Courting the Other: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Texts

Theme Session, 5th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference

Amsterdam, July 14-19, 1997

Organized by Margaret H. Freeman (Los Angeles Valley College)

Recent work in the area of cognitive linguistics recognizes the central role that idealized cognitive models, deeply ensconced in cultural knowledge, play in all aspects of communication. The intent of this session is to explore the ways in which cognitive linguistics contributes to the possibilities of approaching the 'other' in the understanding, interpreting, translating, and assessing of literary texts. The question addressed in this theme session, therefore, is:

"To what extent can cognitive linguistics contribute to a better understanding and interpretation of literary texts and both aid and assess the work of translators?"

We want the session to be a lively and focused exchange on this question, rather than simply a presentation of arguments. In order for this to happen, papers will be circulated beforehand so that respondents may address questions that arise in other papers in their own discussion during the session. The goal of the discussion will be to better understand how the research work of all the participants contributes to answering the questions outlined in Professor Grabher's abstract.

The two initial papers outline the scope of the problem in "courting the other" (Grabher) and suggest a cognitive linguistic approach to resolve it (Tabakowska). The eight participants who have been selected to respond to this question address it from one or more of the three inherent aspects of all literary texts: author, reader, and the text itself, whether from the point of view of theory (Diepeveen, Rice), psychology of self/reader and other/writer (Belyanin), conceptualizations of culture (Csabi, Pichler), evaluation of translations of specific texts (Gibinska), or explication of cognitive capabilities (Jacobs, Wojcik-Leese). Professor Donald C. Freeman, Department of English, University of Southern California, will act as respondent.

Content




Gudrun M. Grabher
Institut für Amerikanistik, University of Innsbruck, Austria

Courting the Other in Literature

The "Other" is the most difficult and paradoxical target of our cognition. In literature, the question about the Other is intricately linked with that of the self. In his hermeneutics Gadamer argues that a literary text confronts us with a possible actualization/realisation of human existence. Reading about a "character's" life we encounter one possible ontic realisation within the ontological scope of human existence in general. Understanding the Other's life is thus acknowledging that the Other's life could have been mine. And yet it is not my life, nor is the consciousness of the Other identical with mine. The Other remains the Other. The problem of gaining knowledge of the Other is even intensified if that Other (the character of a literary text) is determined by a cultural context different from mine. Ethnic literature confronts us with this problematic in particular. On the other hand, trying to understand this Other we may approach precisely his/her other culture and gain deeper insight and understanding of it.

In a discussion of the Other in literary texts I therefore intend to raise the following questions:

Starting from the assumption that by reading a literary text I engage in a dialogue with that Other,

1. How do I deepen my understanding of
a) human existence in general?
b) my own existence?
c) my own identity?

2. What are the limits of my understanding the Other?

3. How is my understanding of the Other determined by my own self and background?

4. Does the Other lose his/her alterity through my understanding him/her?

5. Does the other historical, cultural, personal background present a barrier to my understanding of the Other, or is the Other a key to the understanding of his/her different historical, cultural, personal background?

6. Through my understanding of the Other, do I appropriate him/her or does he/she remain the Other?

I would like to see these questions dealt with by means of the exemplary analysis of a literary text.

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Elzbieta Tabakowska
Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

Grammatical choices as poetic images

The purpose of the presentation is to show how grammatical devices, traditionally considered as lying beyond the scope of literary analysis and relegated to the sphere of "linguistics," contribute towards the overall meaning of a literary text. Following the basic theoretical assumptions of cognitive linguistics, it is claimed that the meaning of a text, and of a poetical text in particular, resides in its grammar.

