Cognitive Literary Studies Research Articles

Review

Review

Green numbers? Green selfies? An ecocritical reading of stories in the social media and self-quantification

ABSTRACTThis article shows how the self-quantification movement and social media’s various ways of presenting 21st-century selves are being used to sustain and further the status quo of overconsumption and neocolonial exploitation, but also for making people realise that they are global citizens, closely linked with the people who make their products and the planet’s finite resources that are being used in the production as well as in daily consumption. To understand how these social media stories, numbers and images work, this paper uses interdisciplinary research, especially psychological and cognitive literary studies approaches.

Introduction

In what ways does literary study contribute to human knowledge, understanding, and flourishing? This introductory essay emphasizes the importance of an age-old question in the face of the devaluation of the humanities. Cognitive literary studies are well situated to address the ethical and pedagogical functions of literature. Broadly contextualizing the issue’s contributions within literary and cognitive theory, the essay describes their various explorations of reader processing and ethical involvement, including personal, social, and environmental improvement.

Postmodern Conceptualization of Focalization, Temporality and Spatiality as Three Narrative Aspects in Darren Greer's Just Beneath My Skin (2014)

Although most of the existing postmodern and contemporary theories of narrativity may claim their great disparity from the earlier classic and modern ones, some of their narrative aspects seem to be at a very close distance from the earlier ones, especially those related to content such as themes and characterization. Other narrative aspects that have indeed undergone great deviance from the so long accepted modern interpretations are not paid a highly considerable attention in the field of literary studies, especially those concerned with form criteria such as narrative style, narrator, focalizer, point of view, temporal distortion and spatial form. Thus, this paper aims to explore three narrative aspects that cause a radical change in the classic and modern narrative theory, namely; focalization, temporality and spatiality. Besides, it examines postmodern conceptualization of these three aspects through some literary theories such as Gerard Genette's Theory of Focalization, Mikhail Bakhtin's Theory of Dialogic Novilistic Style, Louise Rosenblatt's Reader's Response Theory, or Literary Transaction Theory as she prefers to call it, and Mark Turner's and others' Cognitive Narratology Theory which is a branch of Cognitive Literary Critical Studies Theory. These theories provide the appropriate theoretical tools for the study and understanding of postmodern and contemporary fiction in general and the novel at study in particular. Since narrativity is the core of literary texts and non- literary media, Darren Greer's novel Just Beneath my Skin is chosen as a practical textual literary corpus where the forces of the three innovative aspects of narrative theory are seen at work.

What Mary Poppins Knew: Theory of Mind, Children's Literature, History

This essay investigates the phenomenon of "embedded" mental states in fiction (i.e., a mental state within a mental state within yet another mental state, as in, "Mrs. Banks wished that Mary Poppins wouldn't know so very much more about the best people than she knew herself"), asking if patterns of embedment manifest themselves differently in children's literature than they do in literature for "grownups." Looking at books for three age groups (nine to twelve, three to seven, and one to two), Zunshine finds significant differences in their respective patterns of embedment, while also arguing that a critical inquiry into complex mental states is not just a cognitive but also a historicist project. Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies.

„Orðin laðast að henni / eins og skortur“

Alda Björk Valdimarsdóttir’s book of poetry, We Who Are Blind and Nameless, was published in 2015. The first part of the book, titled „The course of signs“, lays the groundwork for the conceptual basis of the work through five poems. These five poems will be examined through close reading and scholarly materials from various sources, such as cognitive literary studies, philosophy, psychology, social studies and neurological research. There is particular focus on how the poems stimulate the imagination of readers and ruffle their feelings; there is a discussion on (conceptual) metaphors, irony, humor, paradox, geometrical shapes, enumeration, anaphora and, not least, silence which is a common theme in Alda’s poetry and also defines the structure of her poems in various ways. This analysis shows how Alda convinces readers to think about the „course of signs“ in both a narrow and wider context. She not only causes readers to think about the paradoxical interplay of silence and signs – and thus man’s ingrained need to both speak and be silent – but also woman’s position within her family/world history and the encroachment of man upon his own environment. Through clever humour and irony, Alda Björk shows how apathetic people often are when faced with signs; how without thinking they give themselves over to them, even though they have other options; how people contribute for the signs to be isolating instead of connecting us with each other – and how they misuse silence or are not able to make use of it.

