Cognitive poetics is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature employing the tools offered by cognitive science. Cognitive science is an umbrella term covering the various disciplines that investigate human information processing: cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence and certain branches of linguistics and of the philosophy of science. These explore the psychological processes involved in the acquisition, organization and use of knowled in fact, in all information processing activities of the brain, ranging from the analysis of immediate stimuli to the organization of subjective experience. Cognitive poetics explores the possible contributions of cognitive science to poetics: it attempts to find out how poetic language and form, or the critic's decisions, are constrained and shaped by human information processing. It assumes that in the response to poetry, cognitive devices that were initially acquired for survival in man's physical and social environment, are turned to aesthetic ends. It offers cognitive theories that systematically account for the relationship between the structure of literary texts and their perceived effects. By the same token, it discriminates which reported effects may legitimately be related to the structures in question and which may not.This book uses cognitive theories to illuminate literature rather than use works of literature to illustrate cognitive theories. It emphasizes the particular differences between cognitive processes in general and their unique exploitation for literary purposes; its generalizations are wide enough to be applicable to a great variety of literary works of art, while at the same time, it provides means to make meaningful distinctions between, or within, specific works of literature. Such an approach requires the combination of the tools of cognitive science with those of the more traditional disciplines of literary criticism, literary history, linguistics and aesthetics. An important task of cognitive poetics is to explore the possibilities and limitations of such combinations.This book attempts to illuminate the cognitive aspects of poetic structure on a wide variety of strata and from a wide variety of angles: the sound stratum of poetry, the units of meaning stratum and the world stratum; literary history; period sty stylistic typology; genre; archetypal patterns; aesthetic qualities; poetry and altered states of consciousness.

Provides a comprehensive view of poetry, with chapters the sound stratum of poetry; the units-of-meaning stratum; the world stratum; regulative concepts; and the poetry of orientation and disorientation. This book consists of samples from the author's study of the rhythmical performance of poetry and the expressiveness of speech sounds.

Professor Jacob Mey is one of the most respected, enterprising, industrious, scholarly and, avuncular members of the many linguistics communities in which he has worked. This collection includes invited papers that honours Professor Mey on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.

For more than two decades now, cognitive science has been making overtures to literature and literary studies. Only recently, however, cognitive linguistics and poetics seem to be moving towards a more serious and reciprocal type of interdisciplinarity. In coupling cognitive linguistics and poetics, cognitive poeticians aim to offer cognitive readings of literary texts and formulate specific hypotheses concerning the relationship between aesthetic meaning effects and patterns in the cognitive construal and processing of literary texts. One of the basic assumptions of the endeavour is that some of the key topics in poetics (such as the construction of text worlds, characterization, narrative perspective, distancing discourse, etc.) may be fruitfully approached by applying cognitive linguistic concepts and insights (such as embodied cognition, metaphor, mental spaces, iconicity, construction grammar, figure/ground alignment, etc.), in an attempt to support, enrich or adjust 'traditional' poetic analysis. Conversely, the tradition of poetics may support, frame or call into question insights form cognitive linguistics. In order to capture the goals, gains and gaps of this rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of research, this volume brings together some of the key players and critics of cognitive poetics. The eleven chapters are grouped into four major sections, each dealing with central concerns of the field: (i) the cognitive mechanisms, discursive means and mental products related to narrativity (Semino, Herman, Culpeper); (ii) the different incarnations of the concept of figure in cognitive poetics (Freeman, Steen, Tsur); (iii) the procedures that are meant to express or create discursive attitudes, like humour, irony or distance in general (Antonopoulou and Nikiforidou, Dancygier and Vandelanotte, Giora et al.); and (iv) a critical assessment of the current state of affairs in cognitive poetics, and more specifically the incorporation of insights from cognitive linguistics as only one of the contributing fields in the interdisciplinary conglomerate of cognitive science (Louwerse and Van Peer, Sternberg).The ensuing dialogue between cognitive and literary partners, as well as between advocates and opponents, is promoted through the use of short response articles included after ten chapters of the volume. Geert Br ne, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Jeroen Vandaele, University of Oslo, Norway.

Cognitive poetics is a new way of thinking about literature, involving the application of cognitive linguistics and psychology to literary texts. This book is the first introductory text to this growing field. In Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, the reader is encouraged to re-evaluate the categories used to understand literary reading and analysis. Covering a wide range of literary genres and historical periods, the book encompasses both American and European approaches. Each chapter explores a different cognitive-poetic framework and relates it to a literary text. Including a range of activities, discussion points, suggestions for further reading and a glossarial index, the book is both interactive and highly accessible. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction is essential reading for students on stylistics and literary-linguistic courses, and will be of interest to all those involved in literary studies, critical theory and linguistics.

