Ellen Spolsky

Bar-Ilan University, English Literature and Linguistics, Emerita

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Ellen Spolsky, Professor Emerita, taught literary theory and early modern English literature in the English Department at Bar-Ilan University where she was the Director of the Lechter Institute for Literary Research. Among the founding scholars of the field of Cognitive Literary Study, her interests center on the cognitive/ epistemological aspects of interpretation and on the embodiment of knowing in language texts and in pictures, and on how these are manifest in their cultural/ historical contexts.

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Papers by Ellen Spolsky

Building a Literate Mind

Word vs Image, 2007

There was no Raphael in England. As Lucy Gent bluntly puts it, “most Englishmen were not interest... more There was no Raphael in England. As Lucy Gent bluntly puts it, “most Englishmen were not interested in paying out for pictures” (1981: 2). But the suspicion of pictures is also a recognition of their power. Exploring the political implications of the royal authorization of the English Bible, David Scott Kastan notes that even as learning one’s religion through the words of scripture is thereby approved and encouraged, the power of a picture is acknowledged by the prominent portrait of the King himself on the Bible’s frontispiece. In Chapter 3, the limitations of even the best religious painting were explored, and it was thus acknowledged that the reformers were not wrong to notice that pictures could mislead. By the end of this chapter it should be clear why faith in the revolutionary power of Bible reading might also have been reasonably mitigated.

Archetypes Embodied, Then and Now

Poetics Today, Jun 1, 2017

With Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation to Mary and the 1984 and 1991 Terminator movies as... more With Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation to Mary and the 1984 and 1991 Terminator movies as examples, this essay notes a common interest in the availability of help from a superhuman source. It argues that the yearning for access to a powerful hybridity, a cooperative mixing, a productive grotesque, is an archetype. However, with the support of some recent hypotheses in evolutionary anthropology and biology, the article refurbishes the term archetype for reuse, recognizing that it signals a painful cognitive failure. The cognitive perspective allows us to understand how our brains not only organize but also reorganize , as the world turns, not only our literary experience but also our ethical and political thinking. Artists and poets return to old stories and reconsider old images not because they are, as Northrop Frye considered them, successfully integrated clusters, but because they are not. By acknowledging their many threads and their recombinatory possibilities, we recognize them as affordances whose recurrence arises from their frustrating resistance to untangling. Artists continue to search for a more pleasing, a more satisfying, a more cooperative and thereby more life-sustaining hybridity between the human and the nonhuman, be that divine or machine. They return repeatedly to reuse archetypes not because they are satisfying but because they might yet be.

Ellen Spolsky

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