Cognitive Literary Theory

Bár a detektívtörténet egy viszonylag merev sémára építkező
műfaj, mégis olyan sokoldalú szövegtípus, hogy a legkülönbözőbb
irodalomelméleti megközelítések fedezték fel a maguk
elméleti premisszáinak igazolását benne. Kedvelt témája volt
a formalista-strukturalista elméleteknek, de ugyanilyen
szívesen foglalkoztak vele szemiotikai megközelítésben vagy kultúratudományos megközelítésben
is. Kiemelt terepét képezte végül a posztmodern elméleteknek,
amelyek a műfaj pszichológiai, metafizikai, filozófiai
irányba történő kibővítésével, illetve felbontásának lehetőségeivel
és okaival foglalkoztak. Kötetünkben a detektívtörténetet az egyik legújabb és leginnovatívabb
irodalomelméleti irányzat, a kognitív poétika
szemszögéből vesszük újra nagyító alá.

Curated colloquy with an initial cluster of contributions by Jason Crawford, Walter Melion and Bart M. Ramakers, Michael Silk, and Nicolette Zeeman. // "What has allegory to do with personification, and personification with allegory? Are we justified in speaking, as we often do, of 'allegorical personifications' and 'personification allegory,' or does such usage, however widespread, obscure fundamental differences between the two? Why is it that the notion of allegory emerges already with some of the earliest known readers of Greek mythological poetry in the sixth century BCE, whereas full-scale personification narrative does not seem to appear until Prudentius' _Psychomachia_ in the fifth century CE? Can the histories of these concepts be brought into meaningful alignment? Can the premise of their close interrelatedness withstand rigorous theoretical scrutiny? In revisiting such questions, this colloquy hopes to spark fresh debate on what is not merely an unresolved terminological issue, but a fundamental conceptual problem with immense implications for our understanding of Western art and literature from classical antiquity to the present day."

La poetologia della conoscenza di Heinrich von Kleist si configura come un viaggio nella mente umana, nelle sue capacità conoscitive e immaginative, nelle sue labilità e nei suoi trascendimenti. La totalità romantica è infranta e il linguaggio è il materiale magmatico di attraversamento del reale e della mente: in ciò si esprime un progetto epistemico che, muovendo dall’orizzonte biologico della corporeità, si realizza, in virtù della forza poietica del linguaggio, nella narrazione.

Following Wolfgang Iser’s studies, literary criticism could no longer avoid a confrontation with the phenomenology of the act of reading. This has led the analysis of a literary text towards new researches regarding the reader’s response theory . In particular, it is impossible to define the field of literary investigation, its coordinates and characteristics, without considering the anthropological dimention which defines the epistemological nature of literature itself. We propose in this study a new approach that we call “neurohermeneutic approach”. Unlike an analytical or descriptive approach, the neurohermeneutic approach investigates broth the relations that the reader’s mind establishes with the text figurations and how these figurations stimulates the reader’s mind in that inexhaustible, always new and surprising act of the reading. A partire dagli studi di Wolfgang Iser, la riflessione critica non ha piu potuto evitare il confronto con la fenomenologia dell’atto della lettur...

This book investigates how writers and readers of Renaissance literature deployed ‘kinesic intelligence’, a combination of pre-reflective bodily response and reflective interpretation. Through analyses of authors including Petrarch, Rabelais, and Shakespeare, the book explores how embodied cognition, historical context, and literary style interact to generate and shape responses to texts. It suggests that what was reborn in the Renaissance was partly a critical sense of the capacities and complexities of bodily movement. The linguistic ingenuity of humanism set bodies in motion in complex and paradoxical ways. Writers engaged anew with the embodied grounding of language, prompting readers to deploy sensorimotor attunement. Actors shaped their bodies according to kinesic intelligence molded by theatrical experience and skill, provoking audiences to respond to their most subtle movements. An approach grounded in kinesic intelligence enables us to re-examine metaphor, rhetoric, ethics, gender, and violence. The book will appeal to scholars and students of English, French, and Italian Renaissance literature and to researchers in the cognitive humanities, cognitive sciences, and theatre studies.

