Cognitive Literary Studies Research Articles

Language and Enunciation – A Cognitive Inquiry with Special Focus on Conceptual Integration in Semiotic Meaning Construction

The research topic explored in this dissertation is language and enunciation, and specifically meaning construction, viewed in the perspectives of cognitive linguistics, semiotics, literary studies and philosophy.

Conversations with I. A. Richards: The Renaissance in Cognitive Literary Studies

Throughout his career as critic and teacher, I. A. Richards (1893–1979) was involved in various conversations about poetry: those with his students in the course Practical Criticism, which he pioneered at Cambridge in 1925 and which is still being taught today; those of his students and colleagues in the years 1925–28 with the poetic texts he gave them, generated in an experimental procedure and published in part in his book Practical Criticism; and those with students at Harvard University during the years 1944–63. The challenge for us in this present essay is to integrate these varied cognitive literary studies into our own response to Richards, specifically through the empirical study of poetic texts within the tradition of the Gestalt school of psychology. In the first section, we discuss the poem as a gestalt, which stands behind Richards's presentation of the real reader's “poetic experience” in his Principles of Literary Criticism. We exemplify this by developing a particular technique, used by Richards to teach poetry at Harvard, into an empirical study of the haiku form of poetry. In the second section, we explicate Richards's own empirical study of John Donne's “Holy Sonnet 7,” originally presented in Practical Criticism, which is a good example of the renaissance in Donne criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Richards's experimental technique is discussed in relation to what was then contemporary experimental psychology. We then compare Richards's study with various subsequent replications, including our own, presented here. In the third section, we try to update Richards's experimental technique of obtaining written protocols to one of obtaining online verbal protocols in response to Donne's poem “The Bait.” The move from reading this poem to its empirical study highlights our integration of the different lines of thought within cognitive literary studies.

Cognitive Studies of Anglo-Saxon Mentalities

The new ways of thinking about literature offered by Cognitive Literary Studies and Cognitive Poetics offer detailed means of understanding pre-modern mentalities and fresh perspectives on the literary products of remote cultures. When applied to Anglo-Saxon literature, these methodologies, which bring cognitive science and linguistics to bear on literary studies, focus on the psychology of interpretation and seek to discover the mental causes of the rhetorical effects in literature. They base literary study on an understanding of mental processing, and inform analyses of literary structures with knowledge of mental schemas. A better understanding of the landscape and significance of literary mentalities can only enhance our grasp on both the artistry and logistics of literary meaning.

Grand challenges in theoretical and philosophical psychology: after psychology?

Grand challenges in theoretical and philosophical psychology: after psychology?