Das ganze Studium der Anglistik und Amerikanistik in einem Band. Ob englische und amerikanische Literatur, Sprachwissenschaft, Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, Fachdidaktik oder die Analyse von Filmen und kulturellen Phänomenen führende Fachvertreter geben in englischer Sprache einen ausführlichen Überblick über alle relevanten Teildisziplinen. BA- und MA-Studierende finden hier die wichtigsten Grundlagen und Wissensgebiete auf einen Blick. Durch die übersichtliche Darstellung und das Sachregister optimal für das systematische Lernen und zum Nachschlagen geeignet.

"Chapter 1 begins with a well-known biblical poem, Psalm 23, in order to illustrate two problems facing biblical poetry readers: what are "lines" in (traditionally unlineated) biblical poetry, and why does it even matter? The chapter sets these overarching problems in the context of modern biblical poetry scholarship: the frameworks of parallelism and meter, and the confusion over whether "biblical poetry" is best defined by style or structure. While parallelism and meter are rejected, Robert Lowth's early observation of "conformation" is affirmed: biblical poetry does relate to structure, and it is built from lines that fit to each other, not lines that fit to a meter. This raises the question of how the free-rhythm (unlineated) lines of biblical poetry can be perceived or mentally organized as structural-rhythmic units by the listener or reader. A cognitive approach informed by the theory and method of Reuven Tsur is introduced as the solution"--

An engaging and thought provoking volume that speculates on a range of textual works—poetic, novelistic, and programmed—as technical objects With the ascent of digital culture, new forms of literature and literary production are thriving that include multimedia, networked, conceptual, and other as-yet-unnamed genres while traditional genres and media—the lyric, the novel, the book—have been transformed. Word Toys: Poetry and Technics is an engaging and thought-provoking volume that speculates on a range of poetic, novelistic, and programmed works that lie beyond the language of the literary and which views them instead as technical objects. Brian Kim Stefans considers the problems that arise when discussing these progressive texts in relation to more traditional print-based poetic texts. He questions the influence of game theory and digital humanities rhetoric on poetic production, and how non-digital works, such as contemporary works of lyric poetry, are influenced by the recent ubiquity of social media, the power of search engines, and the public perceptions of language in a time of nearly universal surveillance. Word Toys offers new readings of canonical avant-garde writers such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, major successors such as Charles Bernstein, Alice Notley, and Wanda Coleman, mixed-genre artists including Caroline Bergvall, Tan Lin, and William Poundstone, and lyric poets such as Harryette Mullen and Ben Lerner. Writers that trouble the poetry/science divide such as Christian Bök, and novelists who have embraced digital technology such as Mark Z. Danielewski and the elusive Toadex Hobogrammathon, anchor reflections on the nature of creativity in a world where authors collaborate, even if unwittingly, with machines and networks. In addition, Stefans names provocative new genres—among them the nearly formless “undigest” and the transpacific “miscegenated script”—arguing by example that interdisciplinary discourse is crucial to the development of scholarship about experimental work.

Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures. Applying the cognitive neuroscience of categorization, emotion, figurative thinking, narrativity, self-awareness, theory of mind, and wayfinding to the study of literary works and genres from diverse historical periods and cultures, the authors argue that literary experience proceeds from, qualitatively heightens, and selectively informs and even reforms our evolved and embodied capacities for thought and feeling. This volume investigates and locates the complex intersections of cognition, literature, and history in order to advance interdisciplinary discussion and research in poetics, literary history, and cognitive science.

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. The first twenty chapters give readers the opportunity to acquire a thorough knowledge of the fundamental analytic concepts and descriptive models of Cognitive Linguistics and their background. The book starts with a set of chapters discussing different conceptual phenomena that are recognized as key concepts in Cognitive Linguistics: prototypicality, metaphor, metonymy, embodiment, perspectivization, mental spaces, etc. A second set of chapters deals with Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar, and Word Grammar, which, each in their own way, bring together the basic concepts into a particular theory of grammar and a specific model for the description of grammatical phenomena. Special attention is given to the interrelation between Cognitive and Construction Grammar. A third set of chapters compares Cognitive Linguistics with other forms of linguistic research (functional linguistics, autonomous linguistics, and the history of linguistics), thus giving a readers a better grip on the position of Cognitive Linguistics within the landscape of linguistics at large. The remaining chapters apply these basic notions to various more specific linguistic domains, illustrating how Cognitive Linguistics deals with the traditional linguistic subdomains (phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax, text and discourse), and demonstrating how it handles linguistic variation and change. Finally they consider its importance in the domain of Applied Linguistics, and look at interdisciplinary links with research fields such as philosophy and psychology. With a well-known cast of contributors from around the world, this reference work will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in (cognitive) linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology.