Cognitive Poetics

An Introduction

Peter Stockwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000760866
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

A pioneering text in its first edition, this revised publication of Cognitive Poetics offers a rigorous and principled approach to literary reading and analysis.

The second edition of this seminal text features:

• updated theory, frameworks, and examples throughout, including new explanations of literary meaning, the power of reading, literary force, and emotion;

• extended examples of literary texts from Old English to contemporary literature, covering genres including religious, realist, romantic, science fictional, and surrealist texts, and encompassing poetry, prose, and drama;

• new chapters on the mind-modelling of character, the building of text-worlds, the feeling of immersion and ambience, and the resonant power of emotion in literature;

• fully updated and accessible accounts of Cognitive Grammar, deictic shifts, prototypicality, conceptual framing, and metaphor in literary reading.

Encouraging the reader to adopt a fresh approach to understanding literature and literary analyses, each chapter introduces a different framework within cognitive poetics and relates it to a literary text. Accessibly written and reader-focused, the book invites further explorations either individually or within a classroom setting.

This thoroughly revised edition of Cognitive Poetics includes an expanded further reading section and updated explorations and discussion points, making it essential reading for students on literary theory and stylistics courses, as well as a fundamental tool for those studying critical theory, linguistics, and literary studies.

1

INTRODUCTION

Body, mind, and literature

Reading literature

Cognitive poetics is all about reading literature. That sentence looks simple to the point of seeming trivial. It could even be seen simply as a close repetition, since here cognition is to do with the mental processes involved in reading, and poetics concerns the craft of literature. But in fact such a plain statement is really where we need to start. In order to understand exactly what this book is about, we will first need to be clear about what we mean by ‘reading’ and what we mean by ‘literature’. The answers to these questions will take us to the heart of the most important issues facing us as individual, conscious, emotional, intelligent, critical people, sharing with each other a facility for language and perception. In the course of exploring these ideas, we will not be satisfied with asking important and difficult questions; we will also try to provide either answers or at least directions towards solutions.

What happens when you read a literary text? The answer to this depends on why the question is being asked. Physically, you are holding a book or are in front of a screen and your eyes are focusing, moving, flicking back and forth, and you might be smiling, or pressing your lips together, or beginning to cry. Neurologically, you are converting visual stimuli into parsed sentences, neurons are firing, mental work is being activated as different parts of the brain connect up your memories of words and concepts, anticipating and processing the meanings and feelings associated with them. Culturally and socially, you are accessing the thoughts of someone who is probably distant from you usually in space and often in time, engaging with a period of their thinking and adjusting your own sense of its significance as you imagine other people like you reading the same text. Aesthetically, you might be immersing yourself in an experience to the point that the mundane world around you has dissolved into non-awareness, and the fictional world in focus surrounds you vividly and intensely. A casual observer looking at you reading will, in all likelihood, see nothing at all: a motionless person looking at a book, inattentive to your surroundings, apparently doing nothing. All of the sensory, neurological, aesthetic, social, and cultural connections are permutating invisibly, inside your body and mind.

We do all this whenever we read, whether the object being read is literary or some other form of writing. Although a literary work is an artifice, reading literature is a natural process, a natural object of exploration. As explorers, how can we talk about these intertwined, invisible, subconscious, rich, and complex natural phenomena? It comes down to a plain and incontrovertible truth: literature is made of language, so the best way of understanding it is to draw on our current best understanding of language and mind. In our era, that means cognitive linguistics.

By language, I mean the entire involving experience of a social individual interacting with texts and utterances. Language is neither simply what is on the page nor what is buried in some imagined deep and unprovable structure inside your mind. Language is what happens when you encounter linguistic strings, including your process of engaging with them, deriving meaning and feeling, attaching or detaching yourself from your idea of the cultural origins of the object in front of you, its significance and its effect on you over time – altogether that is what language is. It is real: it is not an abstraction. It is experiential; it is not restricted to syntax or formal patterns. There is no difference between text and context because context and situation and experience are integral parts of what language is.

By literature, I mean not the literary text on the page, but the notion of the literary work as engaged by a reader. Literature literally does not exist until it is read. So literature is not an object in isolation but is an object that necessarily involves an activating consciousness. Literature is not separate from other forms of language. It is special only because we regard it as such culturally, not because of any formal property that it has. The cognitive and perceptual and aesthetic and experiential values that we derive from literature are based on exactly the same capacities we have in relation to the language system and our lives as a whole. Literary works might do interesting and compelling things with those capacities, but just as there is no ‘language module’ in the brain, so there is no essential component of literariness that is peculiar and unique to the literary domain. This means that if we can understand language in general, we can start to account properly for specifically literary reading.

In order to consider what happens in literary reading, we need both a literary text and a process of reading, which of course requires a reader. Here is part of a literary text:

We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,

Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,

Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,

Made him our pattern to live and to die!