Negative empathy

Since its early formulation by Theodor Lipps, the concept of “negative empathy” has rarely received the attention it deserves in the scholarly debate on empathy. The present paper is an attempt to reconstruct its rough history and to propose a theory of negative empathy that is able to highlight its heuristic potential for the purpose of literary analysis, particularly for the study of the representation of the negative in literature. Drawing upon a range of fields of study, from neuroscience, psychology and psychonalysis to literary hermeneutics, cognitive literary studies, and aesthetics, I will try to lay the foundations for a reconceptualization of negative empathy. A high‐level form of empathy, negative empathy will be described, with relation to literature, as a potentially regressive aesthetic experience, consisting in a cathartic identification with negative characters, which can be either open to agency (indifferently leading either to pro‐ or antisocial behavior), or limited to the inner life of the empathizing subject. Such theoretical hypothesis will finally be tested on Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones.

Towards a Philosophy of Rhythm: Nietzsche’s Conflicting Rhythms

Towards a Philosophy of Rhythm: Nietzsche’s Conflicting Rhythms

Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature ed. by Isabel Jaén and Julien J. Simon

Reviewed by: Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature ed. by Isabel Jaén and Julien J. Simon Luis F. López González Jaén, Isabel, and Simon, Julien J., eds. Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-0-19025-657-9. Cognitive literary studies represent an interdisciplinary effort to create a conduit through which the humanities and the sciences may communicate and share ideas and methodologies with the purpose of establishing new connections and discourses between diverse disciplines. Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature aims to consolidate and diversify the epistemological field of cognitive literary studies. Editors Isabel Jaén and Julien J. Simon bring together an array of eleven academic studies that exemplify the multiplicity of discourses conflating in the dynamic multidisciplinary field, in which "Embodiment" and "Theory of Mind" are the two primary lines of inquiry. This monograph primarily seeks to explore the way in which a blend of cognitive theories can facilitate "our understanding of the relationship between the mind and the arts" in early modern Spain (5). Jaén and Simon divide the book into five sections, each covering a specific branch of cognitive studies. The first section offers an outline of the epistemology of cognitive approaches to early modern Spanish literature. Simon's "Introduction" offers a theoretical framework and [End Page 149] expounds the historical backdrop of the studies in order to understand how cognitive embodiment helps the reader navigate through early modern texts. Three studies comprise section two. In the first study, Howard Mancing explores the ways in which the reader interacts with fictional characters as embodied human beings. Mancing analyzes the battle between Don Quijote and the Basque squire, and he concludes that readers cannot read Don Quixote without understanding "the embodied realities of the characters" (42). Mancing applies Maturana and Varela's neurobiological concept of autopoiesis (self-creation) and argues that Don Quijote creates himself as a knight-errant. The process of becoming "Don Quijote" is fraught with a series of difficulties because he has to "couple" with his imagined world of knight-errands, princesses, and wizards. Katherine Connor-Swietlicki offers an analysis of the current state of autopoietic research and neuroscience updates, as well as an analysis of Cervantes's artfully crafted literary debate between the "armas y las letras." The first part has intrinsic scientific and literary values, but it also serves as the theoretical framework from which she fashions a forceful interpretation of Don Quijote's poetic insight of arms and letters. Julia Domínguez closes the second section with a study about the role of memory and imagination in Don Quijote's (mis-)perception of his "real" world. Domínguez's thesis is that the interplay between memory and imagination is central in Cervantes's novel, and she supports her argument by deploying the Janus Hypothesis, which contends that the mind has the capacity of recording the past while imagining the future (75). Don Quijote resorts to memories collected through his readings, and these memories allow him to imagine future scenarios. Section three deals with "Embodied Cognition and Performance," which contains the studies of Bruce R. Burningham and Elizabeth M. Cruz Petersen. Bruningham opens the section by calling into question the pre-established notion that the Spanish Middle Ages did not have dramatic texts, written to be staged to the public. Burningham revisits his book Radical Theatricality, which argues that a theatrical performance does not depend solely on the plurality of actors. Performances do not need to take place on an "architectural stage" to be considered "theatrical." Instead, the essence of theater "is simply one person watching one person do something interesting" (94). Elizabeth M. Cruz Petersen explores the dynamics of shared spaces in corrales in the context of embodied spectatorship. Using Richard Shusterman's theory of pragmatic somaesthetics, Cruz Petersen argues that early Spanish theatergoers played an active role in the way they experienced theater: "Spectators exercised an embodied aesthetics by merging their own experiences with representational forms" (114). Rather than passive viewers, spectators played an active role in the spatial and interpersonal configuration of the playhouse. The response of the people, which was affected by...