A klasszikus detektívtörténet bizonyos szempontból tekinthető egyfajta modern népmesének, mivel a meglehetősen merev sémára épülő műfaj egyik állandó eleme a történet végén minden esetben bekövetkező igazságszolgáltatás. Az olvasó számíthat arra, hogy amellett, hogy megoldódik a rejtély, azaz kiderül, ki követte el a gyilkosságot, a bűnös meg is bűnhődik. Az olvasót a büntetés minden esetben megnyugvással tölti el, mert a klasszikus detektívtörténet nem kérdőjelezi meg a vétkes morális értékét. Ahogy a népmesében, itt is egyértelműen elhatárolódik egymástól a jó és a rossz, és a megkérdőjelezhetetlen morális értékek mentén kialakuló olvasói elvárást a szöveg beváltja: a rossz megbűnhődik, a jó pedig elnyeri jutalmát. Éppen ebben a tulajdonságában rejlik a detektívtörténet egyik vonzereje: Megunhatatlan élvezetet jelent számunkra a meg nyugtató "látvány", hogy bár felborulhat a világ morális rendje, az végül mégis mindig újra helyreáll.
Ugyanakkor az erre a stabil sémára épülő detektívtörténetek mellett szinte a műfaj születésének pillanatában megjelentek azok a regények is, melyek kísérletezni kezdtek a műfajjal és a legkülönbözőbb módon feszegették annak határait. Ezek közül egy korai, még nagyon visszafogottan kísérletező detektívregénnyel, Agatha Christie Gyilkosság az Orient expresszen című regényének végkifejletével foglalkozom a jelen tanulmányban, amely még teljes mértékben klasszikus detektívtörténetnek tekinthető, hiszen nem viseli magán azokat a posztmodern jegyeket, melyek a detektív-sémát alapjaiban forgatják fel, ugyanakkor egy olyan zárlattal rendelkezik, mely éppen a morális ítélet szempontjából nem simul tökéletesen a klasszikus sémába. Tanulmányomban a regény által felvetett morális kérdést járom körül. Első lépésben azzal foglalkozom, milyen kognitív képességek állnak a morális ítélkezés hátterében és mi ezek evolúciós eredete. Második lépésben a kétféle jog problémáját tárgyalom, ami véleményem szerint a regény zárlatában ábrázolt morális dilemma hátterében áll. Harmadrészt pedig azt a kérdést igyekszem megválaszolni, hogy miért fogadja el a legtöbb olvasó Agatha Christie történetének végkifejletét és többségünk miért nem fogadná el az eset ilyen megoldását, ha az nem fiktív, hanem valós történet lenne, azaz mennyiben különbözik morális ítéletünk fikcionális és valós kontextusban.

Az árulás olyan alapvető emberi tapasztalat, amely nagyon határozott és erőteljes érzelmeket vált ki bennünk, akár szemlélői, akár elszenvedői vagyunk, ennek ellenére racionálisan nehezen megragadható jelenség, amelyre sem a pszichológiában, sem a szociológiában nem találunk általánosan elfogadott definíciót. Első megközelítésben azt mondhatnánk, hogy árulásról akkor beszélünk, ha az egyén nem lojális ahhoz a csoporthoz, amelyhez tartozik, és ideiglenesen vagy véglegesen kilép belőle. Az árulás irányulhat egy nagycsoport ellen, ahol a személyes viszonyok már nem áttekinthetők, és inkább valamiféle ideológiai elkötelezettségről van szó, mint például a nemzet vagy
a vallás esetében, vagy egy kiscsoport ellen, amely egy személyesebb, intim viszony, mint a párkapcsolat vagy a barátság. Jelen tanulmányomban az árulás ez utóbbi
típusának, az intim viszonyban történő árulásnak az irodalmi ábrázolásával és befogadásával foglalkozom. Úgy gondolom, hogy az árulás és az ezt követő büntetés irodalmi ábrázolása nemcsak mint a poétikai igazságszolgáltatás egy lehetséges módozata érdekes, hanem a történetmondás evolúciós eredetéhez is visszavezet és felhívja a figyelmet annak egyik központi
funkciójára.
Tanulmányom központi kérdésfeltevése, hogyan működik a poétikai igazságszolgáltatás az „árulónarratívák” egy bizonyos típusában. Először arra a kérdésre keresem a választ, milyen kognitív mechanizmusok irányítják morális ítéleteinket fiktív történetek olvasásakor, és mi lehet ezek evolúciós eredete. Rámutatok arra, hogy az árulás büntetése központi szerepet játszik a történetmondás kialakulásában. A második fejezetben a morális érzelmekkel foglalkozom, mert ezeknek jelentős szerepe van az irodalmi szövegek befogadása során
kialakuló erkölcsi ítéleteinkben. Ezután Arthur Schnitzler egy konkrét elbeszélését, A halottak nem beszélnek című novellát elemzem, amelyet tipikus Schnitzler-szövegnek tekintek az árulás és a poétikai igazságszolgáltatás vonatkozásában, majd röviden kitekintek Schnitzler további műveire is. A tanulmány konklúziójaként azzal a kérdéssel foglalkozom, hogy az árulásnak ez a fajta ábrázolása kifejezetten a Schnitzler-életművet jellemzi-e, vagy levonhatunk egy általánosabb következtetést
is az árulás irodalmi ábrázolására vonatkozóan.

