Author : Karin Kukkonen
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 47,54 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0190634766
Carrying neoclassicism back into today's critical debates, this study considers the cognitive underpinnings of the rules of poetic justice, the unities and decorum, underlines their relevance for today's cognitive poetics and traces their influence in the emerging narrative form of the eighteenth-century novel.
Author : Karin Kukkonen
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 15,93 MB
Release : 2017-03-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0190654511
This study provides an introduction to the neoclassical debates around how literature is shaped in concert with the thinking and feeling human mind. Three key rules of neoclassicism, namely, poetic justice (the rewards and punishments of characters in the plot), the unities (the coherence of the fictional world and its extensions through the imagination) and decorum (the inferential connections between characters and their likely actions), are reconsidered in light of social cognition, embodied cognition and probabilistic, predictive cognition. The meeting between neoclassical criticism and today's research psychology, neurology and philosophy of mind yields a new perspective for cognitive literary study. Neoclassicism has a crucial contribution to make to current debates around the role of literature in cultural and cognition. Literary critics writing at the time of the scientific revolution developed a perspective on literature the question of how literature engages minds and bodies as its central concern. A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics traces the cognitive dimension of these critical debates in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and puts them into conversation with today's cognitive approaches to literature. Neoclassical theory is then connected to the praxis of eighteenth-century writers in a series of case studies that trace how these principles shaped the emerging narrative form of the novel. The continuing relevance of neoclassicism also shows itself in the rise of the novel, as A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics illustrates through examples including Pamela, Tom Jones and the Gothic novel.
Author : Geert Brône
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 569 pages
File Size : 45,48 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Computers
ISBN : 3110205602
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.
Author : Mark J. Bruhn
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 34,30 MB
Release : 2013-11-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1317936868
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.
Author : Karin Kukkonen
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 48,36 MB
Release : 2019-01-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0190913053
When the novel broke into cultural prominence in the eighteenth century, it became notorious for the gripping, immersive style of its narratives. In this book, Karin Kukkonen explores this phenomenon through the embodied style in Eliza Haywood's flamboyant amatory fiction, Charlotte Lennox's work as a cultural broker between Britain and France, Sarah Fielding's experimental novels, and Frances Burney's practice of life-writing and fiction-writing. Four female authors who are often written out of the history of the genre are here foregrounded in a critical account that emphasizes the importance of engaging readers' minds and bodies, and which invites us to revisit our understanding of the rise of the modern novel. Kukkonen's innovative theoretical approach is based on the approach of 4E cognition, which views thinking as profoundly embodied and embedded in social and material contexts, extending into technologies and material devices (such as a pen), and enactive in the inherent links between perceiving the world and moving around in it. 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction investigates the eighteenth-century novel through each of these trajectories and shows how language explores its embodied dimension by increasing the descriptions of inner perception, or the bodily gestures around spoken dialogue. The embodied dimension is then related to the media ecologies of letter-writing, book learning, and theatricality. As the novel feeds off and into these social and material contexts, it comes into its own as a lifeworld technology that might not answer to standards of nineteenth-century realism but that feels 'real' because it is integrated into the lifeworld and embodied experiences. 4E cognition answers one of the central challenges to cognitive literary studies: how to integrate historical and cultural contexts into cognitive approaches.
Author : Christopher Collins
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 39,7 MB
Release : 2013-01-22
Category : Science
ISBN : 0231531028
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.
Author : Karin Kukkonen
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 45,49 MB
Release : 2020-01-16
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0190050950
"Probability Designs develops a comprehensive account of the predictions and probabilities at play in literature, in particular novels. Novels, it is argued, provide readers with a designed sensory flow in their plots, style, and relation to other texts. The model traces, based on research in predictive processing, how this designed sensory flow revises readers' expectations and leads them to engage in exploratory thinking. The model is then embedded in a co-evolutionary account of how language, writing, and fictionality enable literary designer environments in which thought can be extended beyond the everyday. Literary form, as traced in probability designs, performs particular cognitive work in these designer environments"--
Author : John Savarese
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 38,12 MB
Release : 2023-10-08
Category :
ISBN : 9780814256053
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.
Author : Michael Burke
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 33,39 MB
Release : 2016-12-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0190643072
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.
Author : Reuven Tsur
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 44,96 MB
Release : 2017-08-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0190676353
Poetic Conventions as Cognitive Fossils offers a major theoretical statement of where poetic conventions come from. The work comprises Reuven Tsur's research in cognitive poetics to show how conventional poetic styles originate from cognitive rather than cultural principles. The book contrasts two approaches to cultural conventions in general, and poetic conventions in particular. They include what may be called the "culture-begets-culture" or "influence-hunting" approach, and the "constraints-seeking" or "cognitive-fossils" approach here expounded. The former assumes that one may account for cultural programs by pointing out their roots in earlier cultural phenomena and provide a map of their migrations. The latter assumes that cultural programs originate in cognitive solutions to adaptation problems that have acquired the status of established practice. Both conceptions assume "repeated social transmission," but with very different implications. The former frequently ends in infinite regress; the latter assumes that in the process of repeated social transmission, cultural programs come to take forms which have a good fit to the natural constraints and capacities of the human brain. Tsur extends the principles of this analysis of cognitive origins of poetic form to the writing systems, not only of the Western world, but also to Egyptian hieroglyphs through the evolution of alphabetic writing via old Semitic writing, and Chinese and Japanese writings; to aspects of figuration in medieval and Renaissance love poetry in English and French; to the metaphysical conceit; to theories of poetic translation; to the contemporary theory of metaphor; and to slips of the tongue and the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, showing the workings and disruption of psycholinguistic mechanisms. Analysis extends to such varying sources as the formulae of some Mediaeval Hebrew mystic poems, and the ballad 'Edward,' illustrative of extreme 'fossilization' and the constraints of the human brain.
