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Weaving together notions from evolutionary biology (Donald), French poststructuralist theory (Blanchot, Lacan), and modular theories of mind (Fodor, Gardner), Abbott elucidates Beckett's revealing ambivalence concerning maintaining and violating generic boundaries. (See the author's abstract.)
This brisk, speculative essay builds on Merlin Donald and partially converges with Turner's Literary Mind in proposing that the rise of narrative preceded language, transformed the experience of temporality, enabled the sense of history and thus of belief, and entailed the splitting of the human subject as described by Lacanian theory. (See the author's abstract.)
In the context of a special issue of SubStance (which he guest edited) on the "Origin of Fictions," Abbott addresses some of the larger questions raised by cognitive and evolutionary approaches to literature and the arts, particularly the attractions and limitations of scientific reductionism in analyses of cultural practices and artifacts.
Reconsidering the concepts "narrative" and "literature" in terms of the cognitive operations they involve, Abbott suggests that narrative may act as a platform that other operations can be stacked upon without disrupting its running, whereas literariness may reside in a loose set of conditions that can be toggled on or off. (See the author's abstract.)
An early (and engaging) attempt by Abelson, a pioneer in the development of script and schema theory, to assess the likelihood of developing artificial intelligence programs that could understand or appreciate literary works.
A special issue of the French journal TLE including essays on narrative function (Bernard Victorri), literature, cognition, and movement (Pierre Ouellet), and literary characterization (Ralf Schneider). (See the full contents.)
This response to the preceding special issue of Poetics Today on Literature and the Cognitive Revolution, though often more concerned with matters tangential to the special issue itself (such as the status of empirical approaches to literature), raises far-reaching questions regarding the relation between cognitive science and literary scholarship. (See the authors' abstract.)
Argues that reader-response models drawn from cognitive psychology address the experiences of minority readers in particular (and individual readers in general) with more flexibility and accuracy than can models such as that of Stanley Fish.
The authors describe a qualitative empirical investigation of how readers build and negotiate mental models in processing complicated literary narratives (structured by the multiple levels or strata theorized by narratology) with Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" as their sample text.
This early and limited attempt to counter structuralist and poststructuralist theories of textual meaning with a cognitive approach posits that the dynamic patterns of individual memory are the basic units of meaning.
Surveys three cognitivist approaches to the study of mental representation, from the Paris Circle, American cognitive linguistics, and neural network theory. All three underscore the importance both of innate mental structures and of experience, suggesting a new framework for the semiotic analysis of art. (See the author's abstract.)
In this wide-ranging and thoughtful discussion of the promise of schema theory for understanding literary discourse, and of literary texts for the further development of schema theory, de Beaugrande outlines nothing short of a "comprehensive psychology of literature," proposing a research program for investigating the processing dispositions that readers bring to encounters with literary texts in real-life contexts. Includes stimulating discussions of literariness, literature as a cultural universal, the relation between literature and historicity, the sources of esthetic pleasure, and the different processing strategies found among trained and "naive" readers.
Extending his theory of reading as information processing to the professional reading practices modeled and defended by literary critics, de Beaugrande argues that literary theoretical debates may occlude important areas of overlap and unstated common ground, within an ultimately coherent cognitive system for construing literary communication.
The author draws on research from linguistics and artificial intelligence to offer a model of creativity as the "motivated modification of systems," best represented by a network; de Beaugrande illustrates his model by describing in detail the creativity of Shakespeare's Sonnet 33 as an instantiated (by both poet and reader) network.
This analysis of epic simile in The Iliad in terms of cognitive processing argues for the importance of structural complexity, cognitive unclarity, and the principle of asymmetry to literary interpretation.
Draws on work in artificial intelligence, psycholinguistics, structuralism, and semiotics in attempting to elicit the "unconscious structuring" of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."
Building creatively on an array of neuroscientific, linguistic, and psychological theories, with special reference to Damasio, Benveniste, and Piaget, Benzon argues that the same neuro-cognitive mechanisms that support one's first-person sense of self also support identification with fictive characters.
Benzon analyzes Shakespeare's sonnet 129 using cognitive network theory (and in relation to Elizabethan theories of faculty psychology) in order to trace the ways in which its structure reflects the semantics of abstract concepts.
Benzon and Hays suggest a neurological basis for the production of metaphors. Their theory relies heavily on Pribram's "hypothesis of neural holography" from the 1970s. This essay and others are available online via William Benzon's home page.
This analysis of the duality of temporal mapping in George Herbert's The Temple uses Lakoff's theory of conceptual metaphor and Edelman's notion of "two-icity" to argue that the book's striated metaphorical structure simultaneously restrains and liberates the reader-as-pilgrim.
The authors argue for the desirability of integrating literary studies with the science of the mind and helpfully discuss several attempts at such integration (by Tsur, Cureton, Babuts, and M. Turner), concluding that Turner's is the most promising model to date.
Boden outlines a computational model of intuition and creativity (both artistic and scientific) based on the production and transformation of conceptual spaces, contrasting her account with introspective reports on creative processes, such as Coleridge's description of the composition of "Kubla Khan."
The authors, a comparative literature scholar and a cognitive psychologist, seek to bring empirical methods developed for text processing research within cognitive psychology and discourse analysis to bear on the study of how readers make sense of complex narrative fiction.
Provides a concise, intelligent, and highly readable introduction to the "evolutionary" (i.e. "evolutionary psychology") approach to literature; the brief reading of Mansfield Park will strike many as two-dimensional and schematic. (See the author's abstract.)
Recruiting notions from ethology, Theory of Mind theory, evolutionary psychology, and biopoetics, Boyd sketches an evolutionary explanation of the appeal of fictional narratives, illustrated with a reading of Dr. Seuss's unique appeal to universal cognitive propensities in Horton Hears a Who.
This essay uses conceptual metaphor theory to trace a network of bodily metaphors in John Milton's Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, arguing that while the masque ultimately upholds its main character's claim to moral agency, it precludes any interpretation of agency as either disembodied or wholly identified with interiority.
Argues that Meredith's novel not only makes use of conceptual metaphors in significant and identifiable ways, but can be understood as a large-scale conceptual blend. Meredith, moreover, invites such a reading in characterizing metaphor as the "Deus ex machina of an argument." (See the author's abstract.)
Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss' structuralist reading of "Les Chats" is reconsidered in light of cognitive rhetoric and conceptual blending theory. Part of a special issue of Acta Linguistica devoted to Jakobson.
The authors explore the paradox of coprolalia (the spontaneous cursing that often accompanies Tourette Syndrome), as an unwilled, seemingly physiological outburst that nevertheless takes culturally inflected forms, in order to broach a poetics of cursing more generally, with special attention to problems of linguistic agency and the temporality of speech.
Bruner suggests that one important cognitive domain--that of human interaction--is organized in the form of narrative. Drawing extensively on literary theory as well as linguistics, cognitive and social psychology, and anthropology, Bruner gives an overview of ten key features of narrative relevant to this domain.
Explores the "remarkable parallels" in rhetorical strategy found between Smolensky's "On the Proper Treatment of Connectionism" and chapter 2 of Derrida's Grammatology, each responding to impasses in the structuralist paradigm (as realized, respectively, in cognitive science and philosophy).
A significant attempt to correlate Woolf's literary production with her mental illness (understood in terms of "medical model" psychiatry) in a non-reductive fashion. The epilogue posits common ground between Lacanian and neuroscientific accounts of the split subject.
Departing from what he sees as the exemplary failure of cognitive rhetoric, Carroll proposes that evolutionary psychology, with its attention to basic human motives, emotions, and personality traits, can provide literary theory with a comprehensive and objective model of human nature. (See the author's abstract.)
This openly polemical book uses works from the field of evolutionary psychology in a broad confrontation with poststructuralist and postmodern literary theory; queer theory is a particular target. Carroll works on the assumption that literary texts directly represent gross psychological structures.
A sharp and lively review of six books (by Argyros, Koch, Kroeber, Storey, F. Turner, and M. Turner) seeking in various ways to bridge the concerns of evolutionary biology and literary studies. Concludes that only Storey is moving in a promising direction.
A critique from within the evolutionary psychology framework of Pinker's unabashedly reductive approach to the appeal of literary and other artistic experiences in How the Mind Works.
Colomb and Turner present a useful overview of some important distinctions and problems in artificial intelligence (e.g., grammars vs. meaning, top-down vs. bottom-up) and suggest, though they do not detail, some implications these issues have for literary theory and its definitions of meaning.
This collection (including both new and reprinted essays) advances an "all or nothing" approach to rethinking art and esthetics in evolutionary terms, building on the tenets of sociobiology to adumbrate an evolutionary psychology of the arts. Includes essays on literary subjects and themes by Cooke, Eric S. Rabkin, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Nancy Easterlin, and Alexander Argyros as well as more general essays by Joseph Carroll and Ellen Dissanayake.
Crane draws tellingly on cognitive linguistics and cognitive neuroscience to elicit a convincing model of "cognitive permeability" (anticipated, in part, by early modern humoral theory) that underlies the thematic, linguistic, and imagistic structure of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, mediated in part by the "body as container" schema and by a related radial linguistic category clustering around the term "pregnant."
Carefully synthesizing a version of cognitive theory for use in literary studies from work in cognitive linguistics, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and conceptual categorization theory, Crane proposes a fundamentally new understanding of the author function that in turn prompts a series of detailed and compelling readings of selected plays by Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest. Keeps the historical context of the plays squarely in view and engages in a sustained critical dialogue with feminist, new historicist, and cultural materialist readings of Shakespeare. (See the author's abstract.)
Post-structuralist theories of performance and performativity explore the discursive construction of experience but neglect significant material constraints on discourse, missing the complex interaction between discourse and embodied experience revealingly described by cognitive theory. Crane argues that early modern notions and representations of performance share the interactive bias of the cognitive view, paying special attention to Ben Jonson's comedy The Alchemist.
Arguing that cognitive sciences offer new paradigms for rethinking the relations among culture, linguistic activity, and agency, this essay provides an overview of the "cognitive revolution" and recent work on the brain as they bear on the concerns of literary studies, and a survey of work at the intersection of literary studies and cognitive science. (See the authors' abstract.)
Trenchantly diagnosing the failure of prosody studies to develop a satisfactory theory of rhythm, Cureton draws on music theory, cognitive psychology, and linguistics in outlining a theory of poetic rhythm in terms of recursive hierarchies of prominence, coordinating metrical, phrasal, and dynamic ("prolongation") effects. Includes a partial analysis of the rhythmic structure of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 29."
Rhythmic response is a basic human capacity that underlies the experience of poetic meter (and poetic and linguistic rhythm generally); a theory of rhythmic cognition, sketched here, is needed to ground theories of poetic meter and linguistic prosody.
Applying theories of rhythmic cognition from cognitive psychology and music theory to the study of English prosody, Cureton posits a language-independent, psychological capacity for rhythmic competence and uses it to address some long-standing questions in prosodic theory.
Explicates "The Second Coming" in terms of the Lakoff-Johnson-Turner theory of cognitive metaphor, concluding that Yeats exploits conventional figures of center and periphery to convey social disintegration and cultural inversion.
Interpreting texts (hermeneutics), interpreting people (cognitive or intentional psychology), interpreting other artifacts, and interpreting design in evolutionary biology (adaptationism) can all be seen as variants of the same hermeneutical project. All are best undertaken (for reasons of economy and explanatory power) employing an "intentional language," but in no case (as Wimsatt and Beardsley argued in relation to literary texts) can interpretation appeal to an unproblematic, original intent. (This and related essays by Dennett are available in electronic format through the Tufts University Center for Cognitive Studies.
Neuroscientific research (such as split-brain studies) suggests that the unified self is an adaptive illusion. The self is a "theorist's fiction," best understood by analogy with a fictional character.
The innately-driven patterns of parent-infant interaction described by cognitive developmental psychology, including babytalk, provide a basis for mature esthetic behaviors. These "aesthetic incunabula" manifest such proto-esthetic characteristics as stylization, repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration.
This original study takes issue both with the reductive views of art characteristic of much evolutionary psychology and with social constructionist theories of artistic culture in arguing that the rhythmic and modal character of mother-infant interactions provides a foundation for later artistic behavior, establishes patterns that persist in mature artistic activities, and helps account for the adaptive (community-building) function of the arts. Dissanayake's thesis applies most readily to the temporal arts, including the verbal arts, and questions the boundary between artistic and ritual behaviors.
Taking at face value Carroll's claims about the political, theoretical, and scientific purposes of his work, Dissanayake offers an accurate and useful summary of the book as well as insight into its potential appeal.
Although this evolutionary account of aesthetic values centers mainly on the visual arts, literary scholars may be interested in a chapter rethinking empathy theory in psychobiological terms and another critiquing contemporary literary theory from a "species-centric" point of view.
The authors analyze the work and test the general linguistic abilities of a "semi-professional" poet with Asperger's syndrome (considered a mild form of autism) in comparison with a control poet. Finding significant disparities between the savant poet's verse achievement and impaired general linguistic skills, they hypothesize (in terms reminiscent of Gall and Spurzheim's poetry "organ") a specific "mental module" for creative writing.
Of interest primarily to narratologists, this collection of essays on understanding narrative demonstrates how theorists from a wide variety of fields, including literary studies, may benefit from working with cognitive models generated by interdisciplinary conversation.
Convincingly argues that even if certain forms of narrative and conceptions of agency correspond to innate tendencies (biological predispositions) functioning across various readerships, these are not (and should not be) valued over forms and conceptions that flout or disrupt "natural" patterns and expectations.
Argues that while the study of innate and universal psychic tendencies can help elucidate recurring thematic and basic formal elements of literary texts, the elaboration of such elements necessarily takes place within a specific sociocultural environment; interpretation must take the latter into account along with literary-historical and biographical considerations. A complex and informative reading of Anderson's literary fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" illustrates Easterlin's thesis.
Criticizing the social constructivist presuppositions behind much recent literary theory, Easterlin proposes instead to ground literary studies in bioepistomology, a theory of knowledge drawing on evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, and sociobiological theories of science.
Taking the "infant babe" passage in Wordsworth's The Prelude as her prime example, Easterlin argues that psychoanalytical readings of developmental narratives in literary works impose an outdated, distorting pattern that inevitably skews interpretation, which would be better served by models drawn from more recent work in developmental psychology. (See the author's abstract.)
Addressing evolutionary critics in particular along with others pursuing interdisciplinary approaches to literature, Easterlin affirms the value of speculative thought and intuition for scientifically informed literary criticism. Her own version of an empirically constrained speculative method is illustrated through analysis of a key term ("home") as it functions in Book VI of Wordsworth's Prelude.
Easterlin's application of a cognitive theory of religious experience to three of Wordsworth's major works includes a persuasive argument for cognitive psychology over psychoanalytic approaches to religion and literature. A review is available at Romantic Circles Reviews.
Drawing on an impressive bibliography of research in artificial intelligence, cognitive linguistics, and narrative theory, Emmott outlines the mental processes that allow readers to keep track of characters and contexts in narrative texts. As her examples of the latter include many literary novels, critics working with reader-response theory will find her hypotheses highly relevant.
Analyzing the interpretive and evaluative conflicts evident in adult readers' reported memories of their childhood responses to Hans Christian Andersen's "Princess and the Pea," Esrock concludes that a complex of cultural attitudes concerning tactile experience, bodily knowledge, femininity, and public/private distinctions bias readers' attempts to reconstruct the fairy tale.
This call for literary critics to pay more attention to readers' visual imaging includes both a valuable historical analysis of critical resistance to visual imagery and a concise summary of recent neuropsychological findings, which Esrock uses in concert with psychoanalytic theory. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is among the literary works discussed.
In this response to Gabriel Josipovici's Touch, Esrock suggests that bodily feelings like kinesthesia and the interoceptive sensations analyzed by Damasio may play an important role in literary creation and response.
This philosophical study of the appreciation (as distinct from the interpretation) of literature is firmly grounded in recent cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind; Feagin offers an explanation of both why affective responses to literature occur and what kinds of responses are warranted.
Introducing a special issue of Poetics Today on "Metaphor and Beyond: New Cognitive Developments," the authors survey recent work in metaphor studies, with special attention to the implications of conceptual integration (or "blending") theory for cognitive approaches to figurative language.
A lively issue of the Stanford Humanities Review featuring a number of original essays on artificial intelligence and the humanities. Contributors include Terry Winograd, Douglas Hofstadter, Bruno Latour, and Francisco Varela. An online version is available at The Stanford Humanities Electronic Review.
A detailed analysis of the opening scene of King Lear from the standpoint of cognitive metaphor theory. Demonstrates homologies among dominant strains of imagery, plot construction, characterization, and other elements reflecting underlying metaphoric schemata (BALANCE and LINKS).
Applies the cognitive theory of metaphor to the imagery, settings, characterizations, and plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth, delineating a metaphorical structure based in the CONTAINER and PATH schemata described by the Lakoff-Johnson-Turner group.
Working with the cognitive approach to metaphor developed by the Lakoff-Johnson-Turner group, Freeman traces a pervasive metaphorical structure throughout Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra projected from basic "CONTAINER, LINKS, AND PATH" image schemata.
A lucid essay-length review of six books on metaphor published in 1987-88 by Johnson, Lakoff, Turner, Levin, Stambovsky, and the Thompsons. Strongly endorses and cogently outlines the cognitive approach developed by the first three authors named. An electronic version is available on Turner's home page.
Taking her examples from Emily Dickinson's poetry and letters, Freeman provides an overview of how cognitive linguistics and conceptual integration theory can contribute to literary interpretation. (See the author's abstract.)
Draws tellingly on cognitive linguistics and categorization theory in accounting for the seemingly paradoxical conjunction of intimacy and obscurity encountered by readers of Dickinson's poetry.
Considers several of Dickinson's characteristic metaphors in light of cognitive rhetoric (drawing on Lakoff, Johnson, and Turner), emphasizing their rootedness in bodily experience and figurative thought. Argues persuasively that Dickinson challenged and displaced her era's dominant religious metaphor with one more attuned to the scientific advances of the time.
Asserting that cognitive linguistics (as developed by Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, and Fauconnier) can provide literary criticism with an adequate theory of literature, Freeman illustrates her version of a cognitive poetics with readings of the metaphorical structure of two lyrics by Emily Dickinson ("My Cocoon tightens" and "My Life had stood--a / Loaded Gun") and by noting the lack of metaphorical complexity in a spurious Dickinson poem. She then briefly distinguishes hers from several other cognitive approaches through a discussion of Sylvia Plath's "The Applicant." (See the author's abstract.)
A prescient and engaging attempt to bring neuropsychological findings and speculation (specifically on the localization of certain linguistic functions in the brain and the developmental conditions of their emergence) into dialogue with the concerns of rhetoric and literary theory.
A cognitive psychologist summarizes a wealth of experimental studies in providing an overview of how the mind processes narrative works, particularly printed works of fiction. Aims both to refine psychological accounts and to highlight "regularities" across readers' experiences largely overlooked by literary theory, while emphasizing the continuities between everyday linguistic competence and literary reading and production.
Writers recruit readers' ordinary cognitive structures and operations in creating literary characters, taking advantage, however, of specifically fictive phenomena such as a narrator's direct access to the thoughts of another, or the sense of readerly immersion that generates suspense despite advance knowledge of a character's fate. Examples are taken from Ian Fleming's "James Bond" novels.
Gibbs builds on his own and others' research in cognitive psychology in arguing that certain poetic figures evince principles of "figurative thought." Human cognition is fundamentally shaped by "poetic" processes, and such tropes as metaphor, irony, and metonymy are seen as basic devices for conceptualizing various levels of experience.
Positing that understanding metaphor is a process rather than a product, Gibbs argues that the many competing theories of metaphor differ mainly in that they explain different stages of linguistic processing: comprehension, recognition, interpretation or appreciation.
The authors report on a cognitive psychological study of the effects of imagery instruction on reading and retaining a literary text, finding that students instructed to form mental images outperformed a control group in answering questions on concrete, contradictory, and spatial aspects of the text (Gorki's "Old Cecco").
The authors (a cognitive psychologist and a literary critic) anticipate certain aspects of Turner and Fauconnier's "blending" approach to figurative language in promoting an interactive view of metaphor that, in keeping with principles of Gestalt psychology and Interaction theory, highlights the bi-directional, transformative character of metaphor in the creation of emergent meaning. They insist as well on a holistic view both of a given metaphor and of its function within its larger poetic context (here Dylan Thomas' Sonnet VII from "Altarwise by Owl-Light") .
Whitman's meditative poetic catalogs (in "A Song for Occupations," "This Compost," and other works) function to lead the reader, by means of literary devices including anaphora, sound repetition, paratactic structure, intense descriptive detail, and metaphor, both to construct a literary gestalt and to recognize the poet's restructuring of sensory experience.
Goodblatt and Glicksohn analyse Whitman's "Song of Myself" in terms of its enactment of meditative techniques, reinforced by poetic devices such as syntactic parallelism, deferred closure, sensuous metaphor, and various forms of repetition, conveying the sense of an altered state of consciousness through which the reader's perception is deautomatized or defamiliarized.
The authors reconsider I. A. Richards as an early proponent of cognitive metaphor studies, demonstrating his familiarity with and partial reliance on Gestalt psychology and placing their own work on the Interaction Theory of Metaphor in relation to Richards' example. Includes discussions of Donne's "The Bait" and Dylan Thomas' "After the Funeral." (See the authors' abstract.)
Focussing on problem-solving in metaphor comprehension using actual readers and a sample literary text (W. C. Williams' "The Arrival"), the authors describe an empirical approach guided by insights from gestalt psychology and the Interactionist theory of metaphor. (See the author's abstract.)
A lucid overview of the differences and overlaps between conceptual (a.k.a. "cognitive") metaphor theory and conceptual integration (a.k.a. "blending") theory and a helpful introduction to the latter.
Reads Blake's critique (in Urizen) of Lockean notions of memory and personal identity in terms of cognitive scientific work on Dissociative Identity Disorder and its implications for understanding the relations among memory, narrative, and self formation.
This is an early call for literary critics to move psychological studies of literature away from exclusive reliance on psychoanalysis toward the spectrum of contemporary psychological approaches, including cognitive science; Grimaud includes useful parallel summaries of infant and child developmental stages as understood by psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology, respectively.
While a heavy emphasis on rhetorical analysis reflects Gross's lack of sympathy with the challenges of Turner's theoretical task, the review does provide valuable renderings of both the content and context of a cognitive approach to literary studies.
Drawing on empirical data concerning readers' eye movements, Gross analyzes the "productively contradictory" effect of pattern poems in visual-cognitive terms.
Analyzes two early poems by H. D., "Sea Lily" and "Garden," in terms suggested by cognitive linguistics and conceptual blending theory.
Extends the cognitive-linguistic approach to personification by recruiting notions from Theory of Mind theory, conceptual integration theory, and by reference to Dennett's "intentional stance." Examples are from Auden's poetry, especially "Memorial for the City." (See the author's abstract.)
Locating a significant but remediable gap between reception theory (exemplified by Wolfgang Iser) and cognitive criticism (exemplified by Mark Turner), the authors argue for a cognitive reception theory that would bring insights gained from cognitive psychology to the important and still open questions raised by reception theory. (See the authors' abstract.)
Hanauer borrows elements of study design and methodology from cognitive psychology to experimentally evaluate the competing claims behind formalist and stylistic versus conventionalist accounts of why readers apply specialized (deautomatized) interpretive procedures to poetic texts.
This special issue features ten essays illustrating and/or critically addressing issues in the cognitive study of figurative language, most with explicit application to literary topics and texts. (See the table of contents.)
Hart discusses the cognitive linguistics of Lakoff, Johnson, and Turner in the context of poststructuralist theory, offering that the former may offer resources for moving beyond certain impasses widely perceived in the latter. She illustrates the usefulness in particular of Turner's cognitive rhetoric with readings of passages in Shakespeare.
This nuanced overview of recent developments in cognitive literary studies discriminates a range of theoretical positions closely related to a given critic's (explicit or implicit) epistemological commitments, more broadly (and importantly) distinguishing cognitive literary criticism from "cognitive-evolutionary criticism" on the same basis. (See the author's abstract.)
This ambitious and theoretically astute essay argues that a materialist linguistics drawing on metaphorics, especially the cognitive theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff, Johnson, and others, stands to provide a more effective basis for poststructuralist approaches to early modern studies (and cultural studies generally) than can the dated and "top-down" linguistic theories relied on at present. Changes in Early Modern English vocabulary (specifically in Shakespeare) are discussed as one example of the advantages of such a fundamentally new approach.
Harth, a biophysicist, proposes that both artistic and linguistic representation arose because of their usefulness as thinking tools, modeled on and extending preexisting cognitive processes (such as the mental "sketch pad"). Part of a special issue of JCS on "Art and the Brain."
An original and incisive analysis of how developments in information theory, robotics, virtual life and virtual reality technologies have effected notions of the body, of materiality, and of the human. Astute readings of literary works, including Bernard Wolfe's Limbo, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Cole Perriman's Terminal Games, and Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 play a crucial role in the book's argument.
A provocative discussion of the theoretical status of human embodiment with some reference to cognitive science, though more particularly concerned with recent fictional works that call "cybernetic" models of subjectivity into question.