Baudelaire and Other People

Baudelaire and Other People Maria Scott and Alexandra K. Wettlaufer OVER ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS after the death of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), his work remains a focus of interest and investigation for scholars of modernity across a range of disciplines and discourses. In this issue of L'Esprit Créateur, we propose that one reason Baudelaire's œuvre continues to be such a key point of reference for art historians, cultural historians, urban studies specialists, and literary scholars is that his writings—his poetry, prose, and criticism—explore a phenomenon that continues to be a major preoccupation today, namely, what it means to live in permanent proximity to other people. Closely associated with the definition and experience of modernity itself, Baudelaire inhabited the urban landscape of Second Empire Paris, a quasi-anonymous denizen of the crowded parks and boulevards. Manet aptly captures this modern social identity in La musique aux Tuileries (cover illustration), where the top-hatted author of "Les foules" is portrayed in profile against the trunk of a tree, one of a myriad of fashionable Parisians gathered in the gardens behind the elegant pair of lavender-bonneted women who dominate the foreground of the painting. Looking at this picture, it is difficult to imagine that, for many readers and critics, Baudelaire embodies the solitary individual whose psychic, moral, poetic, and even physical integrity is threatened by the presence of other people, or what one of his prose poems describes as "la tyrannie de la face humaine."1 Indeed, for Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire's defensive stance against the gaze of other people is what defines him and his work.2 The theme of autrui is equally central to Walter Benjamin's essays and notes on Baudelaire. Benjamin argues that Baudelaire's verse and prose poetry bear witness to the shock effects produced by life in a modern city and to the mechanisms developed to defend the psyche against the potential violence of random encounters with others.3 Crowded urban spaces produce at least as much anxiety and exhilaration today as they did in Baudelaire's time; encounters with strangers, whether in person or on social media, continue to be a source of both unease and pleasure. Ross Chambers, whose death in 2017 was a grievous loss for French studies, places the various interpersonal croisements that took place in the busy streets of Second Empire Paris at the heart of his exploration of Baudelaire's poetry.4 For the critic Edward Kaplan, similarly, Baudelaire's poetry, in both verse and prose, places the relation between self and other at its very core; Kaplan shows how the poet's work challenges presuppositions about sameness [End Page 1] and difference through complex dialogic interchange.5 Our collection of articles similarly locates the self-other relation at its center, proposing fresh interpretations of Baudelaire's thinking about other people, and showing how the otherness of other people was negotiated by this founding figure of European modernity. Organized in three sections, "Baudelaire and Other People" first considers how the other is constructed in Baudelaire's poetry, then turns to Baudelaire's relationships with other poets, whether as reader or object of reading, and concludes with the role played by other arts and other artists not only in Baudelaire's poetry and criticism, but also in interpretations of his work. In our first section, "Baudelaire's Poetic Others: Theorizing and Realizing Autrui," authors examine the representation of encounters with other people in Les fleurs du mal and Le spleen de Paris. In her analysis of "À une passante" and "Les veuves," Sarah Gubbins explores the role played by both "generic baggage" and pre-existing assumptions in the perception of other people—in this case widows—in Baudelaire's verse and prose poetry. Kevin Newmark's reading of "Les sept vieillards" considers what the "loss of self" at the heart of Baudelaire's encounters with the other might entail and the possibility that it might be merely a provisional loss that allows for an even greater measure of self-possession and understanding in its wake. Maria Scott's essay, engaging with a currently topical theme in psychology and cognitive literary studies, approaches the meeting...