Since you have just read these four lines, we also have a reading, which is what is in your mind right now. Our first option is just to leave what you think of this passage in your mind without any further discussion. In truth, this is what mainly happens when the vast majority of people read the vast majority of literary texts: they read them for themselves, and are happy not to discuss them, nor work out the craft in their construction, nor intellectualise them, nor fit their understanding into a theoretical framework out loud for other people to read or hear. This is ‘reading’ as it happens most of the time, ‘reading’ as an object in the world. This is reading as an entirely natural and primary phenomenon.

We are all readers like this. But this book is about reading literature. We can read literature any time we want to, but when we want to think about what we are doing when we read, when we want to reflect on it and understand it, then we are not simply reading – we are engaged in a science of reading. We are being critical, reflective, analytical, engaging in a type of science. The object of investigation of this science is not the artifice of the literary text alone, nor the reader alone, but the more natural interanimating process of reading when one is engaged with the other. This is a different thing altogether from the simple and primary activity of reading. Literary texts are artefacts, but ‘readings’ are natural objects.

In scientific terms, readings are the data through which we can generalise patterns and principles across readers and texts. However, understanding what we do when we engage in reading literature need not be an abstract or highly and purely theoretical exercise. Though a clear and precise understanding is the aim of any scientific exploration, the means of discovery involves considering a great deal of messy and perhaps contradictory data. For us, that means that we need to attend to the detail and quality of many different readings. Particular readings are important for us; they are not simply the means to an abstract end. Indeed, it is in the detail of readings that all the interest and fascination lies.

So what did you make of those four lines of literature above? What are they about? What do they mean? What do they do for you? How do you hear them? What do you understand by them? Of course, these questions are all aspects of the same question, asked from slightly different perspectives. Perhaps you have read the lines before, and are wondering why they have been reproduced here? You might know the author, or the source, or the historical background. You might recognise the lines as being in a particular form that you can give a name to, or you might be able to describe the pattern in the sounds of the lines when read aloud, using a technical term that you know.

All of these questions are traditionally to do with context, and this is a crucial notion for cognitive poetics. The questions above in the context of this book are different from what they would mean if I were to ask you while we were sitting together on a bench in a park, or standing as tourists in front of them written on a gravestone somewhere, or even if we were in a university or college seminar. In the last case, we would both understand that some of the questions and their answers would be appropriate in the situation, and some would not. For example, if you were to tell me that the lines sounded to you like a eulogy for a dead hero, that would be something I would probably develop in a seminar discussion. If you told me, honestly, that the lines reminded you of a much-loved family cat that had recently died, both you and I and probably the rest of the people in the seminar would regard that as irrelevant and a bit eccentric. But why in fact should that be the case? After all, the four lines might mean exactly that to you, and you could certainly make a case for that reading based on the textual evidence given here. Why are some responses appropriate and acceptable, and others are regarded as personal and therefore irrelevant in a seminar context? Why does it seem so easy for me to equate personal responses with institutional irrelevance here?

What you do with the lines depends very much on the situation in which you find yourself with the text. There is nothing universal or unchanging about the meaning of these lines: indeed, there are as many meanings as there are different settings for different readings. But the status that is attached to each reading also depends on context and the assumptions that underlie the question being asked. It is usual when discussing literature within an institutional setting to apply assumptions that belong to the discipline of literary study. One of these assumptions is that idiosyncratic and personal meanings are not worth discussing with anyone else. However, at your cat’s shoebox funeral in your garden, you might feel it appropriate to read these lines at a small ceremony attended by your like-minded friends and family.

These institutional decisions of appropriateness and status apply within all the different branches of literary studies. For example, if we take a view of literary reading in which history is foremost, then I could assert that your opinion that the lines are a eulogy for a dead hero is simply wrong. In the historical moment of the poem’s construction, the lines belong to a poem called ‘The Lost Leader’, written by Robert Browning in 1845, about William Wordsworth’s shift with age from revolutionary radical to arch-conservative. Though the poem draws on elegy and eulogy, Wordsworth is still alive at the time of writing to be accused of betrayal by Browning:

Just for a handful of silver he left us,

Just for a riband to stick in his coat.

And Wordsworth’s change of heart means that there will be

Never glad confident morning again!

In this approach from literary history, readings are acceptable or not, depending on their conformity to these accepted historical points. A reading that claimed the poem was about Milton, or Coleridge, would simply be wrong. It would be as wrong as claiming that the poem was about a deceased cat, or about Napoleon, or about a modern politician.

Alternatively, the poem, and these lines in particular, can be used within a purely textual approach as an example of a particular pattern in metrics. The lines create a dactylic tetrameter (four repetitions of one accented and two unaccented syllables) in the first line – go back and read it out loud to hear this. Then the subsequent lines introduce minor irregularities to disrupt the pattern: omitting the last two unaccented syllables at the end of lines two and four in order to place heavy emphasis on ‘eye’ and ‘die’; or twice omitting one of the unaccented syllables in the third line to create a heavy pause in the middle of the line. The emphases of the word-meaning can be created and confirmed by these metrical patterns, and illustrate the expert craftsmanship in the poem.

