Peter Stockwell

Texture : a cognitive aesthetics of reading

1. Introduction: Text, Textuality and Texture 2. Characterisation 3. Motivation 4. Voice 5. Irony 6. Tone 7. Sensation 8. Empathy 9. Identification 10. Resistance r.

The poetics of science fiction

Departures - orientation and maps macro-old futures micro - futureplay macro - outer space centrepoint - retrospective/prospective micro - new words macro - new worlds micro - poetic planes arrivals - the ends of the earth.

The cognitive poetics of literary resonance

Abstract The application of cognitive science to literary scholarship in the form of a cognitive poetics offers the opportunity for accounting for many features of literary reading that have been rendered only in vague or impressionistic terms in the past. In this paper, an argument for cognitive poetics is made, with a focus on the affective and experiential phenomenon of resonance. This is modelled through cognitivist work on the field of attention and perception, to give a particularly literary-angled approach. The argument is exemplified with reference to a Shakespeare sonnet and then further demonstrated in a poem by Dylan Thomas, where the notion of a lacuna is developed to account for the phenomenon of “felt absence”. The paper concludes with observations on the role of cognitive poetics in relation to cognitive science, literary criticism, and in its own right.

About the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often:

Stylisticians were among the first to draw on the insights emerging from cognitive science in order to explore literary works. Recent years have witnessed a wider diffusion of the cognitive turn across literary scholarship, with developments into literary cultural studies and historiography. Unfortunately, this has sometimes been accompanied by a relative neglect of textuality and texture. In this article, we argue again for the necessary centrality of stylistics in literary scholarship, and the continuing requirement to make textuality an integral part of cognitive poetic exploration. We demonstrate the value of Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007a, Werth, 1999) in requiring this integration as an inherent feature of the approach, in the process of exploring reading responses to an emotionally involving poem by Simon Armitage.

Texture and identification

It is clear that there is an increasing divergence between the concerns and discourse of professional readers of literature and the experience engaged in by natural readers. In particular, natural readers foreground emotional and motivational aspects of literary works, areas which are neglected or poorly handled in the academy. This paper explores the emotionally affecting dimension of how readers identify with literary works. Drawing on cognitive poetic developments within stylistics including text-world theory, a method is proposed that equates empathetic identification with spatial conceptualisation and distance. A short analysis of a very popular poem illustrates how the method can gauge differences between artificial and natural reading.

The inflexibility of invariance

The Invariance Hypothesis was originally proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Turner in 1989. Since then, a range of versions has evolved so that there are currently both strong and weak statements of it. In general, the Invariance Hypothesis suggests a constraint on the information carried in a metaphorical mapping, as modelled in cognitive linguistics. It seeks to preserve the receiver’s knowledge about the target domain of a metaphor, so that the target retains its basic conceptual integrity in the mapping process. In other words, only that amount of the source domain that is consistent with the preservation of the target is mapped. Invariance is proposed to resolve a perceived problem in accounting for some metaphors, in order to sustain the claims of cognitive linguistics to be a useful and applicable model of language. However, I believe that this is mistaken, and that acceptance of the Invariance Hypothesis is itself a threat to the value of cognitive linguistics, as applied to literature (where it has come to be called cognitive poetics or cognitive stylistics). I will use literary examples to argue for the rejection of the Invariance Hypothesis, which curtails the perception of metaphor as creative, and cannot explain its capacity for reference to a new sense beyond source and target. This limitation is counter to the larger claims of cognitive linguistics concerning the linguistic basis and embodiment of culture and perception. Finally, I suggest an alternative solution, arising from the analysis of literary examples, which preserves the general value of cognitive linguistics while escaping the inflexibility of invariance.

The Cambridge handbook of stylistics

Stylistics has become the most common name for a discipline which at various times has been termed ‘literary linguistics’, ‘rhetoric’, ‘poetics’, ‘literary philology’ and ‘close textual reading’. This Handbook is the definitive account of the field, drawing on linguistics and related subject areas such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, educational pedagogy, computational methods, literary criticism and critical theory. Placing stylistics in its intellectual and international context, each chapter includes a detailed illustrative example and case-study of stylistic practice, with arguments and methods open to examination, replication and constructive critical discussion. As an accessible guide to the theory and practice of stylistics, it will equip the reader with a clear understanding of the ethos and principles of the discipline, as well as with the capacity and confidence to engage in stylistic analysis.