This essay uses cognitive theories of reading immersion, simulation, and quarantine theory to study anomalous readers in Don Quijote: not only the protagonist but also the secondary characters. It also explores the connections between immersion and the modern practice and theory of cosplay and fan fiction

Peak End Rule (Kahneman, 1993; 2011) suggests that the average of the peak and end moments of an event disproportionately affect memory and thus perception of the experience. We investigate PER's application to the experience of reading fiction. Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl" (2012) is an ideal case study because it is commercially popular but, unlike most popular novels, has a distinctly amoral ending. We hypothesize that humans expect moral payoffs at the end of narrative fiction, and that when these expectations are not met (i.e., pain at the end of the experience), as in the case of "Gone Girl," readers' perceptions of the story will be influenced by this pain and manifest as disappointment and dislike. We reference existing models in evolutionary psychology, which seek to explain human altruism, and models in cognitive science, which seek to explain patterns in memory and assessment. To quantify disappointment and dislike, we conduct a programmatic corpus linguistic analysis of 40,000 web-scraped Amazon product reviews of "Gone Girl," comparing them to reviews of eight other similarly popular novels from the same year. Results show that reader sentiments about "Gone Girl," both the overall review ratings and analysis on a sentence-by-sentence basis, are more positive than for the comparison novels. When only reviews mentioning "end" are analyzed, however, the effect reverses, with a similar finding at the more granular level of sentences mentioning "end." These findings support our hypothesis that moral endings, or lack thereof, significantly shape reader perceptions of a novel.

Marshalling history and contemporary science, Banks investigates what happens when writers revive the embodied content of “dead metaphors” or Latin etymons. Analysing Rabelais’s Prologue to Gargantua and Dolet’s Commentaries on the Latin Language, Banks shows that both fiction and lexicography highlighted semantic continuities between the abstract and the embodied by moving between the two, reflecting humanism’s “language turn.” However, Rabelais’s switches between embodied and abstract are more striking, and often found in discussions of cognition. Drawing on neuroscientific research into how language affects sensorimotor response, Banks argues that Rabelais thereby makes extensive calls on readers’ embodied cognition, which may come to the level of conscious reflection. Further light is shed on this by contrast with Charles de Bovelles’ treatment of the proverbs underlying Rabelais’s Prologue.

This chapter offers a way of understanding the effects of poetic images (metaphorical or literal). It employs and extends the notion of ‘emergent properties’, as well as relevance theory’s account of how communicative acts can ‘show’ as much as they mean. The images examined are from poems by Mary Oliver (‘Wings’, ‘Wild Geese’, and ‘Mindful’). The chapter suggests that such poetry is particularly in need of a new theoretical approach capable of engaging with its focus on embodied experience and ‘merging’ with nature. It shows how ‘emergent properties’—for example, a complex sense of what continuity with nature might feel like—can result from engaging in a range of imaginary sensorimotor experiences. The final section of the chapter turns to an abstract painting by Natalia Wróbel which dialogues with Oliver’s poetry, and fleshes out the relevance theory account of communicative showing to articulate differences between artistic genres and media.

