Cognitive Dimensions of Achieving (and Failing) in Literature

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2010

Freeman 2 Literary critics have long been familiar with such topics as perspective, point of view, flashbacks, foreshadowing, etc. that cognitive linguists are just now exploring. One question that inevitably arises is what new insights Cognitive Linguistics provides in literary studies that literary criticism has not already discovered. The corollary, what literary criticism can contribute to cognitive linguistics, is almost always never asked (but see Brandt . In its focus on the processes of literary creation, interpretation, and evaluation, Cognitive

2002

Lingua. Language and Culture Lingua. , 2019

In this survey article, Jean-François Vernay purports to retrace the genesis of Cognitive Literary Studies and examine its potential to bring scientific insights to the study of literature. More specifically, his reflexion attempts to determine whether Cognitive Literary Studies is able to bridge “the excitement of connecting scientific principles with a love of literature”, as Peter Stockwell has it. Vernay explores the cognitive and literary intersections through which the cognitive paradigm in Literary Studies is helping to redefine the boundaries between literary and scientific knowledge, renew literary criticism and reconsider one of the defining traits of fiction. What might be dismissed as an umpteenth interdisciplinary approach may in fact hold the key to discarding blue-sky conceptions of fiction while giving teachers and book professionals a cogent and much-coveted argument for the usefulness of literature.

English Studies: The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, and Future, 2014

Sowon Park offers a concise introduction to the field of cognitive literary criticism, how it emerged, how it is defined and how it interrelates with existing criticism. Placing the development of cognitive literary criticism in a historical context, Park identifies a key issue that runs through interdisciplinary research across the divide between the 'two cultures' and across time. On the one hand, attempts to integrate scientific and literary knowledge are fraught with scientific reductions of the literary; on the other, attempts to preserve literary knowledge as a different-but-equal field of inquiry risks the complete exclusion from the hegemonic scientific discourse and a further marginalization. What constructive possibilities there are in the future in the face of such a dilemma are presented and reviewed. Gildea, Niall, Helena Goodwyn, Megan Kitching, and Helen Tyson, eds. English Studies: The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2021

The desire to understand and interpret the underlying mechanisms involved in the creation and reception of literary texts, and the influence of these mechanisms on human cognition goes back at least to Aristotle's Poetics. However, the last century has witnessed a vast variety of approaches to the understanding of literature: a plethora of theories such as feminist, post colonialist, queer and reader response theories as well as some practical ways of analysis and interpretation such as formalism, new criticism, stylistics, cognitive poetics have shown themselves at the opposite end of the continuum. Stylistics and its evolved form, cognitive poetics have been significantly influential in the understanding of the processes involved in the creation and reception of literature. Although stylistics and cognitive poetics have usually been covered under the broad heading of literary theory, it has been observed that the divergence in the ways they operate makes such claims invalid because, unlike theory, empirical evidence is at the heart of stylistics and cognitive poetics. This paper aims to provide an overview of stylistics, and cognitive poetics and illustrate how they differ from literary theory.

Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, 2016

In the review, I examine the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, a volume edited by Lisa Zunshine (2015), from the perspective of selected arguments found in the essays.

2012