Michael Burke

The neuroaesthetics of prose fiction: pitfalls, parameters and prospects

There is a paucity of neuroaesthetic studies on prose fiction. This is in contrast to the very many impressive studies that have been conducted in recent times on the neuroaesthetics of sister arts such as painting, music and dance. Why might this be the case, what are its causes and, of greatest importance, how can it best be resolved? In this article, the pitfalls, parameters and prospects of a neuroaesthetics of prose fiction will be explored. The article itself is part critical review, part methodological proposal and part opinion paper. Its aim is simple: to stimulate, excite and energize thinking in the discipline as to how prose fiction might be fully integrated in the canon of neuroaesthetics and to point to opportunities where neuroimaging studies on literary discourse processing might be conducted in collaborative work bringing humanists and scientists together.

Taking perspective: Personal pronouns affect experiential aspects of literary reading

Personal pronouns have been shown to influence cognitive perspective taking during comprehension. Studies using single sentences found that 3rd person pronouns facilitate the construction of a mental model from an observer’s perspective, whereas 2nd person pronouns support an actor’s perspective. The direction of the effect for 1st person pronouns seems to depend on the situational context. In the present study, we investigated how personal pronouns influence discourse comprehension when people read fiction stories and if this has consequences for affective components like emotion during reading or appreciation of the story. We wanted to find out if personal pronouns affect immersion and arousal, as well as appreciation of fiction. In a natural reading paradigm, we measured electrodermal activity and story immersion, while participants read literary stories with 1st and 3rd person pronouns referring to the protagonist. In addition, participants rated and ranked the stories for appreciation. Our results show that stories with 1st person pronouns lead to higher immersion. Two factors—transportation into the story world and mental imagery during reading—in particular showed higher scores for 1st person as compared to 3rd person pronoun stories. In contrast, arousal as measured by electrodermal activity seemed tentatively higher for 3rd person pronoun stories. The two measures of appreciation were not affected by the pronoun manipulation. Our findings underscore the importance of perspective for language processing, and additionally show which aspects of the narrative experience are influenced by a change in perspective.

The rhetorical neuroscience of style: On the primacy of style elements during literary discourse processing

Abstract Much work has been conducted in the social psychological sciences both modelling and predicting how the storage and retrieval of images and words in the mind operate (e.g. Baddeley 1974, 2000, Damasio 1999, Barsalou 1999). The focus has largely been on the interactions between short-term and long-term regions of memory. Such studies have also on occasion been complemented by behavioural experiments. More recently, a growing body of work has started to emerge from the biological cognitive neurosciences which looks at these same processes with the aid of scanning technologies (e.g. Dehaene 2003, 2009, Ledoux 1998, Eichenbaum 2011). The questions that will be considered in this paper are can these scientific findings be extended to aesthetic objects that are studied in the humanities, and in particular to the style of literary texts, and also can the way literary style figures operate shed light on how the mind and brain might function.

How cognition can augment stylistic analysis

Stylistics has traditionally focused on the formal properties of style. The addition of a cognitive dimension to stylistic analysis might, on the face of it, suggest a move toward a somewhat reductive perspective on interpretation and a de-emphasis on the role that culture, language and style can play in the literary meaning-making processes. This article will aim to show how cognition can in fact augment stylistic analysis. It will also suggest that the inclusion of a cognitive dimension in the domain of stylistics is something that should be welcomed rather than distrusted as it enriches the stylisticians current toolkit. The method employed to highlight this will be to add a cognitive dimension to a very fine stylistic analysis from the 1980s. This will be done in an attempt to show how both approaches, the mainstream and the cognitive, are in fact complementary rather than competitive.

Why care about pedagogical stylistics

The teaching of stylistics in the modern day university classroom is a useful and worthy endeavour. Knowledge gained in such courses assists our undergraduate and graduate students in understanding how language, grammar and rhetoric function in texts. The knowledge they acquire leads them first to comprehend the basic grammatical and rhetorical concepts. This is followed by a second level of ‘practical’ knowledge, whereby students are able to analyse texts with the tools they have acquired at the first stage. The third stage is when students go into a mode of synthesizing all they have learned, which, in turn, allows them to move on to the production stage. Such a process is valuable, for example, in the contemporary university creative writing classroom. It is important to note that the process described here is not simply literary stylistics, but fundamentally pedagogical stylistics. The fact that a close, stylistic analysis of texts, literary or otherwise, for formative ends, is pedagogically valuable was something that was not lost on the teachers of the ancient world. In democratic, classical Athens, for example, the classrooms of Aristotle, Isocrates and Theophrastus were full of young men eager to learn the analytic skills of rhetoric, the forebear of modern day stylistics. Similarly, in the schools of rhetoric in Imperial Rome, Quintilian and his Roman colleagues knew the didactic worth of the close study of literary works: texts designed not just to delight but also to teach, as Horace famously noted. Nor was it lost on the countless dedicated schoolmasters of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. Indeed, right up to the end of the 18th century the grammatical and rhetorical study of style and language for pedagogical ends was still very much in vogue, at least in the UK: the work of Dr Hugh Blair, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres at the University of Edinburgh is a salient case in point. So, to return to my opening remark: if the importance of such instruction, and the key role of pedagogy in it, was not lost on the stylistics of the past, why does it appear to be less valued in the stylistics of the present? In other words, why is it that pedagogical issues appear not always to be given the prominence or prestige they logically seem to deserve in our universities? Why, for example, do we stylisticians tend not to solely focus on pedagogical stylistic research? And why is it

