Abstract Some theorists on literary interpretation have suggested a connection between Monroe C. Beardsley’s anti-intentionalism and hypothetical intentionalism based on an implied author. However, a full exploration has never been attempted. I undertake this task in this paper. A close reading of Beardsley reveals that he assumes something very similar to the implied author in interpretation. I distinguish five types of fictional works in terms of their narrative mode and show that my claim stands in at least four of the five types. The significance of my argument lies in exposing the above version of authorism in anti-intentionalism. Beardsley is generally perceived as advocating the irrelevance of authorial intention to literary interpretation. The common interpretation of his theory is that work-meaning is generated by linguistic conventions, with intention playing no role in meaning-determination. All the interpreter needs is knowledge of public, linguistic conventions in order to recover textual meaning. Nevertheless, when dealing with the problem of interpretation, Beardsley explicitly talks about attributing textual meaning to a fictional speaker. Although he does not elaborate on the nature of this speaker, clues scattered in his writings point to the striking similarity of this theoretical apparatus to an implied author. The key lies in his presumption that every fictional work must have an ultimate speaker to whom meaning inferred from the text should be attributed. This claim is almost the core of an implied author theory of interpretation. A difficulty in classifying Beardsley’s view as a version of the implied author position is that his characterization of the story’s presenter might apply better to the story’s narrator than to its implied author. To test this, I examine different types of narrative modes to see whether the fictional speaker merges with the implied author in each of these scenarios. The first factor to consider for classifying narrative modes is whether the narrator’s presence is explicit or implicit. The narrative scenario in which the narrator is implicit can be further divided into two sub-types: either the story is told from an omniscient viewpoint or centers on the experience of a third-person character. In either case, the story is not told by any of the characters in the story; rather, it is told by an implicit speaker whose words the work purports to be. It seems reasonable to identify this fictional speaker with the implied author, for both function as the subject to which textual meaning is attributed. As for the narrative mode in which the narrator is explicit, this involves first-person narratives. In these, either the narrator is reliable or unreliable. When the narrator is unreliable, a transcendental perspective is required in determining the text’s meaning, because what is said ultimately in the work is not equivalent to what is literally said by the unreliable narrator. It follows that an implicit
{"title":"Beardsley and the Implied Author","authors":"Szu-Yen Lin","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2018-0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Some theorists on literary interpretation have suggested a connection between Monroe C. Beardsley’s anti-intentionalism and hypothetical intentionalism based on an implied author. However, a full exploration has never been attempted. I undertake this task in this paper. A close reading of Beardsley reveals that he assumes something very similar to the implied author in interpretation. I distinguish five types of fictional works in terms of their narrative mode and show that my claim stands in at least four of the five types. The significance of my argument lies in exposing the above version of authorism in anti-intentionalism. Beardsley is generally perceived as advocating the irrelevance of authorial intention to literary interpretation. The common interpretation of his theory is that work-meaning is generated by linguistic conventions, with intention playing no role in meaning-determination. All the interpreter needs is knowledge of public, linguistic conventions in order to recover textual meaning. Nevertheless, when dealing with the problem of interpretation, Beardsley explicitly talks about attributing textual meaning to a fictional speaker. Although he does not elaborate on the nature of this speaker, clues scattered in his writings point to the striking similarity of this theoretical apparatus to an implied author. The key lies in his presumption that every fictional work must have an ultimate speaker to whom meaning inferred from the text should be attributed. This claim is almost the core of an implied author theory of interpretation. A difficulty in classifying Beardsley’s view as a version of the implied author position is that his characterization of the story’s presenter might apply better to the story’s narrator than to its implied author. To test this, I examine different types of narrative modes to see whether the fictional speaker merges with the implied author in each of these scenarios. The first factor to consider for classifying narrative modes is whether the narrator’s presence is explicit or implicit. The narrative scenario in which the narrator is implicit can be further divided into two sub-types: either the story is told from an omniscient viewpoint or centers on the experience of a third-person character. In either case, the story is not told by any of the characters in the story; rather, it is told by an implicit speaker whose words the work purports to be. It seems reasonable to identify this fictional speaker with the implied author, for both function as the subject to which textual meaning is attributed. As for the narrative mode in which the narrator is explicit, this involves first-person narratives. In these, either the narrator is reliable or unreliable. When the narrator is unreliable, a transcendental perspective is required in determining the text’s meaning, because what is said ultimately in the work is not equivalent to what is literally said by the unreliable narrator. It follows that an implicit ","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2018-0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66954030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In recent years, theories of rhythm have been proposed by a number of different disciplines, including historical poetics, generative metrics, cognitive literary studies, and evolutionary