The article focuses on the psychological dimensions of readers’ engagements with young adult climate change fiction. It argues that that the embodied simulation of a fictional climate-changed world can offer much more than simple entertainment or escapism. Instead, it has the potential to impact teenagers’ understanding of the social, economic, and ecological risks associated with climate change and to give them a better sense of the vulnerability of their current lives and lifestyles. By way of example, the article draws on research in cognitive literary studies, neuroscience, and the psychology of fiction to examine the narrative strategies of Paolo Bacigalupi’s YA cli-fi novel Ship Breaker. It demonstrates how the novel’s depiction of a dystopian future cues both negative emotions and more positive emotions in in order to warn about the future risks of climate change and still make the reading experience pleasurable for young readers.

The aim of this paper is to discuss Iain Banks’s Use of Weapons (1990) and Wasp Factory (1984) in the context of the presentation of the workings of the human mind in both novels – paying special attention to the rela-tionships this presentation has with the major breakthroughs made in the field of cognitive sciences. Thus, I will provide a brief analysis of how the discov-eries made in cognitive sciences have transformed common ideas about con-sciousness and humanness. Subsequently, I analyse the way in which Iain Banks examines the workings of the human mind, as well as investigates the topic of humanness. In this essay I shall argue that Iain Banks’s novels are preoccupied with discussing and demolishing dualisms, such as mind/body, emotions/reason, or nature/culture: this phenomenon is, according to me, likely to be correlated with the ideas popularised by the discoveries made in the field of cognitive sciences.

Non sappiamo perché e come l’Homo sapiens abbia sviluppato la capacità di costruire storie. Possiamo però ipotizzare come presumibilmente siano andate le cose. Cioè come un ominide abbia sviluppato la facoltà di narrare storie e come queste lo abbiano avvantaggiato tra tutte le specie. Si tratta dunque di studiare la narrazione, la fiction e la letteratura nel contesto della teoria dell’evoluzione e delle scienze cognitive, prendendo le mosse dalle recenti acquisizioni dell’archeologia cognitiva che mettono in relazione la produzione di utensili e lo sviluppo di capacità narrative. Si comprende così che la narrazione ha un ruolo decisivo nella costituzione del Sé e delle sue protesi esterne, come da tempo sostengono i teorici della mente estesa e della cognizione incarnata. Questo studio si inserisce nel quadro più ampio di una teoria biopoetica della narrazione e di un’antropologia filosofica che non trascura il bios rispetto allo spirito. Per questo, categorie fondamentali come la compensazione e l’esonero possono essere rilette in chiave evoluzionistica e fornire alcune spiegazioni del comportamento narrativo dell’Homo sapiens: il riequilibrio dei suoi deficit funzionali ed esistenziali e il contenimento dell’ansia.

What cognitive effects characterise science fiction (SF)? Using construal level theory (CLT), I show that SF typically maximises psychological distance along the dimensions of space, time, sociality and hypotheticality. As per the predictions of CLT, this cues cognitive expectations on the part of the reader that SF exploits to communicate its inflated vision of the efficacy of human agency. Two outcomes follow from these claims. The first is a new, empirically informed understanding of the SF genre; the second is a methodological precedent for the application of CLT to cultural materials.

The role and identity of the warrior: self-reflection and awareness in Old Norse literary and social spaces Stefka G. Eriksen Medieval war could be led on many levels, for numerous reasons, and in different ways. War could imply fighting in battles or duels, raiding or harrying; sometimes even the threat of harrying, or keeping peace at certain frontiers was the ultimate war strategy. 1 War could also be pursued in writing, by means of the word, or on a spiritual and inner level. No matter how war was pursued and on what level, it was an important preoccupation that conditioned and was conditioned by the social attitude to war and the role of the warrior in a given society as well as the warrior's own self-reflection and awareness of his individual private and social standing.