Teasing out some implications both of evolutionary theories of narrative and of the stories that viewers invent in response to the activities of artificially evolved virtual agents, Hayles discusses the effect of distributed cognitive systems on changing notions of narrative, subjectivity, and agency.
Hayward uses a connectionist model from the field of artificial intelligence to address certain limitations of traditional metrical analysis; his system accounts for both linguistic and performative/interpretive components of poetic rhythm.
Taking MITECS (the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences) as a starting point, Herman details a number of ways that narratology could profit from greater attention to cognitive science and vice versa. The article constitutes an extremely helpful introduction for those new to or curious about the cognitive study of narrative. (See the author's abstract.)
In this probing essay-review of Turner's Literary Mind, Herman acknowledges the value and promise of Turner's "pathbreaking" study but suggests important refinements of his theories of parable and projection, arguing for the value of a robust distinction between "story" and "sequence," greater attention to relevant studies in narratology and narrative theory, and more extensive engagement with questions of ideology. (See the author's abstract.)
Draws on recent work in language theory and cognitive science to reexamine fundamental issues in narrative poetics. Redefines some basic questions (e.g., what constitutes a minimal narrative) and proposes a novel use of the script concept in framing literary history.
Argues that in synthesizing sociolinguistic, cognitive, and classical narratological models, narrative theorists can overcome the limitations both of classical narratology and of the Labovian approach to stories. (See the author's abstract.)
Recruits conceptual blending theory to analyze the creative projection and transposition of deictic centers characteristic of epistolary fiction, with examples from A. S. Byatt's Possession.
Beginning with a broad definition of literature that includes oral and performative genres, Hernadi speculates on the adaptive value and possible evolutionary antecedents of four widespread features of literary behavior: impersonating expression, indirect communication, fictive representation, and translucent signification.
Outlines an evolutionary argument for the universality of literary and "protoliterary" behaviors, stressing the need for cognitive flexibility within complex social environments and the role of culture in human evolutionary development. (See the author's abstract.)
The authors bring insights from literary theory, folklore studies, rhetoric, and cognitive science to bear on an understanding of the proverb as a genre especially well-suited (and probably adaptive) for a species characterized by cognitive and behavioral flexibility. (See the authors' abstract.)
Analyzing two poems from Basho's Oku no Hosomichi, Hiraga argues that cognitive linguistics and conceptual integration theory, especially when combined with relevant cultural background knowledge, can contribute to the interpretation of Japanese haiku.
This stimulating collection of sixteen essays reopens a series of related issues concerning art and the emotions, in part through appealing to cognitive theory and empirical research for fresh models and the best available data. Notable contributions include:
Carroll holds that psychoanalytical approaches have neglected the "garden-variety" emotions that motivate audiences to engage with narrative art, outlining a rival theoretical framework based on cognitive theories of emotion.
Looks to simulation theory for an account of how readers become emotionally invested in the fortunes of fictional characters.
Sketches out a series of telling distinctions between emotions and "art emotions," empathizing with other people and with fictional characters, and the affective components of "reading" people and reading literature.
The authors seek to reconcile psychoanalytical notions of identification and introjection with a cognitive account of reading fiction as running narrative simulations (with their attendant emotional effects) in the "dream-theater of the brain."
A computer scientist brings the perspective of AI research (particularly into natural language processing) refreshingly to bear on issues in literary theory. Includes analyses of a sonnet by Milton and of Nerval's Sylvie.
Clearly introducing principles and methods of mainstream cognitive science, Hogan provides scholars of the literary and related arts with a cogent overview of issues and problems--including authorship, reader response, metaphor, narrative, affect, empathy, and evolutionary theory--relevant for humanists interested in the "cognitive turn." Artforms considered at length include drama (Shakespeare's King Lear), poetry (Shelley's "Triumph of Life"), jazz performance (Coltrane's "My Favorite Things"), film (Cameron's Titanic), and painting (Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon). (See the author's abstract.)
Hogan describes heroic tragicomedy--here, especially when conjoined with an epilogue that recounts the hero's suffering--as one prototypical narrative form, widespread across diverse cultural traditions, which he considers in terms of its complex emotional valences and conflicting ethical implications.
The introductory chapter includes a section on influence and cognition, arguing that cognitive psychology can help shed light on issues of encoding, memory, and categorization that together constitute a significant and neglected aspect of literary influence.
In this important essay, Hogan begins by discriminating between normative universalism (really "absolutism") and the empirical study of universals. Hogan then discusses aspects of a theory of literary universals (identifying a number of potential examples along the way) and outlines a research program that, in dialogue with cognitive psychology, would help elicit cross-cultural principles of human thought and society.
Proposes, as a more computationally credible alternative to the Lakoff-Johnson-Turner approach to metaphor, an account that relies instead on notions of constituent transfer, lexicalization, primacy, and prototype effects. (See the author's abstract.)
Unique among surveys of literary theory in giving significant attention to Anglo-American philosophy of language and cognitive science; the section on the latter is more programmatic than descriptive, describing an agenda for future work in the field. Also includes a convincing argument for greater attention to recent philosophy of science in framing and evaluating literary meta-theories. (See the author's abstract.)
Develops a theoretical case for the existence of cross-cultural esthetic universals arising from shared psychological structures.
A number of commonalities among the works of Shakespeare and the dramatic traditions of several geographically disparate Asian cultures-- including foreshadowing, the use of image patterns, circularity of structure, and certain aspects of genre and characterization--suggest the need to take literary universals more into account in comparative and historical studies of the drama.
Hogan argues that Sanskrit poetic theory, largely neglected by Western scholars, might provide the starting point for a new subfield of cognitive science that describes poetic effects; cognitive science, in turn, offers a context for reinterpreting Sanskrit theories of aesthetic response, which incorporate such notions as affective components of memory traces.
Marks a prominent psychoanalytic critic's turn to cognitive science and neuroscience in search of a "more powerful psychology" on which to reground reader-response theory. Synthesizes concepts drawn from psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, information theory, and neuroanatomy in proposing new approaches to understanding reading and authorial identity.
A readable, sage introduction to studying the areas of convergence between neuroscience and the arts, especially the verbal arts, with attention to integrating certain developments in psychoanalytic theory as well.
Diagnosing the widespread resistance to the reader-response view that a text resides in a given reader's experience of it, Holland proposes that human beings are neurologically (and adaptively) wired to automatically interpret internal events (e.g. perceptions) as impingements from an external environment featuring reliable and predictable patterns of cause and effect. The robust sense that a literary text is external to the reader follows naturally from this common predisposition.
Elucidates Coleridge's influential formulation by reference both to psychoanalytical accounts of regression and to neurobiological theories of distinct brain systems (neocortical and cortico-limbic), which Holland argues are not only reconcilable but mutually informative, as in the new hybrid discipline of "neuropsychoanalysis."
Drawing on Bakhtinian thought and chronobiology, Holquist offers a dialogic model of time as the fundamental category of narrative and argues that this model originates in the biology of body cycles.
Honeck, a psychologist, gives a brief overview of the history, current state, and future directions of metaphor studies, especially in the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence. The special issue that follows includes an overview of "Experimental Psycholinguistics and Figurative Language" by A. N. Katz, a report on "Neurocognitive Mechanisms Underlying Metaphor Comprehension and Other Figurative Language" by C. Burgess and C. Chiarello, and a review of "Computational Approaches to Figurative Language" by J. H. Martin.
Honeck outlines and explores seven basic approaches to the study of proverbs: personal, formal, religious, literary, practical, cultural, and (especially) cognitive. Building on Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual theory of metaphor, he posits two new models (DARTS and PLANTE) to illuminate the cognitive processing involved in inventing and comprehending proverbs.
A substantial collection of essays by various hands on figurative language in relation to cognitive science, with sections on historical and philosophical issues, processing and representation, semantic theory, developmental aspects, and problem solving. Contributors include Mark Johnson, Andrew Ortony, Ellen Winner, and Howard Gardner.
The authors describe successfully training a neural network computer program to identify poetic authorship by scanning for characteristic letter sequences (the poet's "psychophonological fingerprint") alone, using samples from the works of three Dutch poets: Bloem, Slauerhoff, and Lucebert.
Taking their philosophical bearings from Aquinas and Merleau-Ponty and drawing widely on experimental neuroscience, the authors--a neurobiologist and a scholar of comparative literature--propose an environmental, intentional, neurodynamic understanding of the human organism that they find broadly congruent with poststructuralist models of subjectivity such as Foucault's and Butler's.
Seeking to reconceptualize literary sentimentality as a "transdisciplinary" subject for research, Howard looks to neurobiology and empirical psychology as well as to anthropology, cultural history, and literary criticism in broaching a refreshingly new approach to an old problem.
A full-length response to the special issue of Poetics Today on "Literature and the Cognitive Revolution" that places the various contributors' theoretical and methodological claims under close scrutiny.
Investigates the relations between cognitive literary interpretation and empirical method, worrying that any commitment to the scientific model of knowledge may entail reliance on empirical studies at the expense of interpretive speculation. Areas of literary scholarship such as textual studies, bibliography, and literary biography and history are not considered.
This "willfully skeptical" look at recent evolutionary and cognitive literary criticism concentrates mainly on the work of Carroll, Storey, Spolsky, Turner, and Crane, concluding that the latter provides the best example to date of a promising dialogue between cognitive and poststructuralist approaches. (See the author's abstract).
Theories of language emerging both from within cognitive linguistics and from various evolutionary accounts of the origin of language cast serious doubts on Derridean (and postructuralist in general) approaches to language as systemically arbitrary and thoroughly relativistic. Similarly, cognitive and evolutionary theories of narrative undermine key claims of poststructuralist narratological theories. A reading of Woolf's The Waves illustrates the issues at stake.
Builds on Minsky, Jackendoff, and other cognitive theorists to advance a conceptualization of third-person narrative situations in terms of cognitive models, and proposes the outlines of a genuinely reader-oriented narratology. (See the author's abstract.)
In this elegant essay in postclassical narratology, Jahn considers a range of garden-path texts (from sentences to fictional narratives by Thurber and Le Guin) in demonstrating the advantages of interdisciplinary exchange between AI research and narrative poetics.
A noted clinician and psychiatric researcher revisits longstanding associations between artistic (especially poetic) creativity and madness, drawing on work in neuroscience, human genetics, and psychopharmacology. Jamison argues that manic-depressive (bipolar) illness exhibits features often noted among creative artists and (even in its milder forms) may facilitate creative production. Includes an extended discussion of Byron and brief genealogical studies of a number of artistic figures.
An early attempt to apply insights from Artificial Intelligence, especially Newell and Simon's work on information processing, to the study of reader response. Analyzes the verbalized procedures of six graduate students interpreting Shakespeare's "Sonnet 94," Swinburne's "Ballad of Dreamland," and Hopkins' "Carrion Comfort."
The common thread in this wide-ranging collection of forty recent articles, mostly from cognitive psychology and literature, is the use of empirical methods to describe literary effects. The essays do not have abstracts, although the table of contents is fairly useful for finding works on particular genres or themes. Of especial interest to literary scholars are:
Outlining the obstacles (brought about by the historical separation of disciplines) to using hard acoustic data in stylistic analyses of poetry, Barney offers, through his own work on enjambment, a model for synthesizing phonetic and literary approaches.
Harker offers a brief survey of psychological research on the cognition of reading and argues that such empirical research must ground any literary theoretical model of the processing of literary texts; he proposes one possible model.
Using an experiment designed to test the theories of Barthes and Jakobson about rhyme's "formal aesthetic effect" by measuring literary "tension" in terms of electrocortical signals, Hoorn concludes that while unexpected semantic deviations do evoke a physiological response, rhyme itself (contra Barthes) does not create tension by overlapping with semantics.
In the final chapter Kroeber proposes that Gerald Edelman's neurobiology offers a basis for understanding literature and culture in a more ecological or "holistic" sense.
The first book-length exposition of the cognitive approach to metaphor, demonstrating its prevalence in ordinary language and discourses of many kinds, while illustrating its basic workings. An important early synthesis of Lakoff and Johnson's work, to be further developed in Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things and Johnson's The Body in the Mind (both 1987).
A useful and reader-friendly handbook on cognitive linguistics, with many illustrations from and some model interpretations of literary works from diverse cultures and traditions.
László describes the results of research, including empirical studies of reader response, undertaken from 1981-1994 in this two-part book, which develops both an information processing account of literary reading and a social-cognitive approach to understanding literary interpretation. (See the author's abstract.)
Entertainingly describes an experiment in the cognitive psychology of literary reception suggesting (in its failure) that literary texts provoke a uniquely "deautomatized" cognitive style of reader response.
Noting that cognitive accounts of memory have eclipsed older psychoanalytical models across the psychological and neuroscientific disciplines, Lau draws adroitly upon a large body of recent memory research in elucidating the workings of memory as represented in the poetry of William Wordsworth. Special attention is given to "Tintern Abbey," the "Immortality" ode, and The Prelude. (See the author's abstract.)
In the long title essay, Lodge provides an account of how his 2001 novel, Thinks . . . , relates and responds to cognitive neuroscientific theories of consciousness and of the self by Dennett, Crick, Damasio, Edelman, and Ramachandran. He also traces an overview of the representation of consciousness in the Anglophone novel from its inception to the present.
Proposes that the embodied realism of Lakoff and Johnson can provide theater historians with the basis for a viable alternative to the "linguistic idealism" marking post-structuralist approaches to historical analysis. Combines insights from cognitive linguistics with a modified hegemony theory to analyze the audience experience of a mid-1950s production of Michael Gazzo's play, A Hatful of Rain.
Provides an overview of recent research and theoretical speculation concerning human emotions that could be usefully brought to bear on issues in literary and media studies. Mellmann discusses work in neurobiology, the cognitive psychology of emotions, and in evolutionary psychology as well.
Applies insights from cognitive linguistics (primarily Lakoff and Johnson) to a discussion of how two basic, interrelated metaphors, HARD IS COLD and SOFT IS WARM, arising ultimately from everyday embodied experience, help structure perceptions, experiences, and representations of social relations, especially in relation to gender differences.
The authors examine the structuring of meaning through binary oppositions in semiotics, cognitive psychology, and deconstructionist theory in an attempt both to link these fields and to locate them in the context of postmodernism.
Meutsch proposes a cognitive model for reading literature; understanding a literary text is a 'hypotheses-test-variation' process which continually evaluates and modifies a mental modal of the text determined by the initial goals of the action of reading.
Reconceptualizes Stein's innovative writing practices in terms of a "radical empiricism" closely tied to her studies in psychology and neuroscience at Harvard (with William James) and Johns Hopkins Medical School. Meyer places Stein in a tradition of radical empiricist writers and thinkers running from Wordsworth and other Romantic "poetic scientists" to contemporary neuroscientists such as Edelman and Varela. (See the author's abstract.)
Miall uses a range of recent research on the neuropsychology of cognition and emotion (and their interaction) to show how insights from this field both illuminate issues in reader response theory, such as anticipation and affect, and offer a model for future empirical studies of literary response. (See the author's abstract.)
Miall's study of the advantages and limitations of Johnson's The Body in the Mind for understanding literary response includes a reading of Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much With Us" and an argument for integrating Coleridge's account of the imagination into a theory of the bodily basis of meaning. (See the author's abstract.)
In the study of text comprehension, literary texts must be distinguished from nonliterary ones; defamiliarization theory, which the authors both define and put in historical context, offers a better framework for understanding specifically literary comprehension than does general text theory. (See the authors' abstract.)
Using studies of readers' responses to stories, Miall and Kuiken conclude that stylistic variation (foregrounding) in literary texts evokes a characteristic literary response, measurable in terms of such phenomena as reading time and affective judgment, thus challenging the widespread assumption that literary texts have no inherently literary qualities. (See the authors' abstract.)
Citing evidence from several empirical studies (including their own findings), Miall and Kuiken argue that formal features in literary texts significantly shape readers' response (and judgments of literariness in particular) by appealing to psychobiological, cognitive, and psycholinguistic processes. (See the authors' abstract.)
Working from empirical studies as well as from narrative and cognitive theory, the authors concentrate on the neglected area of the esthetic focalization of feeling, varying according to individual readers but commonly elicited by recognizable stylistic features in the text and helping to shape a phasic pattern of emotive response. (See the authors' abstract.)
Considers the implications of the new cognitivism (second-generation cognitive science) for a post-Derridean theory of representation or "derepresentation"; includes a critique of Lakoff's cognitive semantics and an attack on Turner's Reading Minds.
A brief and helpful response to Canfield's "Microstructure of Logocentrism" in the previous issue.
Argues that Wordsworth's poetry anticipates key tenets of Edelman's Neural Darwinism. The problematic notion of "anticipation" aside, Miller describes a series of convincing parallels between Wordsworth and Edelman.
Locates parallels between Coleridge's definition of the imagination in the Biographia Literaria and Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, holding that the former "is largely validated" by the latter.