Empathy and the Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Empathy and the Novel Tara McGann Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 242 pp. $65.00. Does novel reading make you more empathic, even more moral? In this groundbreaking study, Suzanne Keen subjects to scrutiny the assumption that novel reading induces empathy, thereby motivating altruistic behavior. Further, Empathy and the Novel questions the notion that culturally valued works kindle morality better than popular fiction. Nonetheless, while complicating an assumed coincidence between novel reading and empathy, she distinguishes herself from critics of empathy and of empathic reading. Unlike those who decry the indulgence and withdrawal from real engagement that they see empathy as encouraging, as well as its reliance upon universal categories, Keen sees empathy as a “precious quality of our social natures” (viii). She writes, “I do not quarrel with the intrinsic value of human empathy, nor do I regard narrative empathy as a cheat or a fake” (146). Rather, Keen asks that we examine what she terms the empathy-altruism hypothesis in a spirit of open exploration rather than either uncritically presuppose or simply reject it. That scientific bent to her project determines the book’s structure as well as its admirable commitment to cross-disciplinary investigation. Attempting to study [End Page 263] narrative empathy comprehensively and empirically, Keen skillfully knits together modes of inquiry as varied as narratology, neuroscience, moral philosophy, reading studies, developmental and social psychology, cognitive literary studies, feminist and postcolonial literary criticism, and reader-response criticism. Given the density of this weave, the book’s lucidity and accessibility across disciplines is impressive. So too is its rigor. The preface squarely takes on the assumption that novel reading, by stimulating emotional responsiveness and the role-taking imagination, helps readers become moral world citizens. The problem, as the book will establish, is that no evidence exists to support this comforting scenario. Yet Keen does not reject out of hand that such evidence could be found even as she dismantles inflated claims for narrative empathy, which “need not definitively perform renovations of civic virtue nor of individual behavior to be recognized as a core component of emotional response to fiction” (ix). The preface lays out the book’s project of understanding what creates narrative empathy as well as its manifold effects. As noted, Keen does not disdain empathy and indeed takes seriously the reading experiences and expectations concerning character identification of middlebrow novel readers, who are the overwhelming majority of the dwindling population of novel readers and usually women. In shedding light on a critically ignored dimension of novel reading, this book exposes such a bias as a gender bias. Before setting forth on its project, the book defines empathy: “In empathy, sometimes described as emotion in its own right, we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others” (5). It surveys contemporary scholarship on empathy and considers its popular representation, namely how in popular as well as academic discourse, empathy is still often gendered as a supposedly female trait. In exposing literary critics to the way psychologists approach the study of empathy, the first chapter seeks to bring information to a conversation between literature and psychology, for many who want to cultivate empathy turn to novels to achieve this goal. However, as Keen argues, prosocial behavior need not arise from empathy, nor can we assume that empathy leads to altruism. Further, we cannot assume that narrative empathy translates to compassion towards living human beings, let alone to taking action to benefit others. Narratives can be used to confirm prejudice or even stoke hatred. In this chapter Keen provides an example of the kind of studies that will need to be conducted, relating one with her own students, who were asked to respond to three narrative texts, one an excerpt from a novel. Keen wanted to find out which genres and narrative techniques generated the greatest empathy among her students as well as test her hypothesis “that fiction deactivates readers’ suspicions and opens the way to easier empathy” (29). There is something about the very fictionality of a novel that disarms readers, she contends, inviting them to identify with characters. The field of psychology can also learn much from...

Cognitive Literary Studies: The “Second Generation”;The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity

Research Article| December 01 2006 Cognitive Literary Studies: The “Second Generation”; The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity H. Porter Abbott H. Porter Abbott Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2006) 27 (4): 711–722. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2006-009 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation H. Porter Abbott; Cognitive Literary Studies: The “Second Generation”; The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity. Poetics Today 1 December 2006; 27 (4): 711–722. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2006-009 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. Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The View of Where We've Been and Where We'd Like to Go

Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. $115.00 hc. $33.95 sc. 176 pp. Gavins, Joanna, and Gerald Steen, eds. 2003. Cognitive Poetics in Practice. London and New York: Routledge. $125.00 hc. $34.95 sc. 173 pp. Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. $21.00 sc. 396 pp. The three studies that are the subject of this discussion bear in common, among other things, an important assumption that touches intimately on the concerns of literary research and pedagogy. They assume that, in a post-Derridean world, not only is the quest to understand the processes of meaning-making still a valid one, but that [End Page 225] today, ironically, we may have at our disposal more instruments than ever before with which to explore how human beings communicate. Philosophers and literary scholars on both sides of the great Theory Divide are wondering alike, inevitably: What's next? How might we proceed in the wake of poststructuralism's rearrangement and even discrediting of the formalist and structuralist strategies that once provided our (admittedly foggy) windows onto communicative acts and the texts that encode them? To the authors and editors of these books, the tools literary scholars need not merely to dispense with the older paradigms but actually to surpass them in their ability to teach us about meaning-making are most readily and sensibly found in the cognitive sciences. These studies culminate (though in a limited way that I will discuss shortly) roughly twenty years of eavesdropping by a small contingent of literary scholars on conversations taking place within fields like cognitive psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, computer science, the cognitive neurosciences, cognitive evolution, evolutionary psychology, and others that fall under the widely interdisciplinary label "cognitive science" (and that generally tend to make those of us in the humanities cringe––with honest intimidation if not distaste). Literary scholars intrigued with recent advances in learning about the human brain/mind (learning spurred on by the invention of imaging technologies such as CAT scan, MRI, and OIS that allow scientists to view live brains in action) have been bringing to their roles as literary theorists and critics a conviction whose time has surely come: Simply put, they believe that our approaches to literary questions can and should be enriched by an acknowledgment of how the enabling and constraining behaviors of brains and minds contribute to literary experience. The diversity of titles now associated with this belief testifies to the expansion and increasing maturity of cognitive literary studies. To cite some of the major titles from just the past five years, including monographs, essay collections, and theater as well as literary studies: Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (2004), Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (eds.), The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity (2004), Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion and Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (both 2003), David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (2003), Bruce McConachie, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947-1962 (2003), Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions (2002), David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (2002), Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare's Brain: Reading With Cognitive Theory (2001), Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World (2001), and Blakey Vermeuele, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology [End Page 226] in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2000). (Also, forthcoming in 2006 is Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel.) These works represent literary scholars' efforts to assimilate brain/mind science into a broad range of historical and close-textual readings; and as such, they risk being accused by colleagues in the humanities of being epistemologically naive, even parasitical, feeding off the...