Many fields in the social sciences and humanities have recently been influenced by evolutionary theory and cognitive science. Of these, few have produced richer results than evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religion. Researchers have established many different proposals for the origins of religious behavior and imagery. Dealing with the nature of symbolic narrative, this research is applicable to literary studies as well. Of particular interest are “minimally-counterintuitive concepts” or “minimally-counterintuitive imagery” (MCI), which combine elements from two or more ontological categories (such as people, animals, or inanimate objects). The predominant theory states that we make automatic assumptions about each category (people can speak while animals cannot, animals move on their own volition while plants do not, etc…) and that concepts that cross these boundaries are better remembered than other types of imagery.
Based on this work, I and a small team of undergraduates tried to test some implications of this theory empirically. For instance, there should be a difference in the prevalence of MCI in religious and non-religious texts and there should also be a difference between texts that are part of an oral tradition and those that are not. As a start to this project we compared the prevalence of counterintuitive imagery in two very different texts: the Hebrew Bible and the Harry Potter novels. Our initial conclusion, admittedly based on a small sample size of two works, is that neither assumption is correct. A work being religious and a work being told orally do not seem to mean that it will have a higher proportion of counterintuitive imagery. In fact, the Harry Potter novels contain a much higher percentage of MCI than the Hebrew Bible. These results are tentative as they need to be backed by a much broader examination of texts from different periods and different geographical locations, but they point to a need to reexamine the evolutionary purpose of minimally-counterintuitive concepts and perhaps of the relationship between early religion and narrative more broadly.

This essay investigates the phenomenon of "embedded" mental states in fiction (i.e., a mental state within a mental state within yet another mental state, as in, "Mrs. Banks wished that Mary Poppins wouldn't know so very much more about the best people than she knew herself "), asking if patterns of embedment manifest themselves differently in children's literature than they do in literature for "grownups. " Looking at books for three age groups (nine to twelve, three to seven, and one to two), Zunshine finds significant differences in their respective patterns of embedment, while also arguing that a critical inquiry into complex mental states is not just a cognitive but also a historicist project. Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies. REMEMBER the time when Ben Rogers left off what looked like a really cool gamepretending to be a Missouri steam ship-to take over Tom Sawyer's chore of whitewashing the fence?

Review of Rhonda Blair and Amy Cooks, ed., Theatre, Performance, and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies and Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Jacono, eds., Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience.  Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues. Theatre Journal 68 (December, 2016): 687-89.

What is the role of interpretation—the close reading of individual texts—in cognitive literary studies? In attempting to come to grips with this vexed question, my article focuses on the complex divides that separate the practice of interpretation from cognitive-scientific research. I argue that cognitive literary studies can only fulfill their potential by moving beyond interpretation, and I survey lines of research that have already put into practice this intuition. Secondly, I explore a heuristic use of interpretation, where insights from cognitive science are leveraged—in what I call a “cognitive thematics”—to illuminate a background of metacognitive questions.

The aim of this paper is to use cognitive approach in order to analyse the topic of religion in two novels by Iain Banks. I argue that in both "The Wasp Factory" and "Consider Phlebas" Banks presents divine thoughts as cognitively natural for humans, since, according to neuroscience, the propensity for religiosity is inborn and universal. Banks’s novels show that people have an innate need to fill space with agents, and cannot refrain from ascribing illusory purpose to the cruel chaos of the surrounding world.

What makes a narrative text a narrative?
This is the central question of the paper which functions as an introduction to the edited volume "Perspectivization on narrativity and narrative perspectivization" (2016, John Benjamins). Based on an overview of narratological and linguistic approaches to narrativity, it argues for a dynamic account that sees narrativity as a specific constellation of perspectivization that dynamically emerges from the interaction between the textual structure and the recipient’s interpretation.

Em texto merecidamente célebre, “O direito à literatura”, Antonio Candido sublinhou a centralidade do literário na constituição da pólis. Aqui proponho que o desafio presente exige o desenvolvimento de uma nova ideia: o direito à leitura literária, a fim de substituir a ênfase na produção para uma consideração nova do ato de leitura e, sobretudo, de sua recepção. E assim como Candido ampliou ao máximo a noção de literatura, precisamos, num primeiro momento, realizar operação semelhante com a leitura para, num segundo instante, aperfeiçoar o conceito de “leitura literária”.