Arguing that cognitive psychology is more appropriate than psychoanalysis for interpreting Hamlet, Morin diagnoses Hamlet's depression as caused by his own negative thought patterns.
Literary epiphanies capture the human mind-brain in the moment of becoming aware of its own cognitive activity, constituting a textual record of such charged moments addressed to others.
Advocates a biocultural or consilient approach to literary thematics that would profit from work on human nature in evolutionary psychology and biology without losing sight of historical difference, multiple readerships, and the relative autonomy of fictive constructs.
Oakley demonstrates the flexibility and range of Turner and Fauconnier's theory of conceptual blending in elucidating the rhetorical, narratological, and grammatical aspects of complex texts, with examples from Art Spiegelman's Maus II.
Drawing on work both in literary criticism and in cognitive psychological theory, Oatley distinguishes among various modes of emotional engagement with fictional works, as readers first confront literary texts (experiencing curiosity or dishabituation effects) and then enter fictional worlds, proceeding variously to sympathize or identify with characters and their goals and/or to evoke and perhaps reinterpret remembered emotions of their own. Identification is further discussed in terms of a simulation model of fictional mimesis.
A landmark collection of essays from various perspectives on fundamental questions regarding metaphor. Includes some salient examples of cognitive approaches, some retained from the first edition (1979), others added or revised. Of particular note:
Metaphor, metonymy, irony, and other tropes are constitutive of human thought. Psycholinguistic research suggests that their comprehension does not require special cognitive procedures. As products of understanding, however, figurative meanings may invite special interpretive treatment, including judgments of poeticality.
A detailed and invaluable overview of the cognitive linguistics approach to metaphor, sketching a history of this approach through the early 1990s and clarifying key issues.
An essay widely credited with having inaugurated (in 1979) the cognitive understanding of metaphor as deeply implicated and constantly deployed in everyday thought and ordinary language.
The authors draw on findings from developmental psychology in discriminating two discrete levels involved in processing metaphor and irony and in arguing that the interpretation of these figures is enabled and constrained by different cognitive functions. Non-literal utterances in general place a different set of demands on processing than do literal statements.
Paivio synthesizes an interdisciplinary approach to the term imagery by considering literary intuitions about imagery in light of empirical psychological research on the function of mental imagery in memory, thought, and language.
Paulson argues that the discipline of literature is best understood in terms of the "revolution against simplicity" in information theory and cybernetics; literary texts are complex systems exhibiting emergent qualities that require a multiplicity of explanatory levels.
The authors confront psychoanalytical notions of repressed and screen memories with empirical studies from academic psychology, asserting that the representation of traumatic episodes in autobiographical writing tends more often to fit with cognitive than with Freudian theories of memory.
The guest editors introduce a special issue of Journal of Pragmatics on "Literary Pragmatics" by considering the relation between pragmatics (defined here as the study of everyday language and its use in social contexts) and poetics, with special attention to the cognitive approach to metaphor.
Builds on the conceptual cognition approach to figurative language to address the figure of apostrophe, arguing that deconstructive readings of apostrophe necessarily limit its scope and need to be supplemented by the resources of cognitive rhetoric. (See the author's abstract.)
Utilizes concepts, models, and findings from recent neuroscience and cognitive science in developing a new cultural historical understanding of the relations between literary activity and brain science in Romantic-era Britain. (See the author's abstract.)
Richardson draws on cognitive categorization theory (esp. the work of Rosch and Lakoff) in rethinking questions regarding the British Romantic canon in its relative exclusivity and peculiar robustness. Argues that British Romanticism is best understood as a radial prototype category.
Looks in some detail at work by Turner, Spolsky, Scarry, Hart, and Crane in considering the promise of the emerging field of cognitive literary criticism. Special attention is given to questions of literariness, literary history, and relations with poststructuralist paradigms.
Draws on recent neuroscientific work on unconscious cognition to help elicit neglected aspects of Romantic-era discourse on the unconscious, with particular attention to Coleridge's ambivalent relation to questions of mind-body interaction and unconscious motivation and thought, especially as this bears on the introductory notice to "Kubla Khan."
Austen's last completed novel exhibits an embodied approach to representing mind and mental behavior that overlaps significantly with the brain science of her time and becomes visible in light of the recent resurgence of biological theories of mind. (See the author's abstract.)
Re-examines a problem in literary history--the oddly fractured narrative pattern typical of British Romantic representations of sibling incest--in light of the recently revived Westermarck theory of incest avoidance, arguing that such evolutionary hypotheses cannot be located in fictive texts in any simple manner. The example of Romantic incest suggests, rather, that cultural and historical context remain as important as ever, even (especially?) in considering representations of a "universal" human situation.
A collection of essays in cognitive literary criticism, especially in relation to narrative and dramatic forms, with an introductory survey of the field by Alan Richardson and original essays by Ellen Spolsky, Patrick Colm Hogan, Mary Crane, F. Elizabeth Hart, Lisa Zunshine, Blakey Vermeule, and Joseph Tabbi. (See the table of contents.)
A special issue of Poetics Today featuring both theoretical and critical essays in cognitive literary criticism, with an introduction, essays by Mark Turner, Paul Hernadi, Ellen Spolsky, Reuven Tsur, Steen, Lisa Zunshine, and Richardson, and a response by Tony Jackson. (See the table of contents.)
Responds to various issues raised by Adler and Gross in their critical response to the special issue of Poetics Today (23.1) on "Literature and the Cognitive Revolution," especially in relation to how best to define and delimit the new field of cognitive literary studies.
Collating a range of neuroscientific theory with various accounts of the "privileged moments" induced by literature, Roy posits a neurophysiological basis for aesthetic experience.
Rubin explores both what the ability to memorize (or reconstruct) epics, ballads and other forms of oral poetry reveals about the nature of the brain-mind and how the workings and constraints of human memory shape elements of such poetic forms on many levels, from alliterative word pairings to narrative structures. Rubin summarizes and refines a whole tradition of work in on memory and provides a good deal of information regarding the principles and methods of cognitive psychology as a courtesy to literary readers. A review is available elsewhere on this page.
Historicizes the critical debate around the "genuine instability" of intertextuality and combines a semiotic analysis of 17th century French parody with A.J. Greimas' cognitive model of "believing and knowing" as biologically linked modalities. Posits a "neurosemiotic" concept of memory as the driving force or vector in the schematization of intertextuality.
Using virtuality, recursion, windows, and morphing as her examples, Ryan extends the analogical repetoire of narratology to include metaphors from computer science, showing how these can help elucidate traditional narrative forms.
Ryan draws on both AI and "possible worlds" theory in an attempt to reinvigorate the study of narratology. She challenges, for example, conventional narratological approaches to framing with the notion of "stacking" employed in AI, suggesting that modeling narrative as a computer language does a better job than traditional narratology of describing complex metafictional effects.
Relying on a combination of disciplined introspection, ingenious thought experiments, and insights from cognitive psychology as well as philosophical esthetics, Scarry develops a novel approach to understanding the effects of visual description in literary works. Argues convincingly that poets from Homer to Heaney, as well a range of novelists including Flaubert, Brontë, and Proust, implicitly and skillfully recruit the human mind-brain's habitual processing mechanisms in designing visual effects to be enacted by the attentive reader.
In the sequel to "On Vivacity" (below), Scarry speculates that flowers are especially suited to serve as representations of the imagination because their physical properties interact with certain properties of the mind.
Drawing on both research from cognitive psychology and extensive observations of narrative imagery, Scarry synthesizes a powerful theory of how writers use both the structure of actual perception and some special features of the imagination to impart vivacity to fictional phenomena.
This collection of essays brings together an interdisciplinary group of psychologists, historians, neuroscientists, literary critics, philosophers, and others exploring the relations among memory, the brain, self-representation, social and ethical judgment, and knowledge and belief formation. It includes a section on autobiographical recall and autobiography.
Using numerous examples from everyday cognitive activity, Schank outlines a theory of human intelligence which defines narrative as a cognitive mechanism of central importance to such phenomena as memory, knowledge, conversation, and cultural engagement.
Schaub's careful, systematic integration of Kant's aesthetic theory with recent research on the neurology of aesthetic response includes a balanced, politically aware argument for the progressive and liberating potential of art. (See the author's abstract.)
The verbal tics, echolalia, palilalia, punning, and coprolalia associated with Tourette Syndrome, situated at the gray area between bodily and mental, biological and cultural, intentional and involuntary behaviors, shed light on the material linguistic resources of poetry and its relation to subcortical as well as neocortical brain activity.
