by Margaret H. Freeman (Los Angeles Valley College).
Forthcoming in Metaphor & Metonymy at the Crossroads, ed. Antonio Barcelona. Mouton de Gruyter 1998 (in press).
It is a commonplace of literary criticism that one of the defining characteristics of literature is its ability to generate multiple meanings and interpretations. Literary critics are adept at producing such readings, readings which are often insightful and illuminating. Literary critics, however, have never explored the principles or the processes by which such multiplicity occurs. Their readings are shaped by the theoretical stances they take, whether psychological, sociological, historical, or deconstructionist, to name just a few. Readings thus generated of a single literary text exist side by side, vying for preferential acceptance with no means independent of the theories being used to determine their validity. Literary criticism, in other words, lacks an adequate theory of literature. Recent developments in the field of cognitive linguistics have already proven promising and productive in the search for an adequate theory of language. Cognitive theory, for example, has been able to show that meaning does not reside in language so much as it is accessed by it, that language is the product, not of a separate structural system within the brain, but of the general cognitive processes that enable the human mind to conceptualize experience, processes that cognitive linguists call embodied understanding (Johnson 1987) . By recognizing the central role played by analogical reasoning which maps elements of one cognitive domain onto another, cognitive linguists have begun to account for a variety of linguistic phenomena occurring in natural languages, such as anaphor or counterfactuals, metaphor or metonymy, that have long eluded logic-oriented theories of meaning (Fauconnier 1997) .
If cognitive linguistics can produce an adequate theory of language, it can also serve as the basis for an adequate theory of literature. I therefore propose a theory of literature that is grounded in cognitive linguistic theory: namely, that literary texts are the products of cognizing minds and their interpretations the products of other cognizing minds in the context of the physical and socio-cultural worlds in which they have been created and are read. This is the argument that underlies this paper. The theory I call cognitive poetics is a powerful tool for making explicit our reasoning processes and for illuminating the structure and content of literary texts. It provides a theory of literature that is both grounded in the language of literary texts and grounded in the cognitive linguistic strategies readers use to understand them. The question I raise in this paper is, therefore, "In what ways can cognitive theory as it has been developed in recent years contribute toward a more adequate theory of literature?" To answer this question, I look at Emily Dickinson's poem, "My Cocoon tightens -," to show how the general mapping skills that constitute the cognitive ability to create and interpret metaphor can provide a more coherent theory than the intuitive and ad hoc approaches of traditional criticism. I then look at another Dickinson poem, "My Life had stood - a / Loaded Gun -," to show how a cognitive metaphor approach can illuminate the insights--and the limitations--of traditional literary criticism. Finally, I show how the application of cognitive poetics can identify and evaluate literary style by discussing a poem generally believed to be by Dickinson but which proved to be a forgery, and end by comparing cognitive poetics to other cognitive approaches. [M.F.]