Romola’s “Thinking Bodies”: Reading for Proprioception with George Eliot; or, Postural Consciousness as Psychological Realism

Cognitive literary studies welcome an array of methods and approaches and have proven especially amenable to developing ideas in the cognitive sciences of the embodied mind. Traditional historicism typically applies contemporary discourses of early mind-sciences but I propose, however, that for George Eliot’s Romola, historical context and Victorian science partially obscure a literally physiological, in fact, anatomical, vector of thinking in the novel. I take up recent developments in artificial intelligence and proprioception to suggest that Eliot’s details of postural consciousness contribute to her overall psychological realism and, furthermore, that thinking enters her novels anatomically through “thinking bodies”—especially through Romola herself.

Literature in the Undergraduate Spanish Curriculum: Visionary Brainstorming

This essay, drawing from Design Thinking, challenges college faculty to reconsider the reading and teaching of literature in the undergraduate Spanish curriculum and initiates a visionary brainstorming process to be continued by readers in their own institutions. It suggests considering new research in cognitive literary studies, the impact of digital communications, and students' personal reading experiences and future goals as individuals and departments imagine new places for literature in and across the curriculum and innovative ways to teach it.

The Emotive Textualities of Wilhelm Jensen’s Karin von Schweden

This article traces the emotive textuality in Wilhelm Jensen’s (1837–1911) Karin von Schweden (1872), which is an anomaly in the author’s expansive oeuvre of over 160 prose works in that it is one of his very few literary successes. Drawing on work in cognitive literary theory and emotion studies, the essay identifies emotive textualities in (1) the text’s emphasis on characters’ interiority through an extensive interest in fostering readerly attribution of thoughts, emotions, and motivations to actions of fictive characters (or, Theory of Mind, as cognitive sciences call the process), and (2) the text’s emphasis on facilitating readerly empathetic alignment with figures. The goal is to use the emotive textuality as a way to situate Jensen’s text in the context of sentimental fiction and the author’s personal populist style.

Vulnerable lives: the affective dimensions of risk in young adult cli-fi

ABSTRACTThe article focuses on the psychological dimensions of readers’ engagements with young adult climate change fiction. It argues that that the embodied simulation of a fictional climate-changed world can offer much more than simple entertainment or escapism. Instead, it has the potential to impact teenagers’ understanding of the social, economic, and ecological risks associated with climate change and to give them a better sense of the vulnerability of their current lives and lifestyles. By way of example, the article draws on research in cognitive literary studies, neuroscience, and the psychology of fiction to examine the narrative strategies of Paolo Bacigalupi’s YA cli-fi novel Ship Breaker. It demonstrates how the novel’s depiction of a dystopian future cues both negative emotions and more positive emotions in in order to warn about the future risks of climate change and still make the reading experience pleasurable for young readers.

