Cognitive Poetics

CITATION: Бегоян А. Н. Концептуальная психотерапия: основные понятия и интегративный потенциал // Проблемы индивидуального психологического консультирования: Материалы научно-практической конференции с международным участием. 11–12 февраля 2011 года / отв. ред. К. М. Гайдар, О. П. Макушина; Воронежский государственный университет. – Воронеж : Издательско-полиграфический центр Воронежского государственного университета, 2011. – 156 с.; с. 72-79.

Philip Larkin's poem "Love Song in Age" is analyzed against its Polish translation by Stanisław Barańczak using conceptual metaphor theory. The use of conventional and novel metaphors is compared. Some iconic effects along with their influence on the metaphorical mappings in the original poem and the translation are also compared and contrasted. The differences in the conceptual metaphorical structure of the construals potentially evoked by the original poem and its translation are discussed as possible sources of diminished equivalence between the texts.

I apply my particular reading of Schutz's theory to the problem of emotion, which Schutz himself only hinted at. How is it that emotions are rich and varied phenomena bound to unique embodied individuals - while at the same time emotions can be shared, understood, and even predicted (e.g. when we intentionally offend or amuse other people), and show a high degree of cultural and historical relativity?

This short article was published in e-magazine for A level students. It summarises the importance of nature not only in Edward Thomas's poetry but for his psychological well being. The psychological aspect of his encounters with nature is cited as the strongest distinguishing factor between his nature writing and that of Georgian poets.

"Cognitive poetics is a new way of thinking about literature that applies principles of cognitive linguistics and psychology to the interpretation of literary texts. Since literary criticism lacks an adequate theory of literature; cognitive linguistics is a promising tool in the search for an adequate theory of language and literature. According to Freeman (1998), conceptual mapping in literary texts can operate at three different levels including “attribute mapping,” “relational mapping,” and “system mapping”. In this paper, Khayyam's poetry is analyzed using this approach and how system mapping of his world text demonstrates the unique aspects of his thought as well as showing the reason for his preferred pattern in order to draw his world through poetry. In addition, there are several controversies over the originality of some poems attributed to him. To this end, by applying three kinds of mappings, a reliable and scientific method is provided which can be a step forward in the area of literary critic of Khayyam's poems. In conclusion, the function of different system mappings in Khayyam's poetry could differentiate the quatrains belong to different authors as well as offering a close systematic reading.



Key words: Text world, poetry, cognitive, mapping, linguistics."

Rilke’s relationship to Nietzsche is still nowhere near fully explored. This is due to the poet’s peculiar silence regarding the inescapably influential philosopher, as well as to a frequently acknowledged lack of evidence regarding that influence, the existence of which remains heatedly debated and, at best, speculatively assumed within scholarship.
The recent discovery, however, of two copies of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra amongst Rilke’s possessions has changed the status quo, as both contain reading traces identified as Rilke’s in one case, and (most probably) Lou Andreas-Salomé’s in the other. This unprecedented find not only proves for the first time Rilke’s familiarity with that book, but also makes visible which particular Nietzschean themes were of special interest to the poet. It is this study’s aim to trace Nietzsche’s presence, rendered tangible by those themes, in Rilke’s work and enquire whether, where and how he transformed it poetically.
In the first part, potential arguments against this objective are addressed. An
investigation of the legitimacy of a comparison of a Dichter and a Denker is followed by a thorough record of the state of research on ‘Rilke and Nietzsche’ so far, whilst an alternative methodological approach, a ‘reader-response-poetics’ (rather than -theory) drawing on both Nietzsche and Rilke themselves, is offered. Then, following the documentation of the new findings, the resulting scholarly desiderata this study sets out to meet are defined.
The second part completes the theoretical framework by uniting all remaining
evidence such as Rilke’s own statements and those of his contemporaries regarding his reading of Nietzsche. The role of Lou Andreas-Salomé in both men’s lives, along with Rilke’s ‘Marginalien zu Nietzsche’ found in her estate, will also be discussed. Moreover, Zarathustra is introduced in two chapters, taking into account the circumstances of both Nietzsche’s writing, and Rilke’s reading, of it.
The third and last part – structured in analogy to the first three Zarathustra books –
consists of in-depth textual analysis of representative Nietzsche passages marked by Rilke, along with interpretations of Rilkean works found to be relevant in their
respective contexts. This process, during which the main topics Rilke apparently found most arresting in Nietzsche crystallized almost automatically, has ultimately also brought to light the continuity of Rilke’s reception of Nietzsche throughout his literary career.