Mind-modelling with corpus stylistics in David Copperfield

We suggest an innovative approach to literary discourse by using corpus linguistic methods to address research questions from cognitive poetics. In this article, we focus on the way that readers engage in mind-modelling in the process of characterisation. The article sets out our cognitive poetic model of characterisation that emphasises the continuity between literary characterisation and real-life human relationships. The model also aims to deal with the modelling of the author’s mind in line with the modelling of the minds of fictional characters. Crucially, our approach to mind-modelling is text-driven. Therefore we are able to employ corpus linguistic techniques systematically to identify textual patterns that function as cues triggering character information. In this article, we explore our understanding of mind-modelling through the characterisation of Mr. Dick from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Using the CLiC tool (Corpus Linguistics in Cheshire) developed for the exploration of 19th-century fiction, we investigate the textual traces in non-quotations around this character, in order to draw out the techniques of characterisation other than speech presentation. We show that Mr. Dick is a thematically and authorially significant character in the novel, and we move towards a rigorous account of the reader’s modelling of authorial intention.

Cognitive Poetics and Literary Theory

Cognitive poetics, the application of cognitive science to illuminate the study of literary reading, is maturing as a discipline. This paper argues that cognitive poetics is best seen as the latest development in the progressive evolution of stylistics. The endpoint of the process represents the return of rhetoric to the centre of literary scholarship, where it offers an alternative to the purely historiographic paradigm. It is argued that stylistics and cognitive poetics have been successful in providing a descriptive account of how readers construct propositional content from literary reading, but they have only recently turned their attention to a correspondingly rigorous analysis of aesthetics and emotional involvement. The paper surveys recent trends in the field, and argues that the most effective advance in cognitive poetics requires a thorough stylistic grounding to accompany the conceptual theory: the notion of ›texture‹ is key to this. The question of whether cognitive poetics has the status of a critical theory or a method is considered. The paper concludes by arguing that cognitive poetics differs from other critical theoretical approaches partly deriving from its interdisciplinary, scientific and empirical base, and partly because of its relationship with those critical theories. Cognitive poetics is (and should be) a hermeneutic theory with an integral poetic dimension, in order to capture the interaction of meaningfulness and felt experience in literary reading.

The positioned reader

Modern stylistics is in the process of emerging completely from the shadows of the New Critical prohibitions on discussing the intentional and psychological fallacies in literary reading. Informed by cognitive linguistics and the psychology of cognition, a strong tradition of cognitive poetics has become established within stylistics, serving as a powerful challenge to the psychological fallacy in particular: readerly effects, emotions and significances in literary engagement are now regarded as part of the legitimate ground of stylistic study. In the classical terms that underpin the long view of stylistics, we now possess a good research programme in the systematic account of meaningfulness (logos) and emotional affect (pathos). What remains is the challenge of a similarly principled account of ethics. However, just as the cognitive turn has taken an applied linguistic approach to interpretation and aesthetics, so our cognitive poetic approach to ethos must be based on a descriptive account not of authority and immanent intentionality, but on the readerly sense of adopting a position in the process of literary reading. The concept of the intentional fallacy cannot be criticised as comprehensively as the psychological fallacy, but it nevertheless poses the wrong sort of question. This article sets out an encompassing framework for the analysis of ethics as an interaction between readerly disposition and textual imposition, to produce a sense of a ‘positioned reader’ of a literary work. Brief analytical illustrations from literary prose fiction are presented for exploration. The article draws on and questions related traditions in critical theory and psychology, with the aim of establishing a fully rounded stylistics as the foundational principle and principal method in literary study. My ultimate framing objective is an applied linguistic approach to literary scholarship that is evidential, dialogic and humane, and which completes the circle of meaning, feeling and significance familiar to generations of literary scholars.