Evaluation of competing linguistic theories comes through their application; it is argued that the theory of language as developed by Ronald W. Langacker (grammar as image, meaning as conceptualization, alternate scene construals) and George Lakoff (theory of metaphor) seems particularly promising in dealing with literary texts. Creating a poem, interpreting a poem, and translating a poem into another language are all linguistic processes. Therefore, appeal to a linguistic theory is a necessary prerequisite for an adequate explanation of these processes. It is claimed that an analysis carried out within a theoretical linguistic framework makes it possible to offer a consistent and methodologically rigorous explanation of phenomena that are intuitively recognized by literary critics. The author argues that the poetry of imagery is ultimately built of the prose of grammar. For sample analysis, several lyrical poems are chosen (Sheamus Heaney, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson), in which the effect of particular grammatical choices upon the overall meaning is strikingly obvious. In all of them, such seemingly disparate grammatical devices as those that the English language uses to bring about the contrast between temporal and atemporal profile, boundedness and unboundedness (in spatial as well as temporal domains), countability and uncountability, definiteness and indefiniteness, etc. conspire with conceptual metaphors in achieving the ultimate overall effect of a poem.

In order to justify the claim that a linguistic analysis, carried out within the framework of cognitive linguistics, makes it possible to confirm, explain, systematize and -- ultimately -- predict literary interpretations, the effects of the sample analyses are compared to interpretations of the poems in question that are offered in standard critical works. The ability of a theory to independently corroborate native speakers' intuitions is a strong argument for its validity -- both as a theory of language and as a tool helpful to a reader of a text (also -- or perhaps in particular -- in his/her capacity of a prospective translator), to an actual translator looking for a TL counterpart of a SL text and, finally, to a translation critic who might wish to support his often impressionistic assessment with far less impressionistic linguistic arguments.

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Leonard Diepeveen
Department of English, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Modern Difficulty and Radial Categories or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Waste Land

The most common initial response to the canonical works of Anglo-American modernism was that these works were difficult. However, while assertions of modernism's difficulty were strenuously voiced, they occur without any stated agreement on difficulty's lexicon, its causes, or its value. A slippery concept, difficulty at times lexically surfaces as erudition, at other times as obscurity or complexity, and at still other times as nonsense. The list could be extended. However, in the reception of modernism difficulty and its allied terms are not part of a systematic taxonomy.

Cognitive linguistic work on categorization makes modern difficulty possible as a subject matter. Early in the twentieth century, those terms that are used to describe difficulty are members of a single radial category, containing both a central subcategory and noncentral extensions. As a category, then, difficulty has a center and periphery: as the terms in this category are typically used, the lexical term difficulty is prototypical, at the center; obscurity near the center; and erudition and esotericism at the edges. A term such as incoherence, because (unlike more central terms) it doesn't promise a real meaning somewhere in the middle of the difficult work, is even more to the side. Several characteristics place the lexical term difficulty at the center of this radial category. Although Lakoff describes basic-level status solely in terms of objects, the abstract term difficulty is at the center of its category in part because it has many of the characteristics and the attractiveness of basic-level terms. It is easy to use, it is the most commonly used and contextually neutral term, and it is the first to enter most readers' lexicons, ahead of terms such as erudite and esoteric. Difficulty also contains the most common attributes of category members, and, I believe, it is the term that has the greatest cultural significance: it applies to the greatest number of human activities.

Difficulty's multiple manifestations but lack of theorizing suggests that its conceptual content is entrenched: omnipresent, central to many activities, yet powerful because it typically goes without saying. Difficulty's peculiar power as an entrenched concept is indicated by the visceral reactions of rage and laughter many early readers directed at modernist texts. Further, when all its different lexical terms are seen as members of a single category, difficulty becomes central to modernism, for modernist readers and writers haphazardly constructed the modern canon around difficulty.

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Susanne Pichler
Department of English, University of Innsbruck, Austria

Courting the Other in African Women's Writing of Fiction

The last thirty years has seen an increasing interest in African literature. The study of African literature has become both a distinctly Third World undertaking and a comparative discipline with an emphasis on the relationship between African literature and Western literature. Yet, African literature has excluded the female Other--the African woman writer for a long time. The tendency to ignore African women writers on the continent seems to have become a tradition--implicit rather than explicitly stated--however an unfortunate one. Until recently African literary criticism has suffered from a male-dominated selectivity / exclusivism even, which it has inherited from the Eurocentrically biased West and which has only recently been challenged in the West itself. Can it be assumed that the apparent ignorance of the African woman writer results from the West's insecurity to face the Other--the Other as being constituted by a different tradition, culture, race, and sex?

