Abstracts and short bios
Abstracts and short bios
Little is left to tell? Rethinking voice in narrative
Voice is a polysemous word that can stand for a grammatical mood, narrating instance and angle, an actual sound produced and perceived or the phenomenological account of inner speech. In narratology, voice has been studied along with perspective as categories that ascertain who speaks vs. who sees and thus help establish the position of the narrating instance with respect to that is narrated.
However, voice can be the topic of the narrative itself: a text can describe voice cues and how characters perceive and emotionally respond to these voices. Also, expressive voice descriptions in literature may trigger similar emotional responses to those obtained in actual discourse. This encourages further research in the field of audionarratology, particularly in how audiobooks and print narratives are received and emotionally processed.
In this presentation, I would like to sketch out and discuss possibilities of research on voice in narrative. Drawing on work on audionarratology and multimodality, I would like to discuss how voice cues are construed so as to engender an aural way of worldmaking and induce an emotional response.
Ana Margarida Abrantes studied German and English at the Universities of Aveiro, Essen and Innsbruck. She completed her MA in cognitive linguistics in 2001 and received her PhD in German language and literature from the Catholic University of Portugal in 2008. As a post-doc scholar supported by the Portuguese research foundation FCT, she was a visiting researcher at the Department of Cognitive Science of Case Western Reserve University (USA) between 2007 and 2009. She is currently senior researcher at the Center for Communication and Culture at the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon and a Professor of languages and culture studies at the same university. Her research interests include cognitive literary studies, cognitive semiotics, cognitive culture studies and German language and literature.
A 'tale-bearer' and other textual strategies for the representation of mind
in Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru (1975)
Even within the context of experimental literature of the 1970s, Brooke-Rose’s novel Thru is often described as “the most challenging book”, or as a text with an “incomparable metatextual complexity and […] conceptual excess” (Darlinghton 2015). This paper argues that there is a mainly unexplored aspect of Brooke-Rose’s literary writing experiments – their new type of “utterly other discourse”. I draw upon cognitive narratology approaches (Fludernik 1996, Caracciolo 2014) and theories of enactive cognition (Gallagher 2017, Hutto and Myin 2012, 2017) to consider strategies of meaning-making that shape the story-world of Thru. I suggest that representation of fictional mental functioning since modernism strives for more closeness to the reality as experienced and propose a new reading of the novel as a narration of experiences that tries to reconcile avant-garde writing practices with the understanding of how mind might work. I consider how in the Brooke-Rose’s novel these two tendencies converge. I utilize insights from the distributed and extended cognition framework that understands the activity of mind to be the interaction of brains, bodies and the world (e.g. Clark and Chalmers 1998) and suggest there can be several ways of reading the novel. Firstly, on the story level as an intertextual interpretation invoking re-reading. Secondly, on the discursive level as an almost abstract writing. Thirdly, as representations of experiences, an active coupling between fragments of discourses in which mind, body and environments participate in the sense-making. The paper takes its cue from research in processes of perception and cognition that might shed light on narrative strategies employed by experimental fictions.
Daria Baryshnikova currently works on her PhD thesis as a doctoral candidate at RWTH Aachen University (Germany), investigating the specificity of cut-up-narratives within different cultural contexts. Her focus is on the representation of mind and mind processes in fragmented prose. In 2005, she defended her candidate dissertation in the field of history of culture. Since then, she worked as a lecturer at the Russian State University for the Humanities and the Witten/Herdecke University (Germany), and earlier as an editor at the art-magazine “Iskusstvo”; and as a research assistant at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Moscow).
The suspicious reader: a neurohermeneutical approach to literature
Within the heuristic frame of Cognitive Literary Studies, we have been developing a neurohermeneutical approach to literaturesince 2017. Its purpose is to investigate the literary text as a unique cognitive dynamic device with multilayered meanings and a metaphorical undercurrent, both responsive to the functioning system of the human mind.
Such an abundance and ambiguity of meanings is conveyed by words, textual strategies, structures, techniques, which prompt the reader to subjectively undergo the process of interpretation by constructing embodied emotional mental representations.
This view implies considering the literary text as an anthropological device, which cognitively guides the imaginative, emotional and experiential responses of the reader by means of the author’s linguistic, stylistic and rhetoric choices, mirroring cognitive, emotional, and imaginative human processes.