aesthetics. The wide range of fields indicates the transdisciplinary nature of rhythm as a phenomenon, as well as its complexity, highlighting the degree to which many of the central questions surrounding rhythm remain extraordinarily difficult even to state in terms that can traverse the disciplinary boundaries effortlessly transgressed by rhythm as a phenomenon. In particular, any theory of rhythm, whether in music, dance, sociology, or language, must grapple with two quandaries. First, the precise site of rhythm remains opaque: rhythms occur in, affect, and are produced by all of bodies, cultures, and universals (whether metaphysical or species-physiological). What is the relation between species-wide characteristic, individual body, cultural context, and the history of art making in the experience of rhythm? Second, rhythm is simultaneously a phenomenon of fixed, organizing form and one of dynamic, changing flow. How can rhythm encompass both the measurement of regular recurrences across time and the organizing of temporal phenomena as they unfold? In this article, I draw on Emile Benveniste and Henri Meschonnic to elucidate these quandaries or conflicts before turning to Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on rhythm. I argue that Nietzsche’s work with rhythm provides a historically situated model for how we might continue to take the questions and conflicts within rhythm seriously, rather than privileging an abstract and universally applicable theory of rhythm. This model is especially crucial for our own historical moment, when cultural-political emphasis on science and technology at the expense of aesthetics devalues all insights not presented in the form of countable data points or empirically testable facts. Nietzsche is, of course, one of the great critics of positivist-scientistic epistemologies, part of a long tradition questioning the naturalness of natural-scientific paradigms and alerting us to the metaphors at play even in the ›hard sciences‹. I use rhythm as one paradigmatic place to resist the importation of scientistic thought into discussions of language, literature, and culture. I show how Nietzsche’s writings on rhythm prove illuminating for contemporary understandings of rhythm because the tensions in his work are shaped by the quandaries inherent to rhythm that I have used Benveniste and Meschonnic to elaborate, namely the question of rhythm’s site as individual, cultural, or universal, and the conflict between rhythm as form and as flow. The question of the site of rhythm appears in Nietzsche’s discussions of Greek and Latin meters both in his philological works, in his aphorisms, and in his letters: on the one hand, he argues that Greek and Latin metrical and rhythmic resources are irrevocably lost to modern cultures (indicating that rh
{"title":"Towards a Philosophy of Rhythm: Nietzsche’s Conflicting Rhythms","authors":"H. Eldridge","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2018-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In recent years, theories of rhythm have been proposed by a number of different disciplines, including historical poetics, generative metrics, cognitive literary studies, and evolutionary aesthetics. The wide range of fields indicates the transdisciplinary nature of rhythm as a phenomenon, as well as its complexity, highlighting the degree to which many of the central questions surrounding rhythm remain extraordinarily difficult even to state in terms that can traverse the disciplinary boundaries effortlessly transgressed by rhythm as a phenomenon. In particular, any theory of rhythm, whether in music, dance, sociology, or language, must grapple with two quandaries. First, the precise site of rhythm remains opaque: rhythms occur in, affect, and are produced by all of bodies, cultures, and universals (whether metaphysical or species-physiological). What is the relation between species-wide characteristic, individual body, cultural context, and the history of art making in the experience of rhythm? Second, rhythm is simultaneously a phenomenon of fixed, organizing form and one of dynamic, changing flow. How can rhythm encompass both the measurement of regular recurrences across time and the organizing of temporal phenomena as they unfold? In this article, I draw on Emile Benveniste and Henri Meschonnic to elucidate these quandaries or conflicts before turning to Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on rhythm. I argue that Nietzsche’s work with rhythm provides a historically situated model for how we might continue to take the questions and conflicts within rhythm seriously, rather than privileging an abstract and universally applicable theory of rhythm. This model is especially crucial for our own historical moment, when cultural-political emphasis on science and technology at the expense of aesthetics devalues all insights not presented in the form of countable data points or empirically testable facts. Nietzsche is, of course, one of the great critics of positivist-scientistic epistemologies, part of a long tradition questioning the naturalness of natural-scientific paradigms and alerting us to the metaphors at play even in the ›hard sciences‹. I use rhythm as one paradigmatic place to resist the importation of scientistic thought into discussions of language, literature, and culture. I show how Nietzsche’s writings on rhythm prove illuminating for contemporary understandings of rhythm because the tensions in his work are shaped by the quandaries inherent to rhythm that I have used Benveniste and Meschonnic to elaborate, namely the question of rhythm’s site as individual, cultural, or universal, and the conflict between rhythm as form and as flow. The question of the site of rhythm appears in Nietzsche’s discussions of Greek and Latin meters both in his philological works, in his aphorisms, and in his letters: on the one hand, he argues that Greek and Latin metrical and rhythmic resources are irrevocably lost to modern cultures (indicating that rh","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2018-0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44611931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The narratological concept of unreliable narration is subject to constant debate. While this debate affects different kinds of problems associated with unreliability, one of the central issues concerns the application area of ›unreliable narration‹. Here, theorists discuss, for example, whether there