Cognitive Literary Studies: On Persistent Problems and Plausible Solutions

AbstractThe present article addresses the question whether the wide and disparate field of Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) has met the goal set by its representatives: to provide more authentic, intelligible and meaningful work than the traditional literary scholarship against which it positions itself. When »cognition« entered literary studies in around the 1990s, this was seen to announce the dawning of a new era, characterised by a rejuvenation of the field with the aid of interdisciplinary input, which simultaneously promised a return to its fundamental interest in literary texts. These objectives were accompanied by a growing disaffection with dominant theoretical paradigms (e.g. post-structuralism) and a forthright commitment to bridging the Cartesian dualism purportedly dominating the humanities. From the outset, however, CLS was greeted with criticism both regarding the reliability of its methodological basis and the usefulness of its results. These weaknesses have on the whole not been remedied and their continuing presence is highlighted by the field’s location at the margins of literary scholarship a quarter of a century after the »cognitive turn«. My taking up the longstanding debate surrounding CLS and returning to issues that may appear dated to some is not only indicatedI begin by considering the methodological flaws that critics of CLS identified already at its inception, focusing on the one hand on the unsubstantiated foundations of its claims and on the other on its resistance to providing a precise definition of its key concept »embodiment«. As many other critics have already pointed out, the field’s most problematic assertion is that the products of the human mind, be they mental schemata or figurative language (especially metaphors), are indicative of how human cognition works generally. While this naturalisation of literary form as the structuring principle of human cognition may entail a reassuring revaluation of literary scholarship, it is based on rather simplistic and often unsupported assumptions about the nature of cognitive processes. At the same time, this conflation of literary language and cognitive structure has prevented scholars from asking questions of genuinely literary import. Instead, CLS tends to take literature as a repository of natural language to be scanned for evidence of whatever cognitive phenomena are at stake.Furthermore, CLS’s attention to the text is also indicative of insufficient attention within the field to all that literature doesThe unease surrounding biological matters in CLS persists in recent reconceptualisations of its premises developed with the aim of responding to these criticisms, to which I then turn. Rather than resolving its questionable claims, CLS has branched out into ever new areas, for instance by contextualising cognitive processes, investigating larger, more complex textual phenomena (blends) and studying social or extended cognition rather than individual minds. These reconceptualisations, productive though they may have been within the field of CLS, have merely replicated its fundamental problems and are thus subject to the same charges as earlier forms of cognitive literary scholarship.In conclusion, I argue that to comprehend the embodied responses that CLS currently mainly assumes as givens these would have to be identified and pried apart from the multifarious manifestations by which literary art appeals to the human mind. For that, however, scholars would have to accept the existence of a certain cognitive »norm«, i.e. a »human nature«, without which the most radical theory of embodiment leads to the very impressionism against which CLS initially positioned itself. This would require, above all, that cognitive literary scholars establish clarity about their key term »embodiment« and, in order to do so, embrace research from disciplines they typically eschew: notably the »hard« neurosciences and psychology (both cognitive and evolutionary); furthermore, it would require them to limit their expectations about the explanatory scope of CLS and its innovative force within traditional scholarship.

Bodies, Spaces, and Cultural Models: On Bridging the Gap between Culture and Cognition

AbstractOver the past two decades cognitive literary studies (CLS) has emerged as a new subfield of literary studies. Despite the success of cognitive theories in some areas of research such as in narratology, however, the impact of CLS on the academic discipline of literary and cultural studies as a whole has not been as profound as predicted. Major schools of research, e.g. postcolonial studies or gender studies, remain virtually untouched, and the vast majority of literary scholars are still sceptical or indifferent towards this area of research. Reasons for this scepticism include, for example, epistemological and methodological uncertainties concerning the interdisciplinary intersection of science and literature. But scholars have also begun to address another lacuna in contemporary research that may prove to be of equal or even more profound consequence: the lack of a solid and widely accepted conceptual and analytical bridge between cognitive approaches and the wide field of cultural studies. It is a well-known fact that the study of culture in its many theoretical guises has taken a lead role in philology departments around the globe. Though not every scholar welcomes this development, it would certainly be unwise to ignore the general impact of cultural studies on philology. For this reason, my paper argues that CLS not only needs to engage in a productive interdisciplinary dialogue between literary scholars and cognitive scientists but it also needs to incorporate cultural studies into this dialogue. In other words, an important challenge lies in making cognitive approaches relevant for cultural analysis.This paper engages with current attempts to face this challenge. It provides a survey of approaches that aim to build a conceptual bridge between culture and cognition and thus take a step towards extending cognitive approaches into the field of cultural studies. For this purpose, I adopt the distinction between so-called ›first‹ and ›second generation‹ approaches in order to group this research heuristically into two academic camps: (1) approaches that emphatically foreground so-called second generation cognitive science as their prime source of inspiration, i.e. approaches that engage with enactive, embedded, extended, and embodied aspects of cognition; and (2) studies which do not explicitly situate themselves within this paradigm and rather seek innovation by turning to more ›classical‹, foundational ›first generation‹ concepts of mental representation, information- and text processing. By discussing examples from both lines of research, including work by Kukkonen/Caracciolo (2014), Strasen (2013), Sommer (2013), and Hartner/Schneider (2015), my survey attempts to provide an impression of the wealth of creative thinking currently at work in CLS. In this context, the paper discusses some of the major challenges cognitive approaches are facing today; it traces a selection of current developments in the field, including work on the concept of ›cultural models‹, the notion of the ›intercultural mind‹, and the attempt to programmatically ground conceptualizations of cognition in our bodily interactions with culture and the environment.All in all, I argue that despite the efforts towards a systematic cognitive investigation of culture sketched in this survey, the project of cognitive cultural studies in general is still in its infancy. Its work is conducted by a comparatively small group of enthusiasts and constitutes a highly-specialized academic niche within a multitude of postclassical approaches to literature. Whether it will be possible to interest the much larger body of ›traditional‹ literary and cultural scholars in cognitive approaches, in my opinion, will to no small degree hinge on the field’s ability to move beyond abstract theoretical reflection. While there is obviously nothing intrinsically wrong with specialized fields of research beyond the mainstream, I believe that cognitive approaches have the potential to reach a wider audience. However, this may depend on the ability of CLS to develop concepts and methods capable of analysing concrete cultural phenomena in their social and historical context.