Literary neurohermeneutics, far from being just a ‘hyphen hermeneutics’ or reductive stance, explains the act of reading literature as a complex emergent bodily, emotional, cognitive, phenomenon, focusing on ambiguities, and blurriness in meaning construction, considered as an intrinsic creative and embodied activity, leading also to ethical judgement.
Grazia Pulvirenti
Full Professor of German Studies and Neurohermeneutics at the Department of Humanities (University of Catania), she was Visiting Professor at the University Vienna (2002-2003). She is currently Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute London, Honorary Fellow at the UCL London. She is President of the Lamberto Puggelli Foundation Onlus.
Her research is mainly focused on: the intersection of literature and neurocognitive sciences, Visual culture, Austrian literature, 18th century German literature.
Renata Gambino
Associate professor of German Literature at the University of Catania, she is Director of the Interdisciplinary Research center NEW-HUMS - Neurocognitive and Humanities Studies; she is responsible for the Catania unit of the Erasmus+ project ENID-TEACH devoted to the research about the digital pedagogy at university level. She was MC member in the international COST project E-READ inquiring into reading processes. Her main areas of research include Goethezeit, the German fairy tale tradition, travel literature, literary anthropology, visual culture and cognitive poetics.
Since 2011 Gambino and Pulvirenti are co-founder of the digital platform of interdisciplinary studies about neurocognitive sciences and humanities www.neurohumanitiestudies.eu.
Since 2014, they are organizers of the International NeuroHumanities Dialogue, fostering the linkage between humanities, neurosciences and cognitive sciences.
Among her last co-authored publications: “‘Reading against the Grain’. For a Neurohermenutics of Suspicion.“ Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 2021; “‘The boundless Realm where all Form lies’. Representing Imagination at the Crossway between literary and neurocognitive Studies,” Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 2020.
In press is their book: Literature from the inside of the mind. A Neurohermenetic Approach.
The monstrification of the reader: a cognitivist enquiry into the receprion of monstrous characters in fantastic fiction
The recent research on embodied simulation, immersion and empathy has demonstrated the close relationship between sensorimotor experience and the experience of reading fiction. The study of neural mirroring mechanisms has caused a great advance in the description of the embodied experience of reading and has provided a solid basis to understand the bodily aspects of empathy. These sets of theories grounding present cognitive research into literature have been used to analyze literary techniques that can prompt a higher resonance in the reader’s body, such as interior monologue, first-person narration and the direct account of the experience provided by the senses to the bodies of the characters featuring fictional literature. Following these observations, this paper posits a series of controversies that arise when the protagonists of the narratives are characters having monstrous physical qualities, such as strange limbs or parts in their bodies, or characters that undergo a process of metamorphosis that brings a new body to them. They hypothesis presented here is that the depiction and activation of unusual and strange parts in the characters’ monstrous bodies make the reader face their own monstrosity for their sensorimotor resonance with this kind of bodies [AMMA1] is produced without previous experience. In this sense, it can be said that the excerpts of fantastic literature to be analysed in this presentation enlarge the cognitive possibilities of the readers’ body, which would run in parallel with the epistemic (and merely intellectual) challenge that fantastic literature entails.
Benito García-Valero is Lecturer at the University of Alicante. His actual research fields are the relations between literature and science and fantastic literature. He has recently edited the last issue of Brumal (2022), a journal specialised in fantastic literature. These research interests led him to design interdisciplinary practices like his Laboratory of Theory of Literature ‘Body and Symbol’ (www.laboratoriocuerpoysimbolo.com), an innovative space where new methodological approaches to teaching literary theory are explored. His last book, La naturaleza de la luz, la magia literaria (2020) connects quantum theory with fantastic literature.
Embodiment without body.
On the cognitive cultural status of what we call literature
Addressing Cognitive Poetics under the heading "Mind, Body, Culture" seems to be a contradiction. How does poetics, poetry, or literature link to the body? Isn´t that what a certain Western tradition calls literature defined by its distance to any bodily experience? Isn´t reading a book a kind of stepping out of the body and engaging exclusively with the mind? The paper will try to argue the opposite: that literature as embodiment without body resides in three distinct bodies: words, language and the human. In its threefold embodiment, literature is a cultural technique which is not a natural given - other then the body as such. Considering literature as a cultural technique allows to recognize its specific cognitive function which is necessarily not just a transversal human feature but a specific cultural achievement. The reading and translation of some short literary examples and a theory of cognitive simulation will set up the argument.