Cognitive poetics and imagery

Imagery is manifestly a basic and omnipresent constituent of the mental life of human beings, a cognitive prerequisite of symbolisation and thought. The study of the poetic functions of imagery offers us a window into the cognitive semantics of the imaginative mind, but the literary contribution should not limit itself to illustrating the generalities of the mind; it should also address the issue of literature as such: what compelled humans to create art, poetry, and fiction, and in which sense can we be said to have a ‘literary mind’? (cf. Turner 1996)Imagery is a universally central dimension in poetic meaning production. Yet, cognitive poetics has made little effort so far to elucidate its semantic and semiotic mechanisms. Important as it is, imagery appears to constitute an issue exempt from deeper inquiry not only by the inherent difficulties and complexities of iconic structure but also by uncomfortable feelings about the entire field of mental representations in behaviorist psychology, analytic philosophy of mind, and anti-phenomenological thinking in general. In order to develop the study of poetic imagery in the framework of a cognitive semantics and semiotics, we suggest interrelating plain literary reading and cognitive research as directly as possible, and thus openly focusing on and exploring meaning production as it occurs in the poetic text, rather than using poetry only to illustrate certain notions in cognitive semantics.Here, we will limit ourselves to analysing two cases of reprocessed imagery, followed by some overall theoretical considerations on cognitive literary studies.

“Literary Interpretation” and Cognitive Literary Studies

“Literary Interpretation” and Cognitive Literary Studies

From Practical Criticism to the Practice of Literary Criticism

In Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1963[1929]), I. A. Richards marks his standing as the herald of three trends of literary criticism: the empirical study of literature, New Criticism, and Reader-Response Criticism. What is more, in this book he affiliates himself with the experimental psychology of his time and by extension with the rising prominence of Gestalt theory within this discipline. Our research weaves together not only these three trends but also his Interaction Theory of Metaphor, detailed in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). This essay draws out the implications of Richards's approach to cognitive literary studies for our work on poetic metaphor. In the section entitled “A Gestalt Approach to Poetry” we develop and incorporate his Interaction Theory of Metaphor into our Gestalt-Interaction Theory of Metaphor, applying it to a reading of John Donne's poem “The Bait.” In the section“An Empirical Study of Poetry” we discuss Richards's empirical study of poetry, followed by our own empirical study, in line with the same Gestalt-Interaction Theory of Metaphor.

Adjusting the Frame: Comments on Cognitivism and Literature

This article focuses on the role of cognitivism in literary studies and,conversely, the role of literature in cognitivist approaches. Taking as its point of departure the preceding issue of Poetics Today (vol. 23, no. 1), a special issue on cognitive approaches to literature, this commentary addresses a number of issues related to, but also exceeding, the field of cognitive literary studies. These issues include the interrelation of the terms cognitive and literary and of human history versus evolution; the rhetoric and dynamics of paradigm change; the history of cognitivist inquiry, including different models of the study of the human mind; practical and fundamental questions about interdisciplinarity; and differences of approach in the sciences and the humanities.