This paper offers an integrated typology for the classification of personifications in discourse, based on existing methods for linguistic metaphor identification such as MIP (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) and MIPVU (Steen et al., 2010). The psychological relevance of the proposed typology is explored in an empirical
study that examines the recognition of personifications in fiction by non-expert readers. A selection of structural properties of personifications is discussed and predictions are formulated regarding which values of which variables are deemed to boost the recognition of personifications. The results suggest that the
different types of personification differ in recognizability and that their recognition may be more strongly determined by inherent properties (such as conventionality) than by external factors (such as the presence of a prime). Though the results cannot be unambiguously interpreted, they do indicate some tendencies
in the behaviour of non-expert readers and their perceptions of the forms and functions of personification in fiction.

There has been a great deal of uproar about Darwinian approaches in literary scholarship. Statements range from enthusiastic prophecies of a new paradigm for literary studies to acrimonious scoldings of reductionism. Believing that the major challenge is first to find good questions to which evolutionary psychology might provide us with good answers, I outline and critically assess different veins of argumentation as revealed in recent contributions to the field. As an alternative to some simplistic mimeticism in present Literary Darwinism, I put forward the idea of evolutionary psychology as a heuristic theory that serves to resolve defined problems in interpretation and literary theory.

This book offers fresh readings of the Gospel of Philip (NHC II.3) and the Exegesis on the Soul (NHC II.6) from new theoretical and historical perspectives. Eschewing the category of “Gnosticism” and challenging common categorisations, the book analyses the preserved Coptic texts as coherent Christian compositions contemporary with the production and use of the Nag Hammadi Codices. A methodological framework based on Cognitive Poetics is outlined and applied to illuminate how the texts present a soteriology of transformation through religious rituals and practices using complex conceptual and intertextual blends with important polemical and paraenetic functions. The analysis highlights the use of metaphors and allusions in (re-)interpretations of authoritative Scripture, ritual and dogma. Complete Coptic texts and translations are included.

Although current discussions of linguistic relativity tend to concen- trate on obligatory grammatical categories, the original architects of this school of thought, including Boas, Sapir, and Whorf, all argued strongly for the role of vocabulary in guiding human perception, especially in the culturally charged situations of everyday life. Taking the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk languages of northwestern California as a case study, this article demonstrates the im- portance of vocabulary in conveying pervasive cultural ideologies, such as those associated with mythology, religion, folklore, or geographical systems of spatial orientation.Although current discussions of linguistic relativity tend to concen- trate on obligatory grammatical categories, the original architects of this school of thought, including Boas, Sapir, and Whorf, all argued strongly for the role of vocabulary in guiding human perception, especially in the culturally charged situations of everyday life. Taking the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk languages of northwestern California as a case study, this article demonstrates the im- portance of vocabulary in conveying pervasive cultural ideologies, such as those associated with mythology, religion, folklore, or geographical systems of spatial orientation.

Recent investigations into emotion and discourse processing using the Text World Theory framework (Werth, 1999) regard psychological projection as a key factor in readers’ emotional responses to discourse (Gavins, 2007; Lahey, 2005; Stockwell, 2009). The present article examines psychological projection in relation to an extract from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and the comments made by a group of readers discussing the novel. As a result, a more nuanced account of psychological projection is proposed, which highlights the multiple perspectives which readers are able to monitor and adopt during text-world construction. Whilst previous work in Text World Theory has focused upon psychological projection in relation to a single text-world role (such as the addressee, for example), here it is argued that multiple projections in relation to a range of text-world enactors are of fundamental significance in our emotional responses to narrative. Such multiple projections, it is proposed, should receive greater consideration in accounts of our emotional experience of literary discourse.