Peter Hanenberg, Professor for German and Culture Studies at Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon, Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation and Director of CADOS, Católica Doctoral School. He was guest lecturer at the Universities of Bamberg (Germany), Galway (Ireland) and Minho (Portugal), from 2006 to 2010 President of the Portuguese Association for German Studies, 2007-2013 coordinator of the research group on Translating Europe across the Ages, 2014-2017 coordinator of the research group on Culture, Translation and Cognition and 2017-2020 coordinator of the research group Cognition and Translatability at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture (CECC) at Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP), Lisbon and between 2012 and 2020 director of the Center. Between 2016 and 2019 he served as a Vice-dean of the Faculty for Human Sciences at UCP. His research focuses on the relation between Cognition and Culture and on the literary representation of the Idea of Europe.
More than a cool body - towards an externalist cognitive poetics
Cognitive poetics is grounded in the theory of embodied cognition (Stockwell 2009), extending the concept of cognition to mental processes beyond thinking (Tsur 2008). However, works in cognitive poetics have not emphasized the human interaction with the ecological environment and the non-human entities in it (cf. Gibson 1986) enough and the integration of the theory of 4E cognition into the analyses is still yet to be carried out, although theorists have already encountered the paradigm of extended cognition (Stockwell 2009, Freeman 2014, Moses 2018). Our presentation proposes a theoretical reorientation of cognitive poetics (inspired by phenomenology and) based on an externalist theory of cognition (previous works include Cook 2018 and Simon 2020, cf. Pennycook 2018). The adaptation of the concepts of coupling, performative coproduction, affordance and situatedness sheds new light on poetry as a way of cognition (Vandaele‒Brône 2009), paving the way towards an externalist cognitive poetics. To actualise this, we investigate the poems of Ted Hughes, Wallace Stevens and Stéphane Mallarmé (the first two analysed by Stockwell 2002 and Milne 2014 respectively), highlighting their poetic effects from the vantage point of externalism (Manzotti 2011). Finally, our findings are generalised with the help of the Motivation and Sedimentation Model (Stampoulidis‒Bolognesi‒Zlatev 2019, Devylder‒Zlatev 2020). Our main proposal is that by representing (and initiating) situated cognition poetry questions the sedimented structures of cognition indirectly while it also facilitates reconceptualising the relationship between the mind and the environment.
References:
Cook, Amy 2018. 4E Cognition and the Humanities. In: Newen, Albert ‒ de Bruin, Leon ‒ Gallagher, Shaun (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 875‒890.
Devylder, Simon – Zlatev, Jordan. 2020. Cutting and Breaking Metaphors of the Self and the Motivation and Sedimentation Model. In: Baicchi, Annalisa (ed.): Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 253–281
Freeman, Margaret H. 2014. Cognitive poetics. In: Burke, Michael (ed.): The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. London, New York: Routledge, 313‒328.
Gibson, James J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Psychology Press.
Manzotti, Riccardo 2011. Varieties of externalism and aesthetics. In: Manzotti, Riccardo (ed.): Situated Aesthetics. Art beyond the skin. Exeter: Imprint Academic. 17–50.
Milne, Drew 2014 [2001]. In Memory of the Pterodactyl: The Limits of Lyric Humanism. In: Jackson, Virginia – Prins, Yopie (eds.): The Lyric Theory Reader. A Critical Anthology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. 361–367.
Moses, Omri 2018. Poetry and the Environmentally Extended Mind. New Literary History 49: 309‒335.
Pennycook, Alastair 2018. Posthumanist Applied Linguistics. London, New York: Routledge.
Simon, Gábor 2020. Pathetic Fallacy as a Cognitive Fossil – Modelling Modern Elegiac Scenes in the Framework of 4E Cognition. In: Hegyi, Pál (ed.): Tradition and Innovation in Literature. From Antiquity to the Present. Budapest: Eötvös University Press. 168–183.