Iconicity and Literary Emotion

In the stylistics classic Style in Fiction by Leech and Short, there is a relatively concise, but immensely fruitful discussion on iconicity, which highlights a number of iconic phenomena, including those of iconic sequencing and iconic juxtaposition.1 Leech and Short’s focus on iconic sequencing in this discussion is twofold. It concentrates both on a chronological and on a psychological aspect. The first of these two categories considers the imitation of a purported sequence of events in a fictional world, while the second focuses on the ‘first-is-most-important’ principle of the syntactic ordering of how things successively occur in the author’s creative mind. The second iconic phenomenon that Leech and Short highlight concerns iconic juxtaposition. This particular aspect of iconicity concentrates on words that are physically adjacent in the text itself, claiming that this closeness may evoke a sense of temporal, psychological or locative affinity. Ungerer and Schmid have recently put forward an alternative cognitive linguistic version of Leech and Short’s iconic categorization, in which an interesting account is given of a) iconic sequencing, b) iconic proximity (the equivalent to Leech and Short’s iconic juxtaposition), and c) iconic quantity. According to them, it is this third category of iconic quantity that is of greatest importance to iconic cognitive linguistic studies.2 Judging by the fifteen-year gap that separates these two publications,

m-Reading: Fiction reading from mobile phones

Mobile phones are reportedly the most rapidly expanding e-reading device worldwide. However, the embodied, cognitive and affective implications of smartphone-supported fiction reading for leisure (m-reading) have yet to be investigated empirically. Revisiting the theoretical work of digitization scholar Anne Mangen, we argue that the digital reading experience is not only contingent on patterns of embodied reader–device interaction (Mangen, 2008 and later) but also embedded in the immediate environment and broader situational context. We call this the situation constraint. Its application to Mangen’s general framework enables us to identify four novel research areas, wherein m-reading should be investigated with regard to its unique affordances. The areas are reader–device affectivity, situated embodiment, attention training and long-term immersion.

The oceanic literary reading mind : An impression

The mind and brain processes of the literary reading mind are most accurately defined as oceanic: the mind is an ocean. This is the essential premise that I put forward in my book Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (Routledge, 2011).1 The statement is of course a metaphor. It follows in a long line of metaphorical apprehensions of the human mind, from Plato’s notion of the mind as a wax tablet to the more modern — some might say reductive — ideas of the human mind as a machine or a computer.

Rhetorical pedagogy: Teaching students to write a stylistics paper

How can we help our students to think clearly and plan wisely so that they can write better stylistics papers? This article evaluates a set of rhetorical pedagogical guidelines that I made for my own undergraduate stylistics students in an attempt to address this question. The article primarily reproduces the guidelines I designed, but also a questionnaire that I drew up, and, crucially, reports the responses of the subjects in that questionnaire. It is hoped that such data might lead to better testing methods and ultimately an improved set of stylistics guidelines so that students can be empowered to perform better, with increased confidence and motivation, in the undergraduate stylistics classroom.

Unpacking and evaluating properties in conceptual metaphor domain mapping : Cognitive stylistics as a language learning tool

Metaphor is a productive domain for L2 and EFL research. Several illuminating pedagogical studies have been conducted into both traditional metaphor and conceptual metaphor (see, for example, Boers, 2000; Chen and Lai, 2011; Deignan et al., 1997; Gao and Meng, 2010; Hall, 2012; Lazar, 1996; Littlemore, 2004; Littlemore and Low, 2006). The same might be said of stylistics, as it too is a fruitful area for L2 and EFL research (see, for example, Burke, 2004; Burke et al., 2012; Carter and McRae, 1996; Clark and Zyngier, 2003; Gower, 1986; Hall, 2005; 2014; Short, 1989; Teranishi et al., 2012; Watson and Zyngier, 2007). What this chapter seeks to do is to bring together these two disciplines (conceptual metaphor and stylistics) within a framework of second language (L2) learning. The goal is to create a productive and transferrable ‘pedagogical cognitive stylistics’. L2 and EFL metaphor experiments have concentrated on increasing a learner’s vocabulary and enhancing his/her language acquisition. The conceptual metaphorical stylistic analysis set out in this chapter, however, seeks not only to do this, but also to stimulate a deeper level of thinking and comprehension in L2 learners.