Presentation of a research project, grounded on perspectives and concepts mainly from reception theory (Iser, Jauß, Stierle), cultural sociology (Bourdieu’s habitus), and translation theory (Lefevere, Pym). The procect aims at contributing to the know-ledge and development of theoretical and practical approaches to literary fiction in aca-demic teaching situations. The issue is how to teach the art of reading the literary text as literature—as a literary artefact and an aesthetic process – and not primarily as an il-lustration of cultural habits and ideolgies, or as didactic mediation (as is too often the case). The project starts from the idea of the literary text as a double-sided phenomenon, wavering between recognition and estrangement—which is what the title of the project alludes to. On the one hand the literary text appeals to the reader’s competence of recognizing the repertoire of the text within the current culture. Examples of ’recognizable’ elements are plot-types, motifs, generic variations, and so on. But on the other hand, what is specifically literary in the literary text is precisely the existence of estranging devices that prevent immediate recognition and desautomatize habitual ways of reading. Literary estrangement means breaking the reader’s horizon of expectations and obstructing the reading, but it also means pointing to a new frame of reference and alternative ways of seeing and understanding the text. Thus, literary estrangement both prevents spontaneous reading and promotes an attentive reading with new dimensions of perceiving, and also of reflecting on the text and the problematics displayed in it. Thus, basic assumptions are that literary texts are cultural meeting places, and that literature, as a cultural tool, desautomatizes language (Sklovskij, Lotman). This means that literature, in breaking the flow of habitual unreflective reading, also provides unique opportunities to introduce the reader to unfamiliar values, ideas and modes of thinking. Literature in this way mediates human experience from different times, cultures and societies. The project studies teaching situations in academic contexts, textual strategies in hand-books, anthologies, and literary works, and reading strategies – actual encounters between student-readers and texts. Thus, how to improve an attentive and reflective way of reading in academic teaching will be investigated. To that end textual strategies will be studied from a theoretical point of view as well as and academic student’s actual reception of them in practical teaching situations. Also how translations of literary texts affect the literary strategies will be studied, especially the interaction between devices of recognition / estrangement and their actual reception. Finally, translation in itself exemplifies a reception of the literary text translated: it is in itself a reader’s response to that text.

The article explores the basic tenets of anti-essentialism in genre theory, focusing on Alastair Fowler's Kinds of Literature but discussing also other theoretical approaches. The writer adopts an anti-essentialist, hermeneutic approach to literary genres and applies the approach to the analysis of Nordic nineteenth-century daughter novels, including works by Fredrika Bremer, Camilla Collett, Juhani Aho and Minna Canth.

"There has always been an interest in how to interpret metaphorical proverbs. Recent research in cognitive science can be utilized to effectively diagram proverb meaning, especially defining the base meaning and evaluating he proverb meaning as incorporated into a larger context such as a story (i.e. blended meaning). In this article Gilles auconnier and Mark Turner's model of conceptual blending (Fauconnier 2002) is applied and expanded to describe he process of metaphorical proverb meaning. The proverb under consideration serves as the conclusion to a Kazakh folktale. Through narrative analysis of the folktale the spaces of the proverb map can be filled in, and the base and blended meaning elucidated. Finally, there is a discussion of relevance as the process of incorporating cultural inferences which complete the meaning of the proverb both as base meaning and as blended meaning.
"

Although the Ancients placed great emphasis on delivery, modern rhetorical scholars often overlook the oral dimensions of speech. Speech is powerful because of its ability to elicit a somatic response. Scholars in other disciplines are examining how speech affects the body, but contemporary rhetorical scholarship often overlooks their findings. This essay reviews scholarship both inside and outside of communication studies that demonstrates the interplay between rhetoric and orality, paying particular attention to how scientific scholarship can inform our conception of ethos and pathos. By drawing together scientific and rhetorical scholarship, scholars in all disciplines can gain a greater understanding of how speech affects the mind, body, and soul.