Understanding others’ mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies. Yet little research has investigated what fosters this skill, which is known as Theory of Mind (ToM), in adults. We present five experiments showing that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective ToM (experiments 1 to 5) and cognitive ToM (experiments 4 and 5) compared with reading nonfiction (experiments 1), popular fiction (experiments 2 to 5), or nothing at all (experiments 2 and 5). Specifically, these results show that reading literary fiction temporarily enhances ToM. More broadly, they suggest that ToM may be influenced by engagement with works of art.

Affective Ecologies is an exploration of our emotional engagement with environmental narrative. Focusing on the American cultural context, the book develops an ecocritical approach that draws on the insights of affective science and cognitive narratology in order to give us a better understanding of how we interact with such narratives in ways that are both biologically universal and culturally specific. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the thesis that our minds are both embodied (in a physical body) and embedded (in a physical environment), not only when we interact with the real world but also in our engagement with imaginary worlds. How do we experience the virtual environments we encounter in literature and film on the sensory and emotional level? How do environmental narratives invite us to care for human and nonhuman others who are put at risk? And how do we feel about the speculative futures presented to us in ecotopian and ecodystopian texts? These are the central questions that are explored in the three parts of the book, questions that are important for anyone with an interest in the emotional appeal and persuasive power of environmental narratives.

This paper organizes traditional and modern literary standards and values into objective assessment matrices to establish frameworks for examining contemporary masterpiece poetry within the contexts of the changing roles of literary consumers as well as those of arbiters of literary taste.

The aim of this article is to explore how non-Christian deities are described, in comparison to the Christian God, in three Old Norse texts, belonging to different genres: Heimskringla, Barlaams saga og Jósafats, Elíss saga ok Rosamundu. These texts describe the pantheons of the Nordic cultures, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Saracens. The main question that I discuss is whether these texts may be seen as transmitting useful knowledge and information about these religions and pantheons to their Nordic audiences or whether they are meant to mainly serve the mandate of their Christian authors. I interpret my results by deploying cognitive literary theory and the concept of mentalization. To conclude, I discuss whether the way non-Christian deities are described may be seen as a mental guide for Old Norse readers to practise mentalization according to the Christian empathetic scripts, in order to reach a deeper cognitive and religious conviction and thus strengthen their Christian identities and communities during the times of the Crusades.

E. T. A. Ho mann's tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816) contains several wonderful, one may even say magical, events. First, it celebrates the birthday of a man who died in his early thirties, then came back from the dead for a couple of days, and then disappeared from view completely, while still managing to stay alive, somewhere (possibly, behind the clouds), for almost 2,000 years. To commemorate him, the grownup characters of Ho mann's story buy toys for their children and tell them that these gifts come from that man, who brings goodies to hundreds of thousands of well-behaved youngsters of Europe, and who, incidentally, has now become an infant again. 1 So, what we have here is a gift-bearing, omnipresent, 2,000-year-old infant. Another wonderful event involves a nutcracker, perhaps delivered by that energetic infant. Shaped like a little man with a large mouth, the nutcracker comes alive at night and commandeers a regiment of toy soldiers to fight an army of mice led by their king: a large seven-headed mouse. The battle is witnessed by a seven-year-old girl, who then reports what she has seen to her parents and to her younger brother, Fritz. One would expect that this event should not strike the parents as very strange because they may already be familiar with its broad outlines, again, through stories involving the two-thousand-year-old infant. When that infant was still a man, he was reported to have successfully fought basilisks, dragons, and many-headed serpents. 2 Somewhere in his 800s, however, he lost interest, so by the eleventh century, the job of dragon-trampling was assumed by St George. St George's exploits were commemorated by many famous artists. One of these artists was Albrecht Dürer (see Figure 10.1), a particular favorite of Ho mann's, 3 who used to live in the same city of Nuremberg as do several characters in The Nutcracker. This is to say that an appearance of a seven-headed monster, right around the birthday of the infant, and its subsequent defeat by the very Nutcracker whom the infant may have

Cognitively -oriented literary studies, if they are to appeal to a broad array of literary scholars, will need to link together cognition and culture. This essay brings together cognitive-psychological studies of the metarepresentational mind and of religious belief in order to offer an explanation of the nature and historical emergence of novelistic realism. It shows how novelistic realism, unlike other kinds of story, directly exercises what psychologist Alan Leslie calls the “decoupling mechanism” of the metarepresentational mind. And it argues that this kind of story takes on its specific power in the history of story  because of specific cultural change.

