Cognitive Poetics in Practice

Joanna Gavins, Gerard Steen, Joanna Gavins, Gerard Steen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134470990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Cognitive Poetics is a new way of thinking about literature, involving the application of cognitive linguistics and psychology to literary texts. This student-friendly book provides a set of case studies to help students understand the theory and master the practice of cognitive poetics in analysis.
Written by a range of well-known scholars from a variety of disciplines and countries, Cognitive Poetics in Practice offers students a unique insight into this exciting subject. In each chapter, contributors present a practical application of the methods and techniques of cognitive poetics, to a range of texts, from Wilfred Owen to Roald Dahl. The editors' general introduction provides an overview of the field, and each chapter begins with an editors' introduction to set the chapter in context. Specifically designed sections suggesting further activities for students are also provided at the end of each case study.
Cognitive Poetics in Practice can be used on its own or as a companion volume to Peter Stockwell's Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction.
This book is critical reading for students on courses in cognitive poetics, stylistics and literary linguistics and will be of interest to all those involved in literary studies, critical theory and linguistics.

1 Contextualising cognitive poetics

Gerard Steen and Joanna Gavins

Introduction

The study of literature has become much less elitist over the past couple of decades. The most obvious manifestation of this development is the rise of cultural studies, which approaches literature as just one element of all culture, including music, film, television, the printed press, and so on. A somewhat more recent manifestation is cognitive poetics, presented to a broad public by Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (Stock-well2002a). Cognitive poetics, too, sees literature not just as a matter for the happy few, but as a specific form of everyday human experience and especially cognition that is grounded in our general cognitive capacities for making sense of the world.

The present collection of chapters is intended as a companion volume to Stockwell’s introduction and aims to demonstrate at a more advanced level what cognitive poetics may look like in actual academic practice. In particular, we are presenting a series of case studies in the general areas delineated by each of Stockwell’s chapters, which contain further thoughts for discussion and possibilities for application in class. Some of the cases are more theoretical and others more empirical, and we hope that this combination of approaches offers a balanced incentive for pursuing further work in cognitive poetics. For that purpose, we have also included carefully designed sections for ‘further activities’ which can be found at the end of each chapter.

In positioning cognitive poetics in this way, we are adopting a historical perspective on the development of the study of literature. Both the position and value of literature itself, as well as of the academic study of literature, have shifted considerably in recent years. The appeal of literature has been challenged by new art forms directed at new groups of audiences through new media, and it has become inevitable to consider the resemblance and difference between these art forms and literature in terms of their psychological and social effects. This is precisely what cognitive poetics promises to bring into view, by relating the structures of the work of art, including the literary text, to their presumed or observed psychological effects on the recipient, including the reader.

Moreover, the standard academic practice of producing yet another interpretation of a text from the canon, or, in more recent years, from outside the canon, has been challenged by the taxpayer, who wants better justification for the spending of their money than an academic’s sheer individual interest in a particular text. And this justification, too, is what cognitive poetics promises to offer. It suggests that readings may be explained with reference to general human principles of linguistic and cognitive processing, which ties the study of literature in with linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science in general. Indeed, one of the most exciting results of the rise of cognitive poetics is an increased awareness in the social sciences of the special and specific nature of literature as a form of cognition and communication. What is noted at the same time, however, is that this special position of literature is grounded in some of the most fundamental and general structures and processes of human cognition and experience, enabling us to interact in these special artistic ways in the first place.

So these developments may be partly accounted for by pointing to historical changes in media forms and their audiences as well as in academic practices of interpretation and their societal valuation, as we have just done. However, cognitive poetics could not have emerged without another remarkable development over the past few decades, the rise of cognitive science. New approaches in cognitive anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence have led to a completely new set of concepts, theories, and insights which are now all available to the student of literature who is interested in describing and explaining the effects of literary texts on the mind of the reader. And the scope of cognitive science is so wide that it is not restricted to purely cognitive phenomena, such as the processing of words or the activation of knowledge schemas from memory. Also part of this undertaking are associations, images, feelings, emotions, and social attitudes, and researchers continue to find and explore new connections between them. For instance, it has now become a genuine possibility that we may be able to give a psychological account of the whole problem of aesthetic and artistic experience, or, another hot issue, literary invention. There are, then, several reasons why cognitive poetics has recently arrived on the academic scene.