Stampoulidis, Georgios – Bolognesi, Marianna – Zlatev, Jordan. 2019. A cognitive semiotic exploration of metaphors in Greek street art. Cognitive Semiotics, 12 (1). https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2019-2008
Stockwell, Peter 2002. Cognitive poetics. An introduction. London, New York: Routledge.
Stockwell, Peter 2009. Texture. A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University.
Tsur, Reuven 2008. Deixis in Literature. What isn’t Cognitive Poetics? Pragmatics and Cognition 16 (1): 119–150.
Vandaele, Jeroen − Brône, Geert 2009. Cognitive poetics. A critical introduction. In: Brône, Geert − Vandaele, Jeroen (eds.): Cognitive poetics. Goals, gains and gaps. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1−29.
Róbert Kopcsák is a PhD student at the Faculty of Humanities at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest. He is a member of the DiAGram Research Group in Functional Linguistics at Eötvös Loránd University. His PhD thesis is focused on the analysis of clickbait articles based on an externalist theory of cognition. His main research interest includes cognitive poetics and critical theory.
Poetic structures and emotion effects in the light of Reuven Tsur's Cognitive Poetics.
Some examples
In my presentation, I will discuss questions pertaining to the analysis of poetry and its emotional effects in the light of Reuven Tsur’s cognitive poetics. Tsur’s approach emphasizes “that poetic texts do not only have meanings or convey thoughts, but also display emotional qualities perceived by the reader” (Tsur 2003, 36–37) and he also has devoted his whole career to the investigation of the effects of poetic structures at the various strata of poetic texts. Tsur (e.g. 2008) emphasizes that he uses cognitive theories to illuminate literary works: this implies that “they should provide means to make meaningful distinctions between, or within, specific works of literature.” Particularly interesting are his ideas on convergent and divergent styles of poetry that make use of different language-based affordances: the former is marked by clear-cut shapes, definite directions, clear contrasts, and intellectual control; the latter by blurred shapes, lack of directions, blurred contrasts, and emotional qualities.
By bringing in select examples of recent poetry, I try to apply Tsur’s ideas to new areas. Tsur himself focuses mainly on romantic (including symbolist) and metaphysical poetry and the discussions on metre and rhythm do not directly pertain to modernist and contemporary poetry.
Pirjo Lyytikäinen is professor emerita of Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki. She has researched Finnish literature and its connection to international currents, genre traditions and philosophical trends. Her recent research focuses on cognitive poetics and the emotional effects conveyed by literary texts. On these issues she has published articles in Finnish and in English, e.g. “How to Study Emotion Effects in Literature: Written Emotions in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher”,” in Writing Emotions 2017 and “Interpretation and Emotion Effects in Literature: Reading contemporary experimental poetry,” in Translation and Interpretation 2022.
State of the art: The phenomenological and neural impacts of reader response 'task sets'
on poetic language processing
Beneath the ‘method wars’ reignited by Felski’s The Limits of Critique, there is a question that has been largely unaddressed in literary studies, but which cognitive literary approaches are well-equipped to answer: What impact does anticipating different types of literary response have on the experience of a literary work? Do response forms like literary critique materially change the phenomenological experience of a literary work and the neural mechanisms behind that experience?
While not yet able to venture definitive answers, I propose instead a ‘state of the art’, laying out the multi-year interdisciplinary research programme currently being undertaken at the University of Edinburgh by myself and psychologist Dan Mirman. Beginning with an overview of the psychological research that informs our investigation, I will focus on ‘embodied cognition’ theories of language, ‘task set’ effects, and their relation to formalist, reader response, and postcritical literary theory. I will present findings from the series of experiments our team have recently conducted regarding the subjective experience and neural processing of literary metaphors. These studies serve as a baseline for our ongoing neuroimaging experiments using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and subjective ratings to begin to unpick the ways that processing literary metaphors is impacted by the anticipation of different writing outputs, outputs framed either in the language and metaphors typical of literary critical analysis, or in open-ended, exploratory, co- creative language adopted from my own creative practices. I will conclude by gesturing to the challenges and questions facing our research, inviting the audience help shape this still-nascent exploration.
Daniel Mirman is Senior Lecturer in Psychology of Language at University of Edinburgh. His expertise is in the cognitive and neural basis of language processing and language impairments. His current research focuses on (1) functional communication in people with language disorders after brain injury (post-stroke aphasia), (2) how semantic knowledge is organised in the mind and how it is accessed during language processing, and (3) the cognitive and neural processes that underlie the experience of aesthetic pleasure from figurative language such as metaphors and poetry.
