Rhetoric, Neurocognitive Poetics, and the Aesthetics of Adaptation

Abstract

Rhetorical effects in speech and writing have a great strategic importance in achieving the communicative end of being persuasive: they are key in the exertion of power through language. Persuasion occurs by cognitive-affective stimulation, relying on specific psychosomatic perceptual patterns which are used on all levels of speech reception in cultural and political contexts. This makes rhetorically conspicuous texts efficient as stimulus material for empirical research into neurocognitive modeling of how poetic texts are read. Adaptations as revisitations of prior works share with the rhetorical repertoire of repetition similar cognitive-affective properties, because both function via recognition of sameness or similarity. Recent paradigm shifts in adaptation studies have much enlarged the field of research, so Linda Hutcheon's as yet empirically unsupported insight that adaptation is the norm and not the exception in human imagination finds an unexpectedly large field of application. This shift away from the narrow standard paradigm of novels adapted for the screen to a more fundamental aesthetics of adaptation has also helped establish connections between adaptation studies and the experiment-based methodologies of empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics with a view to developing cognitive and affective models of the processes underlying the reception of adaptations.