Different kinds of cognitive poetics?

The approach to literature through human cognition is not just characteristic of cognitive poetics in Peter Stockwell’s specific sense, which is connected to the rise of cognitive linguistics in the study of language. Cognitive linguistics offers an approach to all language, not just literary language, through an examination of its cognitive underpinnings, and is based on the results of cognitive science regarding our cognitive abilities for mental representation and processing (for a good overview, see Ungerer and Schmid 1996). It has been part and parcel of cognitive linguistics to pay attention to features of literary language, such as the role of metaphor and metonymy, from the beginning. In addition, cognitive linguists have proposed many independently interesting ideas that may be fruitfully applied to the study of literature, as has been demonstrated by Stockwell (2002a). Margaret Freeman (in press) offers a more recent and theoretical survey of cognitive poetics in the cognitive-linguistic vein.

However, there are other variants of a cognitive approach to literature. For instance, one of the contributors to this book is Reuven Tsur, who has run a cognitive poetics project since the early 1970s, long before the first publications in cognitive linguistics. He based his work on the early findings of the new cognitive science and applied those insights to the study of the relation between literary structure and effect. In doing so, he expressly continued the work of Russian Formalists and Czech and French structuralists, extending such study in an explicitly cognitive direction. The chapter he has offered for the present volume (Chapter 4) is a fine example of this approach, presenting a somewhat contrapuntal development of the treatment of deixis by cognitive linguists as discussed in the textbook by Stockwell. His case study concerns the treatment of time and place in a number of famous excerpts from such poets as Shakespeare, Marvell, Wordsworth, and Keats. It is best appreciated if it is studied as one of the last chapters in a course, for its topic and treatment are pitched at rather an advanced level of discussion.

Tsur’s cognitive poetics is of a more general kind than the one developed in relation to cognitive linguistics, as may be gleaned from his seminal overview Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (Tsur 1992). However, it should also be acknowledged that cognitive poetics in the more specific sense presented by Stockwell is still in development. What is more, it does not have a precisely demarcated borderline which would stamp other variants of cognitive poetics, including Tsur’s, as non-canonical. Indeed, one of the most interesting things about cognitive poetics today is that it is in such a state of excitement and unscripted development in a multitude of directions.

Similarly, the work of two other contributors to this book, psychologists Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr (Chapter 3) and Keith Oatley (Chapter 12), does not derive from cognitive linguistics either but is firmly based in the social sciences, in particular in experimental cognitive and social psychology. Although Gibbs is closely associated with cognitive linguistics through his work on metaphor (Gibbs 1994), he cannot be regarded as a cognitive linguist or poetician. His main expertise lies in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, and his theories, methods, as well as many of his empirical studies are based in those areas. However, Gibbs is also representative of the increasing interest in the social sciences for the special position of literature as a specific form of cognition and communication, which is suggested as well by the title of his successful book on figurative language, The Poetics of Mind. We are very happy that he has offered a chapter in a more theoretical and psychological vein, formulating a new, groundbreaking view of the use of cognitive prototypes during online reading. In particular, his chapter goes against the frequently-held view that prototypical concepts are retrieved wholesale from memory every time they are needed for the interpretation of a particular passage. The alternative Gibbs offers should be read as a counterpoint rather than a development of the corresponding chapter in Stock-well’sintroduction. His chapter is an excellent example of what we mean by the fundamental relation between literary reading and general cognition, written by a psychologist instead of someone trained in language or literature. (It may be usefully connected to Chapter 8 by Crisp on metaphor and Chapter 6 by Steen on scenarios.)