Reading for translation: between Cognitive Poetics and Translation Studies
The aim of this paper is to explore the theoretical and pedagogical implications of Cognitive Poetics to Translation Training. In particular, we propose to analyze reading as a practice that, according to Susan Bassnett and the European Master’s of Translation 2022 Competence Framework (issued by the European Commission), contributes to the development of translational proficiency. To that end, this research venture will combine theoretical reflection and empirical research conducted in a classroom environment. Our theoretical framework will revolve around concepts that are used in both Cognitive Poetics and Translation Studies, namely poetics (Even Zohar, Lefevere, Stockwell), reading (Bassnett, Brandt, Scott) and context (Hatim and Mason, Stockwell). As for the empirical analysis, it will draw on our experience as teachers of literary translation (French and German) in the context of the bachelor’s degree in Applied Foreign Languages at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. Taking into account that the student cohort in this curricular unit is composed of readers who are not specifically skilled in Literary Studies, our syllabus tends to privilege the training of students in reading works of both translated and non-translated literature as well as their paratexts. All in all, this paper will shed light onto shared theoretical groundings between Cognitive Poetics and Translation Studies in an attempt to put forward new pedagogical approaches that can help train students’ abilities to read literary texts for the practice of translation.
References:
Bassnett, S. (1980, 1991, 2002/2013) Translation Studies, London and New York: Routledge.
Brandt, P. A. (2015) ‘On Translation – a Semio-cognitive Approach’, in. P. Hanenberg (ed.) A New Visibility: On Culture, Translation and Cognition, Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, pp. 32-47.
Even-Zohar, I. (1990) Polysystem Studies, Tel Aviv: Porter Institute of Poetics and Semiotics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, special issue of Poetics Today, 11:1.
Hatim, B. and I. Mason (1990) Discourse and the Translator, London and New York: Longman.
Lefevere, A. (1985) ‘Why waste our time on rewrites?: The trouble with interpretation and the role of rewriting in an alternative paradigm’, in T. Hermans (ed.) The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, Beckenham: Croom Helm, pp. 215-43.
Scott, C. (2006) ‘Translating the literary: genetic criticism, text theory and poetry’, in S. Bassnett and P. Bush (eds.) The Translator as Writer, London: Continuum, pp. 106-118.
Stockwell, P. (2002) Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge.
Joana Moura is Invited Assistant Professor of languages and translation at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon and a member of the Literature and the Global Contemporary group at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture at the same institution. Recent publications include: Nunes, Ariadne, Moura, Joana & Pinto, Marta Pacheco (eds) (2021) Genetic Translation Studies: Conflict and Collaboration in Liminal Spaces with Bloomsbury and Faria, Dominique, Pinto, Marta Pacheco & Moura, Joana (eds) (2023). Reframing Translators, Translators as Reframers, Routledge.
Rita Bueno Maia is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Translation in the School of Human Sciences at the Catholic University of Portugal and a member of the Cognition and Translatability group at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture. She has recently co-authored Indirect Translation Explained (Routledge, 2019) with Hanna Pięta and Esther Torres-Simón and is currently co-editing an issue of Revista de Estudos Literários on the topic “Rewriting and Memory”. She is co-coordinator of the international research network IndirecTrans and has worked as a literary translator for the theatre.
Social reading and resilience
Empirical research into reading suggests correlations between theory of mind/empathy capabilities and the reading of serious literature. (Kidd and Castano 2013, Mar 2011) There is on the one hand controversy about the empirical research in terms of a more general replication crisis in experimental psychology and, on the other hand, there is need for more empirical research. Increasing theory of mind/empathy can help increasing individual and collective resilience. In this paper, the connection beween social reading and social cognition will be looked at in terms of current resilience research and the potential of shared reading as practised by The Reader community to increase resilience via social cognitive abilities.
