New poetics in China

2016

A new study of modern Chinese poetry has been published that deserves the at‑ tention of linguists working in both the applied and theoretical fields. The focus of the book is experimental and avant‑garde literature, and as such it raises ques‑ tions that are different than the ones we are accustomed to considering in the field of poetics. This review essay considers proposals for understanding poetic ability and sensibility from the point of view of applications of cognitive science.

Chinese Language and Discourse, 2015

A new study of modern Chinese poetry has been published that deserves the attention of linguists working in both the applied and theoretical fields. The focus of the book is experimental and avant-garde literature, and as such it raises questions that are different than the ones we are accustomed to considering in the field of poetics. This review essay considers proposals for understanding poetic ability and sensibility from the point of view of applications of cognitive science.

Pragmatics and Cognition 17.2: 450-457, 2009

Journal of Pragmatics, 1999

This article discusses the effectiveness of cognitive poetic frameworks like figure-ground, mental space, and prototype which are implied in and evidenced by traditional literary interpretations in the Chinese critical tradition. With examples from Shijing, it points out the relevance between cognitive poetic methods and Chinese traditional literary interpretation such as Pingdian. Combining modern cognitive poetic tools with huge resources of Chinese traditional interpretation, there may exist a new way of interpreting Chinese classical poetry and a hope of integrating indigenous poetic discourses with universal poetic principles.

The author argues that Chinese characters have shaped Chinese poetic art not through their ideographic form but through their monosyllabic sound. Specifically, the pauses in a Chinese poetic line tend to be determined by sound patterns. Since monosyllabic sound is nearly always endowed with meaning, sound patterns tend to be semantic groupings as well. These groupings of meaning, in turn, determine syntax and, by extension, the organization of an entire poem. Given the semantic denseness of Chinese poetry, this structure is crucial to the overall meaning of a poem, to how we read or understand it. So what we have is something like sound 0 prosodic pattern 0 semantic grouping 0 syntax 0 structure. A multilayered integration of all these elements seems to represent the gestalt of Chinese poetic form, with monosyllabic sound as its foundation. At its best, this gestalt engenders a dynamic interplay of all its elements, from which poetic vision emerges.

Studia Metrica et Poetica, 2014

In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 1821-1866. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, eds. Oxford University Press, 2007

This paper explores how cognitive poetics may serve as a bridge between literary studies and linguistics. Because cognitive poetics studies the cognitive processes that constrain literary response and poetic structure, it provides a theoretical cognitive basis for literary intuition. At the same time, by exploring the iconic functions that create literature as the semblance of felt life, cognitive poetics contributes to our understanding of the embodied mind. The effect of what I call "poetic iconicity" is to create sensations, feelings, and images in language that enable the mind to encounter them as phenomenally real. The paper draws upon Susanne K. Langer's ( , 1967 theory of art, Charles Sanders Peirce's (1955[1940]) theory of the sign, Ellen Spolsky's (1993) theory of literature bridging the gap caused by the mind's modularity, Elaine Scarry's (1999) theory of images in the mind, and the cognitive-semiotic notions of blending, deixis, negative polarity, and schema theory to show how Robert Frost manipulates the fictive and factive planes in his poem, "Mending Wall," to create a poetic iconicity of feeling that leads literary critics to their various interpretations of the poem. It concludes by arguing that both literary studies and cognitive linguistics are complementary ways of showing how a literary text extends natural language use in order to bridge the gap between mind and world.

Pragmatics & Cognition, 2009

Reviewed by Margaret H. Freeman (Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts) Cognitive Poetics as an emerging field of study is a fairly recent development in studies of cognition and literature. As such, it has a somewhat complex history. Reuven Tsur first used the term, he tells us, in 1980, and the first edition of this book, Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (1992), outlined the beginnings of a theoretical approach based solidly in a wide range of interdisciplinary fields, including Gestalt psychology, Russian Formalism, New Criticism, literary criticism in general, linguistics, and neuroscience. Meanwhile, a separate strand was developing in the mid 1990's. Quite unaware at that time of Tsur's use of the term, I began to use "cognitive poetics" to describe my own interdisciplinary approach to poetry, which followed Tabakowska's (1993) seminal application of cognitive linguistics to literature in her book, Cognitive Linguistics and Poetics of Translation, to which I added theories of aesthetics, phenomenology, and semiotics (Freeman 1998,2007). The theoretical strand arising specifically from conceptual metaphor studies in Cognitive Linguistics gave rise to Lakoff and Turner's (1989) More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, a cognitive linguistic emphasis which culminated in Stockwell's (2002) textbook, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, with its companion volume by Gavins and Steen (2003), Cognitive Poetics in Practice, and a volume in the Applications of Cognitive Linguistics series, edited by Geert Brone and Jeroen Vandaele, called Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains, and Gaps (Mouton de Gruyter 2009). The Cognitive Linguistics approach has thus tended to dominate as a description of the term. Meanwhile, more general approaches to literature from the field of cognitive science (e.g., Spolsky 1993; Hogan 2003) were developing, along with the ongoing stylistics approaches of the mid-twentieth century which took a so-called "cognitive turn" with the rise of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics (see for example, Semino and Culpeper 2002). The question arises whether Cognitive Poetics in its current state is a general movement, a clearly delineated field of study, or, as Tsur's title suggests, a theory. Given this background, the republication of Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics in an expanded and updated edition is most welcome and timely in the effort to

1996

In this essay I provide a comprehensive cognitive view of rhyme, one of the most powerful resources of poetic language. Readers and critics have strong intuitions on the matter of rhyme but find it difficult systematically to address its manifestations and the construction ...