Essays collected between 1994 and 2004, exploring the emerging field of literary Darwinism and working toward a comprehensive model of human nature; critiquing poststructuralism, traditional humanism, ecocriticism, cognitive rhetoric, Stephen Jay Gould, and narrow-school evolutionary psychology; offering examples of practical criticism of nineteenth-century British novels and novels depicting paleolithic life.

The present paper considers how prosodic analysis can assist in the investigation of the status of Tiberian Hebrew (TH) constituents  with respect to their position on the grammatical-lexical cline.  The introduction presents one area of research where such an  analysis is necessary, namely, the presentation of TH in a typological format. The first section summarizes such a format, presented in detail in Anstey (2005). The second section then demonstrates how the Masoretic diacritics, as encoded in the Westminster Hebrew Morphology Database 4.0 (Groves et al. 2003), can be interpreted as an indication of the degree of morphophonological fusion of constituents, which is one variable affecting diagnosis of grammaticalization vis-à-vis lexicalization. Constituents are divided into three ranges of fusion and candidates for grammatical constituents are suggested. Based on this analysis, suggestions are provided for a more fine-grained subdivision of TH parts-of-speech.  The conclusion suggests areas for further research.

""Biological approaches to the relationship of literature and emotions
[English abstract of the German article]

A heuristics based on evolutionary psychology is put forward here as a possible way of describing the emotional effects of literature. An approach based solely on textual analysis can examine only the representation of emotions in a text, but the approach of literary psychology allows for a correlation of text structure and the mind of the reader and, thereby, for hypothetical statements about emotional effects of a text. Evolutionary psychology has the particular benefit of providing access to certain very fundamental mechanisms of emotional effect that are not as a rule accessible via introspection. Thus, the evolutionary theory of biology allows us to assume that there are a variety of emotional programs, the existence of which can be made plausible by referring to their adaptive function in the process of human evolution. A specific schema of stimuli can be identified as the trigger of each such emotional program, and literary texts can then be analysed in search of these schemata. When an emotional program is triggered by a textual stimulus, the effect can be described as one of dummy stimuli, since the triggering object is not as a rule identical with the object in relation to which the emotional program in question developed in the course of evolutionary history - it merely fits the same schema of stimuli.

The article begins by introducing the theory of emotions in evolutionary psychology that underlies this model of a literary 'dummy'. Central here is the distinction between the trigger mechanism and the program that controls the course of an emotion. The trigger mechanism identifies the triggering stimulus, initiates early physical reactions, and activates a specific strategy of cognitive processing. The program controlling the course of an emotion, on the other hand, performs a second appraisal of the situation and configures a person's behaviour on the basis of the options available in the emotional program. This decoupling of stimulus and behavioural response by means of the intervening program explains, among other things, why we respond to fictional stimuli in a way similar to, but not identical with how we respond to real stimuli: fictions trigger the same emotions as those that present themselves in real situations, but they take a different course because the situational feedback is of a different kind. In normal circumstances, we will 'feel' in a similar fashion (we will register the same physical and cognitive activations) but act differently (more specifically, not at all in most cases).

The second part of the article outlines the adaptive significance of imaginary worlds for the ontogenetic development of the brain. In order to build up innate mechanisms during individual development, keep them ready to function, and adapt them to the cultural environment present in any given case, reasons must be found for activating them repeatedly (and, as far as possible, in situations where pragmatic factors are not involved). Literature would seem particularly well suited to activating a range of cognitive and emotional adaptations and thereby ingraining them ontogenetically. Evolution motivates us to recognize such opportunities by what Karl Bühler has called "function pleasure": the secretion of pleasure hormones that accompanies our actions ensures that we voluntarily accept this kind of superficially pointless ('playful') activity and pursue it with the necessary persistence. Evolutionary psychology thus provides a concept of function pleasure that explains why we enjoy the emotional effect of works of art and why apparently paradoxical phenomena such as the 'joy of grief' or 'agreeable horror' can occur.

