Poetry in the Mind is the first book-length cognitive analysis focused entirely on 21st century poetic texts and their conceptual effects. Addressing central poetic notions or features of poetic ...style from an innovative cognitive perspective, the book sheds new light on established ideas about poetic creativity and language.
Combining cognitive and evolutionary research with traditional humanist methods, Nancy Easterlin here demonstrates how a biocultural perspective in theory and criticism opens up new possibilities for ...literary interpretation.
Easterlin maintains that the goal of literary interpretation is still of central intellectual and social value. Taking an open yet judicious approach, she argues, however, that literary interpretation stands to gain dramatically from a fair-minded and creative application of cognitive and evolutionary research. This work does just that, expounding a biocultural method that charts a middle course between overly reductive approaches to literature and traditionalists who see the sciences as a threat to the humanities.
Easterlin applies her biocultural method to four major subfields within literary studies: new historicism, ecocriticism, cognitive approaches, and evolutionary approaches. After a thorough review of each subfield, she reconsiders it in light of relevant research in cognitive and evolutionary psychology and provides a textual analysis of literary works from the romantic era to the present, including William Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and the Lucy poems, Mary Robinson’s “Old Barnard,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Raymond Carver’s “I Could See the Smallest Things.”
A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation offers a fresh and reasoned approach to literary studies that at once preserves the central importance that interpretation plays in the humanities and embraces the exciting developments of the cognitive sciences.
A storyteller's craft can often be judged by how convincingly the narrative captures the identity and personality of its characters. In this book, the characters who take center stage are "strange" ...first-person narrators: they are fascinating because of how they are at odds with what the reader would wish or expect to hear-while remaining reassuringly familiar in voice, interactions, and conversations. Combining literary analysis with research in cognitive and social psychology, Marco Caracciolo focuses on readers' encounters with the "strange" narrators of ten contemporary novels, including Bret Easton Ellis'sAmerican Psycho, Haruki Murakami'sHard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Mark Haddon'sThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Caracciolo explores readers' responses to narrators who suffer from neurocognitive or developmental disorders, who are mentally disturbed due to multiple personality disorder or psychopathy, whose consciousness is split between two parallel dimensions or is disembodied, who are animals, or who lose their sanity.A foray into current work on reception, reader-response, cognitive literary study, and narratology,Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fictionillustrates why any encounter with a fictional text is a complex negotiation of interlaced feelings, thoughts, experiences, and interpretations.
Many people share the intuition that by turning to works of literature something can be learned about the world. One way to explain the epistemic access to the world that fictional literature ...provides is by comparing it to thought experiments. Both – thought experiments and works of fiction – might be seen as imaginative exercises which help to find out what would or could happen if certain conditions were met. This comparison of fictional literature with thought experiments provides the point of departure for the contributions in our volume. It contributes to the discussion of an approach that has quite recently entered the field of the philosophy of literature.
We live in other people's heads: avidly, reluctantly, consciously, unaware, mistakenly, and inescapably. Our social life is a constant negotiation among what we think we know about each other's ...thoughts and feelings, what we want each other to think we know, and what we would dearly love to know but don't.
Cognitive scientists have a special term for the evolved cognitive adaptation that makes us attribute mental states to other people through observation of their body language; they call it theory of mind.
Getting Inside Your Head uses research in theory of mind to look at movies, musicals, novels, classic Chinese opera, stand-up comedy, mock-documentaries, photography, and reality television. It follows Mr. Darcy as he tries to conceal his anger (Pride and Prejudice), Tyler Durden as he lectures a stranger at gunpoint (Fight Club), and Ingrid Bergman as she fakes interest in horse races (Notorious).
Written in reader-friendly language, this book exemplifies the new interdisciplinary field of cognitive cultural studies, demonstrating that collaboration between cognitive science and cultural studies is
both exciting and productive.
This book proposes an extension of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008) towards a cognitive discourse grammar, through the unique environment that literary stylistic application offers. ...Drawing upon contemporary research in cognitive stylistics (Text World Theory, deixis and mind-modelling, amongst others), the volume scales up central Cognitive Grammar concepts (such as construal, grounding, the reference point model and action chains) in order to explore the attenuation of experience - and how it is simulated - in literary reading. In particular, it considers a range of contemporary texts by Neil Gaiman, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster. This application builds upon previous work that adopts Cognitive Grammar for literary analysis and provides the first extended account of Cognitive Grammar in contemporary fiction.
Stories and Minds Bernaerts, Lars; de Geest, Dirk; Herman, Luc ...
06/2013
eBook
How do narratives draw on our memory capacity? How is our attention guided when we are reading a literary narrative? What kind of empathy is triggered by intercultural novels? A cast of international ...scholars explores these and other questions from an interdisciplinary perspective inStories and Minds, a collection of essays that discusses cutting-edge research in the field of cognitive narrative studies. Recent findings in the philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology, among other disciplines, are integrated in fresh theoretical perspectives and illustrated with accompanying analyses of literary fiction.
Pursuing such topics as narrative gaps, mental simulation in reading, theory of mind, and folk psychology, these essays address fundamental questions about the role of cognitive processes in literary narratives and in narrative comprehension.Stories and Mindsreveals the rich possibilities for research along the nexus of narrative and mind.
PDF