Cognitive Literary Studies, Historicism, and the History of the Imagination

AbstractFor the past two decades, the scholarly discussion about the merits of neuroscience and cognitive science for literary studies has been, in Germany at least, a rather heated affair. This debate, however, has been much less interdisciplinary than the subject matter would suggest and has mainly taken placeThe need to historicise this relationship is part of a more encompassing claim. I believe it is necessary to focus on theory not as something external to, but as a self-reflexive aspect of, literature itself. This implies the need to investigate the mind and cognition only if it is part of the literary work’s self-reflexive scope within a given historical context. Historically, this reflexion presupposes a network in which scientific theories of the mind play a key role. My main example is the imagination. In this context, I will also focus on the rejection of dualism, or rather: the way that René Descartes’s philosophy, especially his distinction betweenOne key problem within CLS has been the focus on theThis historicist approach to cognition as a self-reflexive aspect of literature, on the one hand, and a reflection on science, on the other, necessarily implies a rejection of any universalising approach to literary works of art. The theoretical historicism proposed in this paper presupposes a turn towards the time-bound and the particular, and respective conceptualisations of authorship, literary production, and the text itself. In order to make my point, I will focus on one key concept and cognitive faculty in the history of the humanities: the creative imagination. A historical approach to the imagination in the light of cognitive science – such as championed by Alan Richardson and Mark J. Bruhn in the field of Romantic Studies – thus serves as my starting point. To make my argument, I will focus on three historically crucial phases as they are periods of transition both within literary history and the history of science: the early seventeenth century as the beginning of the scientific revolution, the Romantic period as a second scientific revolution, and literary Modernism as the formative phase of our contemporary scientific worldview. All three literary examples – Shakespeare, Coleridge, Joyce – can and must be seen as paradigmatic of their age as well as instrumental in bringing about literary change. At the same time, these examples will serve as flashlights to highlight a general trend.

The Confines of Cognitive Literary Studies: The Sonnet and a Cognitive Poetics of Form

