Expressive Minds and Artistic Creations

Abstract

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 chapters 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 many believe is essential to future progress in cognitive poetics. Scholars address many specific research questions in their chapters, such as, 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 that situates the study of expressive minds within a broader range of personal, social, cultural, and historical contexts. Among other leading researchers, contributors include world-famous scholars of psychology, linguistics, and literature—Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Zoltásn Kövecses, and Reuven Tsur—whose defining papers also survey the roles and significance of conceptual mechanisms in literature.