Taking the aesthetics of landscape as an example, the third part of the article presents evolved motivational systems (i.e. systems of aesthetic preference) with an evolutionary basis and illustrates them using the locus amoenus and locus terribilis of literature. From our ancestors' need to identify habitats that were safe and rich in food, we can derive a series of preferences for scenic features that once corresponded to these requirements but are today felt to be pleasing or beautiful for no apparent reason. Stimuli such as lush vegetation, a good field of view, and shelter from the elements are approach stimuli, or "appetitive" stimuli (Jeffrey A. Gray) that guide our behaviour without our having to think about it. It follows that their use in literature, as in the topos of the pastoral idyll, should lead to a positive emotional response. Conversely, a set of repulsive, or "aversive" stimuli can be identified; they bring forth behaviour of fearful avoidance or restraint. In literature, such stimuli are familiar above all from the motifs associated with the sublime.

The fourth section of the article uses two pieces of work in film studies to describe two particular emotional responses together with the textual stimuli that correspond to them. The response of crying (the emotion of 'sentiment') is traced back to the "capitulation response" (Helmuth Plessner) as an innate response of helplessness and submissiveness in the face of the overwhelming. Crying is thus linked to resultative plot events in narrative texts. Whenever a plot reaches a point at which there is nothing left to hope or to fear, with the reader forced to accept that a given state (the death of a character, a proven virtue, and the like) is definitive, the sentimental reaction of crying is triggered on the basis of a structural isomorphism between the experiential unit and the evolutionarily grounded trigger schemata of the capitulatory reaction.

Likewise, the reaction of laughter is then presented as a domain-specific psychological response program. Laughter as a signal of willingness to cooperate may have left a particular mark on human evolution in situations of mild social tension - situations in which social cohesion was threatened but could still be restored. Accordingly, it is possible to identify as suitable stimuli for the reaction of laughter those textual structures that, by means of 'nonsevere faults', present obstacles to understanding and thereby create a nonseriously stressful communication situation for the reader. In addition, the speaking entity of literature that is in this respect a humorous one functions as an appetitive social stimulus.

Finally, the fifth section of the article deals with the social attractiveness of fictive characters and the speaking entities of literature. Here, a hierarchical typology of four levels of attachment is put forward; it allows well-known phenomena of quasi-social reader behaviour to be grouped together and linked to particular psychological mechanisms. The ability to recognize psychologically imbued beings can be seen as the lowest level of attachment; it can be traced back to our ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects, and determines what things our empathetic activity applies to in a literary text. The second level of attachment is called 'partiality' and refers to the recognition of a member of one's own group (of one's own community of values and the like; or, in our evolutionary past, of one's own clan). It determines who the reader's heart beats with. The familiarity with fictive people that constitutes friendship can be introduced as a third level of attachment. This familiarity explains the reader's bonds of affection towards the fiction, and, as one of their consequences, the pain of separation felt on finishing a book. The fourth level of attachment involves not so much ties of friendship as love for a particular individual. Forms of expression typical of love can be observed primarily in fan cults (for example, the Werther cult).""

Using Kierkegaard’s early journals and his dissertation On the Concept of Irony as a terminological starting point, this article analyzes Kierkegaard’s less explicit assessment of irony and humour in "Either-Or". As two opposite forms of self-reflection, irony and humour are manifestations of the individual’s incommensurability with actuality (the concrete relationships of responsibility within the finite world). Rejecting the speculative view that religion is immediacy and associating religion with an awareness of the hollowness of the conventional world (but also the reconciliation with finitude), Either-or is able to insert irony and humour as border categories between the existential positions of the aesthetic, ethic and religious. An implicit answer to contemporary Danish theories of irony and humour, this pseudonymous discussion of the two categories also takes up two major problems of Kierkegaard’s early writings: nihilism and romanticism.