Pascal NicklasPascal is research group leader working on empirical aesthetics of literature in the University Medical Centre and the Gutenberg Institute for World Literature and Written Media of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. After his PhD at the Goethe-University of Frankfurt, he did his habilitation in Comparative Literature and English Literature at Leipzig University. He has taught at Vienna, Berlin, Potsdam and Bayreuth before coming to Mainz in 2010. His latest books were:
Adaptation (Oxford University Press): Volume 11, Issue 2, August 2018. Special Issue: Adaptation and Perception, Edited by Pascal Nicklas and Sibylle Baumbach.
Literatur und Musik im Vergleich der Künste. Herausgegeben von Pascal Nicklas. De Gruyter 2019.
More than a cool body - towards an externalist cognitive poetics
Oral poetry improvisation is a demanding cognitive task that depends on multi-level processes of constraints -- verbal structures and rules, performance space, audience, patterns of bodily movement, music and musical instruments. In traditions of improvisation such as freestyle rap and brazilian repente, improvisers have competitive dialogues attempting to surprise the opponent and the audience following strict constraints of time, theme, meter, and rhyme. Improvisers need to control, monitor, and evaluate the results of their own improvisations in real-time, during and while improvising. In this work, we focus on the metacognitive process that occurs while an improviser competes. Metacognition ("thinking about thinking") depends on representations and metarepresentations, which are usually treated as internal knowledge structures, rather than as external-oriented processes. Here we explore how multimodal patterns of embodied diagrammatic activity (not internal symbolic-based processes) can provide an accurate description of the self-monitoring, evaluation and application of corrective responses needed for the improvisational task. We hypothesize that embodied diagrams frame the task of verbal improvisation performing a functional role of offloading the cognitive costs associated with improvising. We use ELAN to analyze the co-occurrence between body movements and verbal structures (i.e. meter and rhyme patterns) of the improvised verse in freestyle rap and repente battles.
Henrique Perissinotto is a PhD Student in Communication and Society at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil. He researches cognitive externalism, Peircean semiotics and cognitive poetics. Ongoing research focuses on how the manipulation of embodied diagrams are used in artistic improvisational tasks as a way to facilitate - or even enable - real-time monitoring, control and evaluation of the improvisation.
A cognitive approach to mono-modal and cross-modal expressions of movement
in children's books poetics
Children’s books are multimodally designed objects: texts and images are integrated within the layout of a page to convey the meaning of the narrative. The paper pays attention to how the resources of texts and images mirror each other as for the description (in words) and the de- piction (in images) of movement. The use of cognitive concepts helps decoding how we make sense of them mono- and cross-modally. Two books of the “Petterson and Findus”-series by the Swedish author and illustrator Sven Nordqvist represent a case in point as they offer rela- tively long texts and particularly detailed images.
In the first step, pages with dynamic narrative situations are selected, e.g., when a rapid or slow movement is described, and characters are depicted sequentially or simultaneously. In the next step, an analysis of texts and images both each on their own and in their interplay follows. The analysis clarifies that in texts the movement of characters is described with verbs and adjectives of speed and is expressed sequentially. In images, the movement is depicted sequentially with connecting motion-lines, or in repeated sequences. In the latter case, the movement is either separated with visual boundaries, which conveys successive movement, or without visual boundaries, which shows unrealistic simultaneous action. The paper applies the concepts of blending, compression, and its counterpart decompression to show how verbal and visual input is blended in our minds. The layout turns out to play its own role in the com- pression and decompression of movement linking texts and images.
Madeleine Pikowsky is a Master student of Linguistics and Comparative Literature at University of Cologne. In her Bachelor thesis, she has explored the multimodality of children’s literature (text, image, and layout) from a cognitive perspective.
In 2021, she became part of the Research Master program of the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne. In 2022, she attended the Summer School of the Institute on Multimodality in Bielefeld, where she gave a poster presentation about her work and gained insights for her Master thesis – developing a cognitive reading of the intersection of multimo- dality and children’s literature further.