This chapter starts with an overview of important topics, perspectives, and problems in Cognitive Poetics, and next takes poetic *metaphor theory* as a central case. First, it discusses Conceptual Metaphor Theory in relation to Aristotle and poetic metaphor. Second, it expounds other cognitive views of metaphor and relates them to poetics: Interaction Theory, Relevance Theory, Blending Theory, Bidirectionality Theory, and the class inclusion hypothesis. Third, it discusses aspects of form. Fourth, it proposes an interdisciplinary template for further analysis. Finally, it connects its discussion of poetic metaphor with the aims of (cognitive) poetics.

This article presents a theoretical framework for an evolutionary understanding of minds and meaning in fictional narratives. The article aims to demonstrate that meaning in fiction can be incorporated in an explanatory network that includes the whole scope of human behavior.
In both reality and fiction, meaning consists of experiences in individual minds: sensations, emotions, perceptions, and thoughts. Writing and reading fiction involve three sets of minds, those of authors, readers, and characters. Meaning in the minds of authors and readers emerges in relation to the experiences of fictional characters. Characters engage in motivated actions. To understand minds and meaning in fiction, researchers need analytic categories for human motives. A comprehensive model of human motives can be constructed by integrating ideas from evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology. Motives combine in different ways to help create different cultures and different individual identities, which influence experience in individual minds. The mental experiences produced in authors and readers by fictional narratives have adaptive psychological functions. By encompassing the minds of authors, characters, and readers within a comprehensive model of human motives, this article situates the psychology of fiction within the larger research program of the evolutionary social sciences.
Keywords: perspective taking, motives, psychology of reading, biocultural theory, evolutionary literary theory
 

Since its early formulation by Theodor Lipps, the concept of “negative empathy” has rarely received the attention it deserves in the scholarly debate on empathy. The present paper is an attempt to reconstruct its rough history and to propose a theory of negative empathy that is able to highlight its heuristic potential for the purpose of literary analysis, particularly for the study of the representation of the negative in literature. Drawing upon a range of fields of study, from neuroscience, psychology and psychonalysis to literary hermeneutics, cognitive literary studies, and aesthetics, I will try to lay the foundations for a reconceptualization of negative empathy. A high‐level form of empathy, negative empathy will be described, with relation to literature, as a potentially regressive aesthetic experience, consisting in a cathartic identification with negative characters, which can be either open to agency (indifferently leading either to pro‐ or antisocial behavior), or limited to the inner life of the empathizing subject. Such theoretical hypothesis will finally be tested on Jonathan Littell's novel "The Kindly Ones."

[fr] La thèse réunit cinq travaux portant sur le rôle joué par la fiction dans notre expérience et notre appréhension du monde. La fiction peut-elle véhiculer des contenus de savoir ou constituer en elle-même une source de connaissance ? Cette interrogation est déclinée à travers une série d’études portant sur la sociologie implicite de l’écrivain américain William S. Burroughs ; les musiques industrielles comme dispositifs critiques ; le pouvoir configurateur de 1984 dans la dénonciation des nouvelles technologies de surveillance et de contrôle social ; l’homologie profonde entre pouvoir et narrativité ; ou encore les contre-fictions dans les "sociétés de contrôle". L’introduction générale qui précède ces travaux s’attache à construire deux exemples de "formes fictionnelles d’intelligibilité" conçues comme ressources cognitives et pragmatiques utilisées par les personnes : le "simulacre", qui consiste en la critique originale d’une cible, sur un mode systématiquement ironique, de manière à retourner contre elle son langage et son mode de fonctionnement ; le "futur antérieur", qui propose l’anticipation d’une menace décrite comme déjà advenue, de manière à montrer l’urgence d’une action à entreprendre pour la conjurer. La thèse défend une conception minimaliste et holiste de la connaissance fictionnelle : c’est en tant que moyen au service de la modélisation mimétique de processus politiques et sociaux que la fiction, en activant notre sens du possible, exerce une fonction cognitive. Ces travaux dégagent ainsi les premiers éléments d’un programme de recherche en sciences politiques et sociales autour du pouvoir du et comme récit. Le récit apparaît non seulement comme un objet, mais surtout comme un "analyseur" du politique.
[en] The thesis assembles five publications dealing with the role played by fiction in our experience and apprehension of the world. Can fiction convey contents of knowledge or even constitute a source of knowledge in itself? This question is broken down into a series of studies about the implicit sociology of American writer William S. Burroughs; industrial music as a critical device; the configuration power of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the denunciation of new technologies of surveillance and social control; the deep homology between power and narrativity; as well as counter-fiction within “societies of control”. The general introduction preceding these publications aims at building two examples of “fictional forms of intelligibility” conceived as cognitive and pragmatic resources used by members of society: “simulacrum”, which consists in criticising a target, in a systematically ironical mode, so as to turn its language and mode of functioning against it; “future perfect”, which proposes the anticipation of a threat described as having already occurred, in order to demonstrate the urgency in taking action to thwart it. The thesis defends a minimalist and holist conception of fictional knowledge: it is as a means at the service of the mimetic modelling of social and political processes that fiction activates a sense of possibilities and exerts a cognitive function. In this way, these collected works intend to give the first elements of a research programme in social and political sciences around power of and as a narrative. Narrative appears not only as an object, but especially as a tool for analyzing politics.