Keith Oatley is well-known for his work on human emotions, in particular through his volume Best-Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions (Oatley 1992). Like Gibbs, he approaches cognitive poetics from the standpoint of the psychologist, not the cognitive linguist, or the cognitive poetician inspired by cognitive linguistics. Oatley has also written a theoretical and psychological chapter, in which we have asked him to pull together some of the threads of this volume and consider some potential avenues for future work. He has focused on a reinterpretation of the traditional notion of mimesis as well as on a discussion of the role of emotions in literary reading.

He also raises the question of the function of literature from a cognitive perspective. This, then, is another example of a cognitive poetics that is conceived in a slightly more general as well as a psychological fashion. Oatley has moreover the additional interest of being a published and successful writer of two novels, which adds an intriguing twist to his consideration of the cognitive processes of literary reading.

Tsur, Gibbs and Oatley are the three most conspicuous examples in this volume of a more general approach to cognitive poetics. A canonical example of the more specific, cognitive-linguistically inspired approach to cognitive poetics has been put forward in the books by Mark Turner (1987, 1991, 1996; Lakoff and Turner 1989), and we have represented his work in this volume by means of Chapter 9 on parable, by Michael Burke. Burke sets out the main ideas of Turner’s theory in order to apply them to a close reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 2.

Turner’s work began as the application to literature of the cognitive-linguistictheory of conceptual metaphor, advanced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) in their famous Metaphors We Live By. Turner first focused on the use of conventional conceptual metaphors in literature in his Death Is the Mother of Beauty (1987) and then went on to write ‘a field guide to poetic metaphor’ with George Lakoff (Lakoff and Turner 1989). We have addressed this particular aspect of Turner’s work in Chapter 8 by Peter Crisp on metaphor. Crisp’s is a demonstration of the main results and possibilities for application of cognitive-linguistic metaphor research in cognitive poetics. He not only includes work by Turner, but also goes back to Turner’s original sources in cognitive linguistics, in particular the work by Lakoff (1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). His case study concentrates on a reading of a poem by D.H. Lawrence, ‘Song of a man who has come through’.

Turner’s major publication is probably his book on ‘the study of English in the age of cognitive science’, the subtitle of Turner (1991). In that book he lays out the programme for what he called a ‘cognitive rhetoric’, which has since developed into cognitive poetics. The title of his next book, The Literary Mind, bears testimony to this development (Turner 1996). It focuses on the use of stories in literature and in everyday life, and makes the radical claim that both thought and language are ultimately derived from literary story-telling. It is an interesting question whether more generally-and psychologically-oriented cognitive poeticians such as Tsur, Gibbs, and Oatley would agree with this kind of cognitive poetics. As noted above, further explorations of these issues may be found in the chapter by Burke, which also exhibits connections with Chapter 8 on metaphor.

There are, then, two kinds of cognitive poetics. One is more tightly related to the rise of cognitive linguistics, and is in part represented by the chapters by Burke and Crisp. There are two further chapters in our collection which also take this cognitive-linguistic inspiration for their starting point, those by Hamilton (Chapter 5) and Stockwell (Chapter 2), but we will return to these in a moment. The other kind of cognitive poetics is more generally oriented towards cognitive science. It includes work by psychologists such as Oatley and Gibbs as well as by poeticians who have been attuned to cognitive science for a long time, such as Tsur. One of the most exciting aspects of the cognitive poetics of the future may be seeing how these two brands of cognitive poetics finally lead to convergence.

Cognitive poetics and other kinds of poetics

As already hinted above, cognitive poetics does not come out of the blue. However, it is also not just an offshoot of cognitive science, but is first and foremost a new brand of poetics. How does it relate to some of its predecessors, and what exactly is this discipline, poetics? These are the questions that we also need to address.

The last successful form of poetics arguably was structuralism, mentioned above in connection with Reuven Tsur. Structuralism was explicitly launched as a ‘structuralist poetics’ in the English-speaking world by Jonathan Culler in 1975. His book of that title was a sensation in that it managed to challenge the long-prevailing practice of formal or moral practical criticism. The following rather lengthy quotation from the preface is especially interesting because it not only shows Culler’s intention, but also exhibits intimate connections with the aims of cognitive poetics.