Architecture and its metaphors: the poetic form as experience
While language can be understood as expression of the phenomenal unity between the world and man, Mexican poet Octavio Paz claims that it is the poetic form that has always explained both mythical and physical phenomena of the human experience. In fact, he writes, “[t]here are no peoples without poetry; there are some without prose” (Paz 1973, 133). Following the idea of a primordial connection between poetry and understanding, this paper aims to explore the possibility of expanding the poetic narrative model to other human cognitive experiences, and the architectural one in particular. If each group of words or word alone is in itself a metaphor (i.e. it stands in representation of something else), this relational structure between signifier and signified at the core of poetics is translated in architectural terms into the relationship between container and contained space, built materiality and its in between. It is through the poetic scheme that Alberto Pérez-Gómez understands the phenomenological experience of spaces and their fruition, claiming that “[a]rchitecture is not an experience that words translate later. Like the poem itself, it is its figure as presence, which constitutes the means and end of the experience” (2006, 8). In this way, space as an object becomes part of its subject: this is the limit and only possibility of knowledge. This contribution intends to apply the poetic scheme to the understanding of the architectural experience through the analysis of common points, which include embodied consciousness, recollection, rhythmic repetition and linguistic mediation.
Bibliography
Paz, Octavio. (1956) 1973. The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem. The Poetic Revelation. Poetry and History. Translated by Ruth L. C. Simms. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. 2006. “The Space of Architecture: Meaning as presence and representation”. Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, edited by Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez-Gómez. San Francisco: William Stout Publishers.
Federico Rudari is a doctoral researcher in culture studies at The Lisbon Consortium. He focuses on the phenomenological understanding of contemporary cultural production and its perception by individuals and collective audiences. Following his interest in artistic practices and the relationship between research and civil society, he has contributed to different exhibitions and projects around Europe. He worked in research and project management at the Cities Programme of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, addressing issues of participation, sustainable practices, and housing. He was a fellow of Uncivilised Paradigms, the first iteration of the project DE.a.RE – Deconstruct and Rebuild promoted and developed by BJCEM and co-funded by the European Union.
Narrative Disorientation in Flood Fiction
Based on psychological notions of disorientation (cf. Berrios), I introduce the concept of narrative disorientation which occurs in and around literary narratives. This includes not only the depiction of characters’ disorientation but extends to formal devices, such as stream of consciousness and fragmentation, which restrict orientation within a narrative and require cognitive flexibility. In order to illustrate this concept, I turn to flood fictions, novels which use the flood as a primary means of depicting climate change (cf. Bracke), because these narratives present themselves as particularly open to engagement with disorientation. On one level, there is a distinct interplay between the flood as conceptual metaphor for more abstract feelings of disorientation and the pervasiveness of strategies which elicit narrative disorientation specifically in flood fiction. Moreover, since climate change floods so rapidly disrupt and shift familiar environments, they cause notable moments of extreme and instantaneous disorientation which flood narratives then simultaneously depict and respond to. As a result of engaging with narrative disorientation, these fictions elicit the cognitive flexibility necessary to adopt new thought patterns and confront contemporary uncertainties which are an inevitable constituent of today’s climate changed reality.
Berrios, G. E. “Disorientation States and Psychiatry.” Comprehensive Psychiatry, vol. 23, no. 5, 1982, pp. 479-491. Science Direct, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010440X82901614?via%3Dihub. Accessed 3 Jan 2023.
Bracke, Astrid. “Flooded Futures: The Representation of the Anthropocene in Twenty-first- century British Flood Fictions.” Critique, vol. 60, no. 3, 2019, pp. 1-11. Taylor &Francis Online, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00111619.2019.1570911. Accessed 3 Jan 2023.
Selina-Marie Scholz works as a research fellow in the department of English literatures and cultures at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. She is currently writing her dissertation on the topic of narrative disorientation in climate fiction, predominantly drawing on cognitive literary studies and econarratology.
A cognitive approach to Rite Dove’s re-use of Greek myths.
This paper presents a cognitive study of the re-use of Greek myth in Rita Dove’s works. It places itself at the intersection of several disciplines including the study of ancient Greek and literature; cognitive linguistics; cognitive literary studies; finally, black classicism. The research is based on recent cognitive theories applied to literature and linguistic analysis, demonstrating how a cognitive linguistic approach, such as the conceptual metaphor model, can shed new light on the relationship between experiences and characters of the modern and urban world, and features of ancient myth and literature. Moreover, the Blending theory is used to investigate the creative process involved in the reception and interpretation of ancient myth and literature as well as in the production of literary texts.