AbstractWhen we think of the cognitive sciences and literature, we usually think of bringing expertise from neuroscience to literary texts. However, interdisciplinary projects of this nature usually focus on semantic fields or narrative patterns, marginalizing the literary quality of the texts that are examined. More recently, the opportunities that come with a focus on aesthetics and poetic form have been discussed following Stockwell (2009), who has argued that we need to go beyond semantics in the field of cognitive poetics. Experiments using fMRI scanners have shown that readers’ brains ›fire up‹ holistically but that engaging with poetry and prose activates different regions of the brain (cf. Jacobs 2015). So one task of cognitive poetics is to look more closely at the aesthetic experience of literary texts. The sonnet is arguably a suitable test case for a cognitive poetics that is interested in form. After all, received wisdom has it that the sonnet abides by a rigid formal pattern: »it is a fourteen-line poem with a particular rhyme scheme and a particular mode of organizing and amplifying patterns of image and thought […] usually [rendered in] iambic pentameter« (Levin 2001, xxxvii). Accordingly, matters of form should play a crucial part when sonnets are read. At the same time, due to its »particular mode« of organisation, the sonnet is often thought to be a poetic form that is prone to cognitive processes. Helen Vendler (1997, 168) claims, for example, that Shakespeare’sFollowing Vendler and Lyne in their focus on cognitive processes when discussing the sonnet, I will challenge simplistic notions of poetic form that – in the case of the sonnet – are limited to structural features like the fourteen-line rule. Aberrations like theIf we accept that poetic form is not given but evolves while stimuli for cognitive processes and emotional responses are provided, research in cognitive poetics must take aspects of form more seriously. In her comprehensive study of poetic form,Scrutinizing poetic form more systematically with the help of cognitive sciences thus also promises to help us redefine our concept of knowing. Exciting experiments with a focus on affect and emotional responses have brought to the fore the notion that aesthetics plays an important part in the process of reading poetry (cf. Lüdtke 2014). These experiments suggest that schema theory, with its reliance on pre-existing meaningful structures, falls short of grasping the process of reading poetry as an aesthetic process. So while pattern recognition, be it on a narrative plane or a semantic plane, is certainly one facet of the cognitive process of reading poetry, the process involves other facets, too, that CLS has only begun to address. Vaughan-Evans et al. (2016, 6) have perhaps provided »the first tangible evidence that this link [between an aesthetic appreciation of poetry and implicit responses] is permeable«. They argue that the »spontaneous recognition of poetic harmony is a fast, sublexical process« (ibid.) opening up a playing field for CLS at a sublexical level that still warrants investigation. Equally, a recent eye-tracking study of how English haiku are being read, conducted by Hermann J. Müller et al. (2017), has revealed that readers’ individual engagement with poetry becomes more diverse with a second or third round of engaging with the text. This may sound trivial, but it does challenge the notion that CLS will help establish universal patterns of cognition. On the contrary, CLS may corroborate a hermeneutical stance: with every reading of a poem, new questions arise; poems are never fully understood. CLS can thus help to heed Bruhn’s and Wolf’s interjection that »we should pay more attention to the responses of the individual qua individual than averaging individuals into groups« (Bruhn/Wolf 2003, 85).

New Stories, New Explanations: Cognitive Literary Studies at Work

Book Review| December 01 2016 New Stories, New Explanations: Cognitive Literary Studies at Work Ciccoricco, David, Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. x + 317 pp. Tony E. Jackson Tony E. Jackson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2016) 37 (4): 697–703. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3638232 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Tony E. Jackson; New Stories, New Explanations: Cognitive Literary Studies at Work. Poetics Today 1 December 2016; 37 (4): 697–703. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3638232 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPoetics Today Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The fictive reflex: a fresh look at reflexiveness and narrative representation

Reflexiveness in literary contexts tends to be assimilated to self-reference; to the various ways in which a work may foreground the artifice and conventionality of its own features as representation, narrative or language. In this sense it is equated with metafiction, and regarded as a sophisticated and highly self-conscious use of narrative; here, however, I offer a contrary view of reflexiveness, one which sees it as elementary, pervasive, and constitutive of fictionality. In this view, there is a continuity between the basic logic of mimesis and the self-conscious “baring of the device” that, for the Russian Formalists, defines the literary. I begin by clarifying the nature of (fictive) representation as an act, and identify its intrinsic reflexiveness, and go on to compare this perspective with both the metafictional notion of reflexiveness and the theoretical discourse on reflexiveness around “mirror neurons” in cognitive literary studies. I then situate reflexiveness within a broader interdisciplinary environment, framed by complex systems science and the conceptualization of emergence in terms of representational recursiveness, which allows the two sides of the discussion so far to be understood as complementary aspects of reflexiveness, one of which aligns with the cultivation of (self-) consciousness, the other with the simple enactment of systemic relations. Finally I address the conceptual challenge presented by an account of narrative, and fiction, based upon reflexiveness, and suggest some ways in which it can be understood.