The type of literary study which structuralism helps one to envisage would not be primarily interpretive; it would not offer a method which, when applied to literary works, produced new and hitherto unexpected meanings. Rather than a criticism which discovers or assigns meanings, it would be a poetics which strives to define the conditions of meaning.specify how we go about making sense of texts, which are the interpretive operations on which literature itself, as an institution, is based. Just as the speaker of a language has assimilated a complex grammar which enables him to read a series of sounds or letters as a sentence with a meaning, so the reader of literature has acquired, through his encounters with literary works, implicit mastery of various semiotic conventions which enable him to read series of sentences as poems or novels endowed with shape and meaning. The study of literature, as opposed to the perusal and discussion of individual works, would become an attempt to understand the conventions which make literature possible.

(Culler 1975: viii)

Mark Turner has rejected structuralism as a form of academic imperialism that is incompatible with cognitive poetics (1991: 22), but, as we shall demonstrate in a moment, his own description of his programme is completely identical with the aims of Culler (see Turner 1991: 19).

The first element to be noted in Culler’s quotation is the contrast between criticism and poetics. It is clear that by ‘poetics’ Culler means an encompassing and systematic theory of literature, which may or may not be applied in practical criticism as the scholarly interpretation (‘perusal and discussion’) of individual texts. This is precisely what lies at the basis of Turner’s intervention in literary studies as well: ‘I offer explorations in this book that do not consist of “giving” and “arguing for” “readings”’ (1991: 19).

Structuralist poetics of the French kind, which Culler is introducing above, aligns itself with its main predecessors in literary theory: Czech Structuralism and, before that, Russian Formalism. Culler also refers to the more encompassing discipline of semiotics, which was developing at the same time and led to such different variants as the work by Umberto Eco (1976, 1990) as well as Yuri Lotman (1977). What is more, despite Turner’s rejection of structuralism as imperialist, these theories of literature have indirectly had a great effect on some of the work in cognitive poetics, rhetoric and stylistics that is being presented in the present volume and elsewhere (e.g. Semino and Culpeper 2002). Theories of narrative structure and foregrounded language, for instance, are at the centre of attention of various studies in present-day cognitive poetics, but they invariably go back to high-qualitytheoretical work done in the heyday of structuralism.

Thus the chapters by Emmott (Chapter 11), Semino (Chapter 7), and Gavins (Chapter 10) all depart from narratological as well as cognitive theory to explore different ways in which narrative structure may be held to induce specific cognitive effects in the reader. Emmott concentrates on the study of plot and specifically examines how unexpected plot reversals such as twists in the tale may be accounted for from a cognitive perspective. Narratological analysis is combined here with the basic cognitive insight that readers build, monitor and maintain contextual frames when they read stories from one episode to another. In order to describe how plot reversals work, Emmott’s approach makes use of cognitive-psychological findings about default frame assumptions and the inferences readers make, both within and between the contextual frames they construct for a story. Her materials include two stories by Roald Dahl, and her analyses in effect present predictions for what readers do when they read these stories, predictions which could be tested in actual informant work.

This may be connected to the second element noted in Culler’s quotation, the emphasis on ‘conditions of meaning’. Culler mentions reading, making sense, and interpretive operations as the true object of literary research, and this is precisely what Turner does as well: ‘In my view, our profession takes as given exactly what we should be trying to explain. We take for granted our capacities to invent and interpret, and devote ourselves to exercising those capacities and publishing the results’ (1991: 1...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 Contextualising cognitive poetic
• 2 Surreal figures
• 3 Prototypes in dynamic meaning construal
• 4 Deixis and abstractions
• 5 A cognitive grammar of ‘Hospital Barge’ by Wilfred Owen
• 6 ‘Love stories’
• 7 Possible worlds and mental spaces in Hemingway’s ‘A very short story
• 8 Conceptual metaphor and its expressions
• 9 Literature as parable
• 10 ‘Too much blague?’
• 11 Reading for pleasure
• 12 Writingandreading
• References