I discuss specific literary works that rely upon explicit intertextuality and clear similarities concerning individual characters, plots, specific dramaturgy, and events. I analyse metaphorical mappings in passages from Dove’s works The Darker Face of the Earth and Mother Love. In The Darker Face of the Earth, the implacable will of Zeus becomes a metaphor for the white power structure and the Ancient Greek notion of fate is used to conceptualize the institution of slavery. In Mother Love, the myth of Demeter and Persephone is blended with modern drama, black motherhood, and American women’s folklore. Persephone’s fall is mapped into the life of an American abroad student. Erotic curiosity and loving relations are constructed on the up/down image schema, and therefore, they are metaphorically represented as a descent into Hell.
I am Giulia Sperduti, and I am an Italian Ph.D. student, working in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Cologne. My research interests are Cognitive Literary studies, Cognitive poetics, and the reception of classics in African-American Literature. My thesis focuses on the literary works of Rita Dove and her re-elaboration of Greek myths, using a Cognitive approach, specifically CMT and the Blending theory. Along with the research work, I have been organizing, together with my supervisor, the event, which will be held in May this year, where we will be honored to host Rita Dove at our university.
Wor(l)ds: cognitive poetics and practice-research
This paper positions itself on the critical-creative boundary and draws upon aspects of cognitive poetics – the principled study of what happens when ‘mind’ meets ‘word’ and builds ‘worlds’ in response – to explore how engagement with the field might benefit creative practice-researchers working within HE. After defining the term ‘practice-research’ and exploring some of the debates surrounding that methodology at present, the paper considers the implications of cognitive poetic approaches for the ‘mechanics’ of creative practice, rather than in terms of ‘post-event’ analysis from the perspective of the stylistician or literary critic, as a way of contributing to these debates. It is in providing a principled and rigorous account of, for example, the way readers engage with texts or audiences with performance that cognitive poetics has much to offer the creative practioner, particularly in terms of energising processes of principled reflection and exegesis, which will often – always? - accompany practice undertaken in an academic context. The paper will consider cognitive-poetic frameworks including Text World Theory, embodiment, mind-modelling, writingandreading (Oately 2004) and the notion of world-building in general.
Jeremy Scott
I work on creative writing from a stylistics/cognitive poetics perspective at the University of Kent (Canterbury, England). I am a practising writer and am currently working on three funded projects (Arts Council England and Creative Estuary) exploring creative heritage in the Thames Estuary. A second fully-revised edition of my book Creative Writing and Stylistics (Critical and Creative Approaches) will be published in early 2023. Further details of my practice and research can be found on my website: www.jeremy-scott.co.uk
"So much depends upon distance" -
Virginia Woolf and Empathy Beyond the Physical Gap
With her intense focus on the workings of the mind, Virginia Woolf experiments with mental spaces and their potential to facilitate empathic experience beyond the physical gap: her works frequently portray the experience of ‘thinking and feeling with’ others through mental movement in imagined spaces without the presence of a flesh and blood empathee.
To the present day, the diversity of empathy research in (cognitive) literary studies exhibits a full range of different approaches to the concept of ‘thinking and feeling with’ others, but the connection between empathy, movement, and spatial structures has, so far, not been investigated. I aim to introduce the concept of ‘empathic space’ to literary studies by showing that the dynamic interdependence between characters’ bodily and mental movement, narrative space, and empathy generates so-called ‘empathic spaces’ that help readers to connect with fictional characters.
Drawing on Woolf’s short story “The Mark on the Wall” (1917), in which a sedentary narrator is bodily anchored in the material space of the storyworld while engaging in intensive mental movement, as well as on her novel To the Lighthouse (1927), which explores the possibility of empathic experience via non-human objects, I aim to show that the author’s fiction enables empathy even for characters who are at a distance by generating ‘empathic spaces’ that allow for proximity through mental movement. Thus, Woolf’s work reflects the way that narratives can evoke empathy by overcoming distance through readers’ imagination/mental movement.
Andrea Talmann is a PhD candidate in the department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Stuttgart. Her thesis project focuses on the concept of ‘empathic space’ in modernist narratives with the aim to establish a connection between spatial concepts, corporeal phenomena, and empathic experience. Her research interests include cognitive literary studies, emotions and empathy in literature, the link between literature and architecture, and modernist fiction with a focus on works by Henry James and Virginia Woolf. She holds a BA in English Literatures and Political Science and a master’s degree in English Literatures and Cultures from the University of Stuttgart.