The textual and historical approaches can even be brought together, if you recognise that hexameter (called ‘Alexandrine’) was a prominent pattern in heroic classical verse such as the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Then you might read Browning’s disruptions of the dactyl and reduction of the repetitions from six to four in the line as offering a debasement of the heroic that parallels the fall of Wordsworth as a hero-figure. This makes the metrical composition a matter of iconic meaning.

What about a personal and idiosyncratic reading? I must admit that I only learnt about the historical construction of the poem several years after I first read it. My first contact was when I heard these lines quoted several decades ago, out of context, in a political analysis programme on the BBC after the 1992 British election. At that time, the Labour Party had been widely expected to win, rejuvenated and modernised by its then leader, Neil Kinnock, after three election defeats. They lost, and Kinnock immediately resigned. The lines from ‘The Lost Leader’, quoted in a new context, took on a different and poignant meaning for a Labour supporter like me. In this selective reading, Kinnock was the lost leader not, like Wordsworth, due to choosing betrayal, but because of electoral misfortune. ‘Never glad confident morning again’ was to apply to the next five years of right-wing government. From this angle, the poem had been redeployed and used as a historical echo for a modern politician. That line in particular has had a strong political resonance and re-use. It was quoted in the Profumo debate in the British Parliament in 1963 to refer to the downfall of the prime minister, Harold Macmillan. It was quoted to describe the disillusionment of some with the young UK prime minister Tony Blair after 2005. It was quoted to capture the change of fortunes of the financial system after the credit crash of 2008.

From a historical perspective, one that privileges the original context of production, these readings of the lines are misquotations, a selective use that is just plain wrong. However, it is one of the many uses to which this poem must have been put over the years. It seems to me that it is important to reconnect the different readings of literary texts between the academic and the everyday, and to recognise that readings have status not objectively but relative to their circumstances. When I ask what the poem means, I am really asking what the poem does, which is another way of asking what it is being used for. Meaning, then, is what literature does. Meaning is usage and effect.

The key to understanding issues of literary value, status, and meaning lies in being able to have a clear view of text and context, circumstances and uses, knowledge, beliefs, and emotions – the entire situation of a literary encounter. It is not simply a matter of its authorial provenance and historical setting; this is the narrow sliver of context that much current literary scholarship has carved out to trap itself in. Cognitive poetics offers us a means of accounting for a contextual situation and setting that includes but is not restricted to the historical. It has a linguistic dimension which means we can engage in detailed and precise textual analysis of style and literary craft. It offers a means of describing and delineating different types of knowledge, belief, and feeling in a systematic way, and a model of how to connect these matters of circumstance and use to the language of the literature. In short, cognitive poetics takes context seriously. Furthermore, it has a broad view of context that encompasses both social and personal circumstances.

Founding principles of cognitive poetics

The foundations of cognitive poetics obviously lie most directly in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, together forming a large part of the field of cognitive science. The basic insight behind these disciplines is in realising that forms of expression and forms of conscious perception are bound, more closely than was previously realised, in our biological circumstances. Most simply, we think in the forms that we do and we say things in the ways that we do because we are all roughly human-sized containers of air and liquid with our main receptors at the top of our bodies. We get warm when we get angry; we feel alert standing up and relaxed lying down; we understand simple physical cause and effect in terms of objects and motion in our physical world. From these basic conditions of being human, we have a mental capacity for extending such concepts into more abstract domains. So, for example, being ‘furious’ or ‘blowing your top’ are non-literal extensions of heating up with anger; in general in many expressions, good is up and bad is down; we pick up, grasp, turn over, and look at an idea even though we know that an idea is not really an actual material object. There are many more aspects of language and thought that are dependent on such projections, as we will see throughout this book.

Our minds are embodied in this way, not just figuratively but also literally, finally clearing away the mind-body distinction of much philosophy, most famously expressed by René Descartes. The notion of embodiment affects every part of language. It means that all of our experiences, knowledge, beliefs, and wishes are involved in and expressible only through patterns of language that have their roots in our material existence. The fact that we share most of the factors of existence (requiring food, having a heat-regulation system, seeing in the visible spectrum, experiencing gravity, living in three dimensions under a sun that transits in a day, and so on) accounts for many of the similarities in language across humanity. The fact that some communities have different factors of existence (such as men’s and women’s different reproductive functions, for example, or different levels of technology, environment, or lifestyle around the world) can also account for habitual differences in expression. Cognitive poetics offers a unified explanation of both individual interpretations as well as interpretations that are shared by a group, community or culture. Embodiment in language can be understood not simply in our own individual form but in terms of an extended embodied cognition, in which the human conditions of other people near me or held in my mind are also part of my conscious experience and articulation. Embodied c...