Significantly extends the project of cognitive narratology in developing a complex and dynamic cognitive understanding of how readers construct literary characters out of textual and mental sources. Draws confidently on research in cognitive psychology, categorization theory, social cognition and discourse processing as well as narratology and poetics. (See the author's abstract.)
Shen's introduction to a special issue of Poetics Today on "Aspects of Metaphor Comprehension" argues that both literary theory and cognitive psychology would benefit from an integration of the two fields, especially in the area of metaphor research. The special issue includes articles by Gibbs and Turner.
Shen argues for a two-way relationship between metaphor and thought; just as metaphor shapes language, metaphorical mapping is in turn constrained by natural principles of taxonomic categorization.
Building on work in both cognitive science and literary theory, Shen offers a paradigm for a hierarchy of metaphor mapping (transfer of properties from a Source domain to a Target domain); in Shen's model, mappability is constrained by both schematic and categorical aspects of knowledge representation.
Noting that autobiographical studies stand to gain significantly from more attention to the specific neurocognitive mechanisms involved in memory, the authors draw on experimental neuroscience as well as literary criticism to newly elucidate the famous "madeleine" passage from Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.
Centered on an explication of "meaning," this broad overview by a cognitive scientist of the relevance of cognitive science to literary interpretation introduces useful cognitive science vocabulary, but represents issues in literary theory in only the simplest terms. Simon ultimately suggests that literary criticism, because it describes the ways in which meanings are generated, may be understood as a branch of cognitive science. The essay is followed by a series of responses by Hubert Dreyfus, Norman Holland, Mark Turner, and others, with a rejoinder by Simon. The issue is available online at The Stanford Humanities Electronic Review.
Sharply distinguishes conceptual metaphor theory from its offshoot, conceptual blending theory, arguing that the latter can better represent the workings of allegory in a prototypically allegorical text like Prudentius' Psychomachia. This rich discussion also takes in borderline (ambiguously allegorical) cases such as Kafka's The Trial. (See the author's abstract.)
A sympathetic essay-review of Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh.
Herrnstein Smith makes intriguing use of cognitive theory, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory in framing a theory of belief in terms of contingent truths maintained by the same general cognitive dynamics that allow beliefs to be changed.
In her response to the assessment by Adler and Gross of the special issue of Poetics Today (23.1) on "Literature and the Cognitive Revolution," Spolsky advocates interactivity between literary scholarship and cognitive theory, arguing that recent developments in both literary theory and the philosophy of science suggest the untenability of any simplistic divide between literary studies and the cognitive sciences.
Spolsky locates a significant area of common ground between post-structuralist theory and a cognitive evolutionary perspective on culture, both stemming from a similar critique of representation, although cognitive theory moves toward a more optimistic conclusion. (See the author's abstract.)
Spolsky examines how the mind's inherent cognitive instability, arising from the gaps and incommensurabilities among various brain functions (modules) and from the neuronal plasticity described by Edelman and others, enables innovation both in imaginative writing and in literary history and criticism. Cultural materialism needs supplementing with a biologically based model of the brain-mind in order to account for change within what might otherwise seem a closed cultural and linguistic system.
Building on the theoretical claims advanced earlier in Gaps in Nature, Spolsky here reads a series of Early Modern (Renaissance) issues, artifacts, and literary texts as culturally specific responses to a perennial human problem, the skeptical bias of "good enough" but inherently gappy and unstable embodied minds. Includes compelling readings of Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Othello and original discussions of erotic pastoral, tragicomedy, and Sidney's poetics. (See the author's preface.)
Exposing the theoretical problems raised by "decoupling" approaches (like that of Tooby and Cosmides) to fictionality, Spolsky argues that a proper account of the adaptive use of narratives must recognize the unstable, provisional, and context-dependent character of the fiction/non-fiction distinction. A brief "Dialogue" with Tooby and Cosmides follows the essay.
Before asking whether beauty has a "unique ground in the mind or the world," one must develop an awareness of the enduring critical tendency (from Shaftesbury to Derrida) to collapse aesthetic experience together with aesthetic inquiry, only to replace the latter by ethics or hermeneutics.
Cognitive theory can contribute to an understanding of the ideological effects of literary works by pointing toward some of the cognitive mechanisms through which texts engage and seek to mold their readers. (See the author's abstract.)
This ambitious attempt to rethink autobiographical self-fashioning along neurocognitive lines covers a good deal of ground, making novel critical use (with special reference to Wordsworth's Prelude of models from memory, sleep and dream research, cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. (See the author's abstract.)
Writing in critical dialogue with cognitive linguistics and its offshoot, cognitive rhetoric, Steen holds that cognitive theories of metaphor can and should be empirically tested, that literary uses of metaphor are processed in a recognizably distinctive manner, and that the conceptual aspect of metaphor should be analyzed in conjunction with the linguistic and communicative aspects.
Gives an informative overview of the work of the "metaphor identification project," ten researchers from various fields collaborating to produce and refine an operational definition of linguistic metaphor. The project's working assumptions and basic methodology are illustrated by an analysis of Tennyson's lyric "Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal." (See the author's abstract.)
Steen argues that a cognitive approach to metaphor understanding should be supplemented by a discourse view, which can help account for some differences between literary and nonliterary metaphor.
Subsuming an extensive array of approaches toward studying narrative--including cognitive psychology, AI theory, cognitive linguistics, philosophy of mind, discourse processing analysis, cognitive narratology, and other forms of cognitive literary criticism, from the 1970s to the present--under the label "narratological cognitivism," Sternberg finds evidence of "isolationism" (ignoring relevant disciplines, especially narratology) and "amnesia" (ignoring a long tradition of thinking about narrative beginning with Aristotle).
The second part of Sternberg's detailed critique of cognitive and related work in narratology and discourse theory proves especially interesting in diagnosing an implicit neoclassicism at work in a good deal of the literature he examines.
This introductory textbook, aimed at undergraduates, takes its bearings from cognitive linguistics, selectively and inventively combining "cognitive rhetoric" with stylistics, Slavic poetics, discourse theory, and narratology. Its puzzling neglect of important work by Spolsky, Hogan, Crane, Esrock, and others diminishes its value as an introduction to the field.
Storey advocates the wholesale replacement of poststructuralist paradigms with a neo-Darwinist understanding of literary representation, drawing mainly on evolutionary biology, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology, but making frequent reference to cognitive science. Includes wide-ranging discussions of narrative, tragedy, comedy, and a reading of Iris Murdoch's A Fairly Honourable Defeat.
Reads Jane Eyre through the "psychoneurobiological paradigm" marking the synthesis of psychoanalytical and neurobiological theories in the writings of Allan Schore, with affinities to work on embodied cognition by Damasio, Lakoff, and Johnson.
Argues for a cognitive understanding of theatricality, working from the cognitive pragmatics of Sperber and Wilson as well as from categorization theory and cognitive notions of schemata. The outlines of such an approach are brought to bear particularly upon the theatrical experiments of Jerzy Grotowski, Augusto Boal, Tadeusz Kantor, and other avant-garde performers and directors.
Contends that narrative, a cultural universal, arises to promote information exchange and that oral narratives tend to address adaptive problems and to model the real world in predictable ways.
Demonstrating that Freud's oedipal paradigm plays no role in current developmental psychology and has been roundly dismissed by evolutionary biologists and psychologists, Scalise Sugiyama questions the continued reliance of literary scholars on this model and describes an alternate reading (based on evolutionary theory) of the Oedipus myth itself.
This experiment in criticism rethinks Wordsworth's poetic project as itself an epistemic experiment, drawing on Bateson's ecology of mind and Damasio's neuroscientific theory of the self in an attempt to recover Wordsworth's relational, recursive view of knowledge and his rhetorical, ecological approach to poetry. (See the author's abstract.)
This pioneering study in "historical cognitive science" looks primarily at seventeenth-century philosophical and scientific discourses in light of recent connectionist accounts of memory, but includes a compelling reading of Coleridge's response to Hartley in the Biographia Literaria.
Opening with an intricate analysis of a New Yorker cartoon, Swan challenges both the cognitive linguistic and conceptual blending approaches to understanding metaphor with a call to attend more fully to the distinctive character of a given literary metaphor in its particular context and in its relation to an ethical, intuitive subject of discourse (See the author's abstract.)
Drawing on research in cognitive science (especially AI models of text production), Symes argues that the role of constraints in literary creativity has been under-appreciated. The productive effect of even quite arbitrary constraints is especially evident in the work of George Perec and fellow members of the OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) group.