The paper analyzes uses a cognitive ecocritical approach to demonstrate that Paolo Bacigalupi’s climate change novel The Water Knife uses the human body and its sensual and affective capacities in order to allow readers to imaginatively experience a decidedly unpleasant future world. Rather than simply evoking “bad weather”, Bacigalupi uses anthropogenic climate change as a catalyst for drastic developments in the ecological, economic and social realm and invites readers to understand on a visceral level that changed climatic conditions will inevitably lead to such conflicts and vulnerabilities.

This article provides an overview of scholarship on Victorian literature and neuroscience, especially books and articles written in the last ten years. These works tend to fall into one of three categories: literary scholarship that draws on history of science, cognitive literary scholarship, and cognitive literary historicism, which attempts to combine the previous two categories. This essay discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each type of scholarship and the barriers to entry in the field as a whole, such as the interdisciplinary skill set required of authors and readers alike. To offset these obstacles, this essay offers a brief history of Victorian neuroscience, a list of resources for those interested in learning more about the topic, and several useful models for would-be scholars in this field.

Palimpsest is an international journal for linguistic, literary and cultural research founded at the Faculty of Philology in Stip in 2016. It is published in printed form and electronically twice a year, the first issue in May and the second one in November.
The journal publishes papers in the area of linguistics, literary science, teaching methodology and culturology. In addition, there is a section reserved for reviews of books, monographs, and other publications in the sphere of philology and culturology. The international journal Palimpsest publishes papers in the following languages: Macedonian, English, Russian, German, Italian, French and Turkish.
All papers are double-blind peer-reviewed by two independent reviewers prior to being accepted for publication.

This article adds to the rich array of scholarly work on the moral dimensions of fairy tales by inverting key aspects of what has so far been theorized, and suggesting a basis for the evaluation of moral agency that arises from reciprocal interchange. Drawing upon current theories of "folk-psychology," complementary developmental studies of "intersubjective competency," research on "motor resonance" (Gallese 2001, Zwaan and Taylor 2006), and close textual analysis, this article illuminates how fairy tales guide (or manipulate) the reception of their moral content by conveying abstract notions and sociocultural knowhow through accessing preconscious sensory-motor mechanisms and "affective consciousness" (Vandekerckhove and Panksepp 2011). In so doing, I add credence to the theory of cultural evolution proposed by Richard Dawkins (1976, 1982) and Daniel Dennett (1984. 1991, 2017), which posits genes and memes to be the main currency of cultural transmission. This view overlaps in interesting ways with the Extended Mind hypothesis and the "4E" modal of human cognition, according to which the mind is embodied, embedded, enactive and extended (Clark 1997, 2013; Wheeler 2005; Gallagher 2005; Menary 2010; Colombetti 2014; Rowlands 2015). What we learn from the continuously successful history of the fairy tale tradition, I argue, is that moral standards may vary, but certain principles for communicating moral content remain steadfastly effective.