If we as Western readers wish to understand the Other in a literary text produced by an Other do we need any particular prerequisites in terms of approaches and criticism? Should we favour a (new) type of reader-response criticism?--a poststructuralist approach?--a feminist approach? I will consider the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in these approaches to Buchi Emecheta's fiction, in particular to The Second-Class Citizen (1974),The Bride Prize (1976), and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). I will then argue for an interactive reading model based on Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. In Gadamer's view, in order to achieve understanding, whenever we encounter the Other--in persons, or in texts--we should be willing to suspend our prejudices and open ourselves to them. In the main part of the paper questions about the nature of understanding across cultures will be raised and the problems of cross-cultural understanding will be discussed. It can best be achieved, however, not necessarily entirely, if we familiarize ourselves with the culture that has produced the text in question. Furthermore, it demands that we recognize the limits in ourselves that prevent a full understanding of the text and its implications. Moreover, I think we have to take into account that the text itself is not always trying to make itself clear to the reader or addressing the reader at all. Reading across cultures also implies reading ourselves. Nevertheless, one has to investigate into the questions of whether an interrogation of oneself as Western reader and one's cultural context is sufficient for an understanding of the other horizon or whether it presents an impediment to our understanding.

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Szilvia Csabi
ELTE (Eotvos Lorand Tudomanyegyetem), Budapest, Hungary

Metaphors of America in 17th and 18th century American Literary Works

The importance of the relationship between literary works and cognitive linguistics has already been in the focus of attention of several studies. However, these studies mainly reflected upon this connection from the consideration of only either one literary text or the complete literary works of a single author. I would like to suggest a different approach to the combination of literary and cognitive linguistic analysis, which can be realized by focusing on several literary works of the same period. My analysis concentrates on the cognitive linguistic analysis of early American literary works, i.e. roughly from the 17th and 18th centuries. The study examines the metaphors concerning the conceptualization of America as represented in the literary works of the age. I claim that the literary works of one period taken all together can offer us a reliable and representative picture of how authors of one literary period conceived of America; as well as they make it possible to find a common denominator of the metaphors then used which provides the source domain information for the metaphorical mappings. That is, we can see how, for example, the Puritan writers generally conceived of, understood and conceptualized America in their literary works. Moreover, we can trace back the motivations for their metaphorical understanding of America to one general source, the Bible. In short, the research question is the following: in what ways did 17th and 18th century writers conceptualize America metaphorically? The results of the study are expected to throw light on the role of the Bible and other possible cultural influences in the metaphorical conceptualization of America in the 17th and 18th century literary works, as well as on the relation of the metaphors, i.e. why it is the case that a metaphor is fully describable only through the joint analysis of several literary works; what aspects of the metaphors are highlighted (or stay hidden) in the authors' conception of America.

The metaphor analysis would have important consequences for several disciplines beyond cognitive linguistics. It would have implications for literary analysis and theory, cultural studies, as well as teaching literature and culture. The study would provide a different and more detailed perspective of the literary works of the given period as regards literary analysis. Concerning literary theory, the study would be significant with respect to New Historicism and New Americanism, which reevaluated the metaphorical conceptualization of America. As regards cultural studies, the use of the prevalent metaphors of the age may also be connected to the philosophy, the world view, the arts of the age, as well. Concerning the teaching of culture and literature, the exploration of the cognitive basis, the motivation of literary works would help students become aware and understand better the concepts used in literature in the 17th and 18th centuries.

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Valery P. Belyanin
National Chengchi University, Russian Department, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.

A Psychiatric Approach to Literary Texts

The proposed approach to literary texts is based on a presupposition that in literary text there is implemented accentuated consciousness of its author. It creates the emotional and semantic dominant of the text which is the basis of the author's concept of the text. According to a psychiatric typology of personality of P.Gannushkin and K.Leongard among others there exist such personality disorders as paranoia, neurological disorders (epilepsy), depression, mania, hysteroidness.