Working within the assumptions of evolutionary psychology, Tooby and Cosmides propose a view of artistic and other seemingly "pointless" human behaviors that attributes a certain fitness benefit (namely, development and attunement of increased mental organization) to esthetically motivated pursuits. They postulate as well the existence of a number of specialized cognitive modules, including decoupling mechanisms for segregating factual from fictive information.
Tsur applies his theory of rhythmical performance to an apparently anomalous reading of Keats's sonnet by the actor Douglas Hodge, illuminating the cognitive processes underlying rhythmic solutions to metrical complexities.
Takes a cognitive approach to understanding the use of spatial imagery in poetry, with special attention to religious poems from English, Yiddish, and Armenian traditions.
Argues that poets play on the figure-ground relationship typically relied on in human perception (as described by gestalt psychology) to shift readers' attention and invert habitual modes of perception and thought, with examples from Dickinson, Sidney, Shelley and Beckett as well as from music and the graphic arts.
Tsur uses a subtle synthesis of empirical data and theoretical insights from phonetics, literary criticism, and cognitive psychology to explain the apparent artificiality of typographic foregrounding in poetry.
Tsur identifies a paradigmatic case of conflict between linguistic stress pattern and metre in poetic rhythm, one that readers tend to resolve in predictable ways in their "rhythmical performance" of the lines in question. The argument is supported by analysis of actual recorded performances (supplied with the e-text in sound clips). Drawing on psycholingustics and gestalt theory, Tsur outlines the cognitive mechanism that would allow readers to reconcile the competing demands of stress pattern and meter.
In this "Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics," Tsur significantly augments his theoretical work on poetic meter, published in the 1970s, with the results of empirical studies carried out in the 1990s. (See the author's abstract.)
Using cognitive psychology, phonetics and acoustics, Tsur offers a systematic account of the (usually only intuitively) perceived effects of rhyme.
Tsur analyzes the critical reception of "Kubla Khan" in terms of readers' cognitive styles, then offers an interpretation of the poem based on the cognitive effects of its semantic ambiguities and prosodic qualities.
Tsur reviews several issues pertaining to versification in arguing that cognitive processes shape and constrain literary and other cultural behaviors. (See the author's abstract.)
Avoiding the extremes both of critical impressionism and reductionism, cognitive poetics attempts to systematically relate perceived poetic effects to verbal structures by moving from literary critical intuitions and analyses to more basic processes studied within psychology, or (in this) case moving from metrics and phonetics to acoustics. (See the author's abstract.)
Illustrates Tsur's cognitive theory of the rhythmical performance of poetry with analyses of how three prominent British actors (Beale, Branagh, and Gielgud) deliver Hamlet's soliloquy.
Tsur combines cognitive science with a range of literary theoretical approaches to classify and describe the relationships between literary structures and their perceived effects, cataloguing useful insights about almost every aspect of poetic structure, such as versification, imagery and emotional qualities. A review is available elsewhere on this page
Tsur draws on empirical data from linguistics and psychology to offer concrete explanations for literary critical intuitions about the ability of sounds to symbolize emotions and produce perceptual effects in the reader.
An early and highly eclectic attempt to bridge the concerns of neuroscience, cultural anthropology, and esthetics; includes some intriguing speculation, supported by empirical research, on metrical universals and the possible neural mechanisms constraining them.
Beginning with a discussion of conceptual blending theory, with examples ranging from The Dream of the Rood to Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon, this essay discusses continuities between classical and cognitive rhetoric, extends notions of history to include evolutionary history, and calls for greater mutual awareness among literary scholars and cognitive neuroscientists. (See the author's abstract.)
A detailed study of the workings of kinship metaphors in literary texts, in ordinary language, and in our (largely unconscious) "cognitive apparatus," asserting an important role in the development of the "science of the mind" for the literary analyst who can bring a sophisticated understanding of rhetoric and a large text-base to bear on issues in cognitive linguistics.
Turner describes the conceptual principles that allow us to interpret "bare equation" metaphors that do not express conventional basic metaphors.
Extends Turner's prior work on figurative language (especially metaphor) to encompass issues in narrative theory and linguistics as well. Key concepts include parable and projection: cognition makes extensive use of narrative, from small spatial stories used to organize learned movements to complex literary constructions. Stories can be used to structure or comment upon other stories (parable) and can be projected onto various domains of cognitive, linguistic, and literary activity. A review is available elsewhere on this page.
Turner uses Pilgrim's Progress, a bible passage, and a John Ashbery poem to demonstrate that cognitive constraints on metaphor compose one part of the background unoriginality on which poetic invention depends.
A significant attempt to reground the study of English literature on the basis of cognitive linguistics. Turner develops an impressive array of interpretive concepts, richly illustrated, under the rubric of "cognitive rhetoric." Argues compellingly that literary theorists and critics ignore to their cost the "signal intellectual work of our era" on the brain-mind.
Turner and Fauconnier summarize their influential theory of conceptual integration (blending) for a literary audience, providing and analyzing examples both from everyday and literary discourse, including Satan's encounter with Sin and Death in Book II of Paradise Lost.
After reviewing empirical studies of the inferential strategies used by readers to build coherence in processing texts, the authors discuss both the overlaps and the significant differences between the nonnaturalistic, experimenter-generated texts mainly used in such studies and naturalistic (particularly literary) texts, which they argue must be considered in the interest of a richer and more accurate model of communication.
Argues that cognitive literary studies (as instanced by the work of Mark Turner) have suffered from an inadequate notion of representation, here meaning "symbolic reference." Making extensive use of Deacon's Symbolic Species, van Oort offers to supplement Deacon with an anthropological reconstruction of the originary scene of representation, elaborating on work by René Girard and Herbert Gans. (See the author's abstract.)
In this sophisticated analysis of eighteenth-century moral philosophy, Vermeule uses cognitive evolutionary psychology to elucidate both the construction of moral authority (figured as the right to impose obligation on others) and modes of resistance to such authority. Includes original readings of Pope's Dunciad (and its twentieth-century critical reception), Johnson's Life of Savage, and Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.
Argues that Langer's esthetic philosophy deserves reviewing in light of findings by Damasio, LeDoux, and others on emotion and cognition. Empirical studies of music and cognition and recent work (by Miall and Kuiken) on reader-response suggest that esthetic investigation can provide valuable aid to neuroscience, which can in turn help elucidate the experience of artistic intuition.
The introductory chapter draws on cognitive categorization theory (and the work of Lakoff in particular) to frame an innovative and sophisticated approach to characterizing literary genre.
Young (a literary critic) and Saver (a neurologist), after noting the universality of story-telling and the crucial role of narrative in establishing and maintaining a sense of self, point toward a regionally distributed neural architecture subtending the human narrative capacity, reviewing four basic types of "dysnarrativia" correlated with specific kinds of brain damage.
Using a fifteenth-century Middle English romance as an example, the authors demonstrate how cognitive psychology's theories of memory may be applied to modern performances of medieval works to help resolve scholarly debates over textual variants; memorization may account for some such variants.
Postulating a struggle for intellectual hegemony between cognitivism (or more precisely, "third culture" popularizations of scientific thought generally) and cultural studies, Zizek points to Lacanian theory as a method for overcoming the current impasse in cultural studies and thus better forestalling the encroachment of its rival interdisciplinary constellation. Includes some provocative distinctions between neo-Darwinian versus Derridean deconstruction of humanist thought and cognitivist versus psychoanalytical accounts of the decentered self.
Evolved cognitive mechanisms impel an insistent concern with the truth value of fictional (and other) utterances, only heightened during periods of cognitive anxiety such as that provoked by the rapid growth of print culture in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain. Writers like Defoe, Richardson, and the Scriblerians both reflect and play on these anxieties as they extend and complicate the truth status of fictive texts. (See the author's abstract.)
Readers of narrative fiction can attribute intentions and emotional states to literary characters in part by unconsciously extrapolating from their own "theory of mind" capacities--an set of innate, species-specific behaviors for (somewhat) reliably guessing at the internal states of others based on external signs. Using Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway as her main example here, Zunshine argues that increasing the nested levels of intentionality can increase reading difficulty; in addition, she emphasizes the pitfalls and breakdowns in "reading" others' minds in this way. (See the author's abstract.)
Barbauld's Hymns in Prose, studied by historicist critics for their didactic and ideological designs, seek to draw in their child readers in part through manipulating entrenched cognitive predispositions concerning natural and artifactual categories. (See the author's abstract.)
This contribution to body of empirical research on literary comprehension concludes that literariness is a quality neither exclusively textual nor exclusively contextual, but instead emerging from the reader's contextually motivated application of a specific cognitive control mechanism.
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