text with a richly construed and nuanced texture. This book unpacks the dynamic interplay between the reader and the multimodal text throughout the processes of multimodal reading, including opportunities for interaction, interrogation, and improvisation of meaning derived from the reader's embodied and textual experiences, tackling crucial features of the comics form, and their impact on such issues as viewpoint, temporality, abstraction, metacommentary, and transmediation. The proposed multimodal cognitive poetics applies to narrative and art comics, in both print and digital media"--




Unparalleled Poetry


Book Description

"Chapter 1 begins with a well-known biblical poem, Psalm 23, in order to illustrate two problems facing biblical poetry readers: what are "lines" in (traditionally unlineated) biblical poetry, and why does it even matter? The chapter sets these overarching problems in the context of modern biblical poetry scholarship: the frameworks of parallelism and meter, and the confusion over whether "biblical poetry" is best defined by style or structure. While parallelism and meter are rejected, Robert Lowth's early observation of "conformation" is affirmed: biblical poetry does relate to structure, and it is built from lines that fit to each other, not lines that fit to a meter. This raises the question of how the free-rhythm (unlineated) lines of biblical poetry can be perceived or mentally organized as structural-rhythmic units by the listener or reader. A cognitive approach informed by the theory and method of Reuven Tsur is introduced as the solution"--