Thus, "light" texts being based on paranoia, depict an active fight for justice of an honest and responsible person. The key-words of such texts are as follows: clear, transparent, duty, destiny, heart, warmth, father, fight, enemy, et al.

"Dark" texts, being based on epileptic consciousness, constitute the largest part of literary texts in general. Their dominant is manifested in the following frame: a simple but aggressive hero is fighting against clever and thus dangerous enemy. The following semantic groups of the words prevail in such texts: double, darkness, anguish, laughter, size, falling down, water, unpleasant smell, body.

"Sad" texts are based upon depression as a state of low emotions, physical weakness and timidity of a person. The following semantic components are typical for "sad" texts: quiet, pleasant smell, loss of money, death,stone, cold.

"Merry" texts which are based upon maniac state of a person who always has high spirits and enormous plans, is very talkative and friendly. "Merry" texts have the following semantic components: together, friends, luck, gangsters, travelling, flight, a lot of money, erudition, physical strength. They are usually implemented in adventure stories and comedies as well.

"Beauteous" texts are based on hysteroidness as a type of demeanour characterised by demonstrativeness, capriciousness, artistic behaviour and pseudology of an accentuated person. "Beauteous" texts have such symbols as colour, appearance of a person, gestures, feelings and emotions, humiliations and sufferings, relatives, comparison with an animal. They constitute mainly the basis of "soap operas".

The analysis made puts forward the problem of verbal and cognitive types of languages as manifestations of cognitive structures of a linguistic personality.

The research has a practical value. Thus the hypothesis of resemblance between the reader (admirer) and the author was verified by means of "Projective Literary Test" which can also be used as a diagnostic instrument. "Psychiatric Analysis of Text" is the title of computer-based expert system of psychological content-analysis designed for identification of the author of the analysed text.

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Marta Gibinska
Institute of English Philology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

'Carving the Passage': Metaphors of Cruelty in Macbeth and Their Polish Translations--The Cognitive Perspective

Three different translations (Paszkowski 1862, Berwinska 1959, and Baranczak 1992) are discussed as to the meaning and function of the translated images of cruelty: I.ii.7-23 (the Captain's report) and I.v.38-54 (Lady Macbeth's soliloquy). In the first text my attention is focused on the value verbs and their function in creating images, on relations of movement, distance, direction and foregrounding. The analysis shows the way in which the speaker's judgement becomes subverted by the specific quality of the images and relations between them, leading to the ironic confusion between 'merciless Macdonwald' and 'brave Macbeth', an exemplification of the 'foul and fair' theme. The analysis of Lady Macbeth's soliloquy centers on the relationship between the image of the hoarse raven and the final image of thick night with the aim of showing how the cognitive potential of adjectives 'creates' the character of Lady Macbeth. The ensuing discussion of the translations concentrates on the differences due to various interpretative decisions and linguistic choices leading to differences of perspective and characterisation.

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Roderick A. Jacobs
Department of English as a Second Language, University of Hawaiï
at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaiï, USA

Perspective and Narrative Flow--A Cognitive Approach

Written narrative discourse demands sophisticated tracking of mental spaces (Fauconnier 1994). Such tracking requires readers to construct complex mental models incorporating much that is inexplicit in the prose. These models interact in subtle and intricate ways. The construal task involves more than the evocation of sequential scenarios, since particular stages in a narrative may arise from the blending of two or more mental models drawing on subsets of features of the source models. During this process of creative construal, readers construct, activate, and adjust a spatio-temporal focus enabling them to integrate the interpretation of individual sentences into more global interpretations. This focus, referred to as the "deictic center" (Rapaport et al, 1989), shifts constantly as the narrative progresses. Characters in a narrative shift in and out of this center over the course of the narrative. Although such linguistic phenomena as anaphora, motion verbs, tense-marking, relative clause structures and nominalizations may mark the ever-shifting deictic center, readers must also draw on complex inferential skills to interpret the narrative flow, i.e., to construct a coherent model of the narrative events, incorporating unexpressed information. Such information varies depending on readers' individual experience and this leads to the predictable variation in individual interpretation. An examination of narrative segments from novels by Ann Tyler and Bobbie Ann Mason reveals significant differences in the styles and manner of manipulation of the deictic center but also exposes interesting constraints common to all.

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Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese
English Department, Jagiellonian University, Krakow Poland

Free Verse as a Type of Salient Ordering

In the first Polish attempt to systematically describe free verse Dorota Urbanska (1995) argues that this poetic form requires 'visual perception during mental (silent) reading'. As free verse gradually adapts to late twentieth-century culture, where the visual supercedes the oral, the intonation and rhythm of a poem increasingly depend on its graphic segmentation. Consequently, the visual design of the poem constitutes its meaning.

As cognitive linguistics admits that sensory imagery, also visual, 'plays a substantial role in conceptual and semantic structure' (Langacker, 1983), it seems possible to employ the cognitive parametres of focal adjustments to analyse a poem composed in free verse. If we assume that reading such a poem involves 'scanning through a domain' of the page and 'along a line' of the poem 'until a contrast is registered', then we can discuss the whole poem in terms of the figure/ground organization. The whole poem can thus be treated both as the figure in itself and as the background to each of the verses. Its every verse, delineated by graphic segmentation (which also includes punctuation) and syntactic structuring, becomes a figure which may be considered in relation to the background, i.e. the other verses of the poem. Therefore reading requires constant re-adjustment of the viewpoint.

Composition of free verse involves, according to Urbanska, two types of structuring: syntactic and 'versifying'. In terms of cognitive linguistics we could talk about them as two types of bounding. When syntactic and 'versifying' boundaries coincide in a poem, syntactic verse poem is created. It falls into two categories: sentence free verse and syntagmatic free verse. In sentence free verse the strong syntactic boundaries between sentences are foregrounded by the graphic segmentation of a poem. In syntagmatic free verse the weak syntactic boundaries between meaningful entities within sentences are emphasized by versification. When syntactic and 'versifying' boundaries do not coincide, anti-syntactic free verse (terms after Urbanska) is composed. Each particular verse of such a poem loses its inner integrity as its beginning and end are syntactically unbounded.

The reader of free verse uses the intuitive knowledge of sentence structures as well as conceptual metaphors and creates construals in order to meet his/her expectations about the poems' syntax, collocations and connotations. The awareness of the cognitive strategies of focal adjustments may help to analyse syntactic, semantic and stylistic resources of the salient ordering offered by free verse. Moreover, such an awareness may assist the translation of poems composed in free verse and the assessment of translated texts.

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Clai Rice
English Department, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA

Courting Some Others: A Cognitive Approach to John Ashbery

Prof. Tabakowska's abstract proposes to demonstrate what Mark Turner has suggested is the most useful aspect of Cognitive Linguistics for literary studies. In his last two books he has proposed that cogling can become a foundation for literary studies by providing a method of accounting for the metaphorical and metonymical displacements that occur in both everyday language and literary texts. Prof. Tabakowska proposes that grammatical devices "conspire" with conceptual metaphor to bring about "the ultimate overall effect" of a poem.

Her proposal calls for several responses: How can a theory built on the process of idealization, on the discovery of sameness, be used to articulate difference? More specifically, the suggestions that elements "conspire" sounds like a possible definition of overdetermination. But like idealization, overdetermination depends on a lack, an absence in a concept's constitution that potentially can be filled by one of a class of items or attributes. Therefore, overdetermination produces the appearance or the feeling of an "ultimate effect" only at the expense of what is underdetermined or omitted. I think the power of cognitive linguistics is not just that it can "systematize and predict" literary interpretations, but that it can be used to demonstrate that interpretations of even the most basic elements of grammar are not fully systematizeable nor predictable, only motivated. John Ashbery's usage of the second person pronoun in "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" should detail how the "effect" of a grammatical choice cannot be unitary, but that the choice distributes its effects throughout the poem.

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