are certain types of narrators that cannot be unreliable, whether some kinds of narrators are necessarily unreliable, or in which way other characters apart from narrators can also be unreliable. It is the first one of these questions that I am addressing in this paper: Are there types of narrators that cannot be unreliable? As I lay out in the first section of my paper, my argumentative starting point is the observation that previous contributions to the application area discussion neglect two basic theoretical distinctions that are necessary to find robust and detailed answers to the relevant questions. The first of these theoretical distinctions will be addressed in the second section of the paper. It concerns the narrative phenomena that are usually referred to as »unreliable narration«. As I will argue, these phenomena are very heterogeneous, and we must distinguish at least five basic types of unreliability whose application areas partially differ:(1) fact-related utterance unreliability: the narrator’s claims about story world facts are false or in a relevant sense incomplete,(2) fact-related cognitive unreliability: the narrator’s beliefs about story world facts are false or in a relevant sense incomplete,(3) value-related utterance unreliability: the narrator’s evaluative utterances are in conflict with a relevant value system,(4) value-related cognitive unreliability: the narrator’s evaluative opinions are in conflict with a relevant value system, and(5) value-related actional unreliability: the narrator’s actions are in conflict with a relevant value system. In the third section of the paper, I will then proceed to show that four kinds of narrator types have been conflated or confused in the application area debate:(a) heterodiegetic narrators: narrators who are not part of the narrated story world,(b) non-personal narrators: narrators of whom we know no features apart from them telling a story, or narrators whom we are not invited to picture,(c) all-knowing narrators: narrators who have complete knowledge of the story world facts, and(d) stipulating narrators: narrators who generate the story world facts by narrating them. In discussions concerning the question of whether one or more of these narrator types cannot be unreliable, some theorists seem to assume that some or all of these types are necessarily connected. I will show, however, that there are hardly any necessary connections between them. After this preparatory work, I am showing in a step-by-step analysis in section four which of these narrators types can or cannot be unreliable in which way – and why. The results are as follows: Both heterodiegetic and stipulating nar
{"title":"Unreliability and Narrator Types. On the Application Area of ›Unreliable Narration‹","authors":"Janina Jacke","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2018-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The narratological concept of unreliable narration is subject to constant debate. While this debate affects different kinds of problems associated with unreliability, one of the central issues concerns the application area of ›unreliable narration‹. Here, theorists discuss, for example, whether there are certain types of narrators that cannot be unreliable, whether some kinds of narrators are necessarily unreliable, or in which way other characters apart from narrators can also be unreliable. It is the first one of these questions that I am addressing in this paper: Are there types of narrators that cannot be unreliable? As I lay out in the first section of my paper, my argumentative starting point is the observation that previous contributions to the application area discussion neglect two basic theoretical distinctions that are necessary to find robust and detailed answers to the relevant questions. The first of these theoretical distinctions will be addressed in the second section of the paper. It concerns the narrative phenomena that are usually referred to as »unreliable narration«. As I will argue, these phenomena are very heterogeneous, and we must distinguish at least five basic types of unreliability whose application areas partially differ:(1) fact-related utterance unreliability: the narrator’s claims about story world facts are false or in a relevant sense incomplete,(2) fact-related cognitive unreliability: the narrator’s beliefs about story world facts are false or in a relevant sense incomplete,(3) value-related utterance unreliability: the narrator’s evaluative utterances are in conflict with a relevant value system,(4) value-related cognitive unreliability: the narrator’s evaluative opinions are in conflict with a relevant value system, and(5) value-related actional unreliability: the narrator’s actions are in conflict with a relevant value system. In the third section of the paper, I will then proceed to show that four kinds of narrator types have been conflated or confused in the application area debate:(a) heterodiegetic narrators: narrators who are not part of the narrated story world,(b) non-personal narrators: narrators of whom we know no features apart from them telling a story, or narrators whom we are not invited to picture,(c) all-knowing narrators: narrators who have complete knowledge of the story world facts, and(d) stipulating narrators: narrators who generate the story world facts by narrating them. In discussions concerning the question of whether one or more of these narrator types cannot be unreliable, some theorists seem to assume that some or all of these types are necessarily connected. I will show, however, that there are hardly any necessary connections between them. After this preparatory work, I am showing in a step-by-step analysis in section four which of these narrators types can or cannot be unreliable in which way – and why. The results are as follows: Both heterodiegetic and stipulating nar","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2018-0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42663502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract When we think of the cognitive sciences and literature, we usually think of bringing expertise from neuroscience to literary texts. However, interdisciplinary projects of this nature usually focus on semantic fields or narrative patterns, marginalizing the literary quality of the texts that are examined. More recently, the opportunities that come with a focus on aesthetics and poetic form have been discussed following Stockwell (2009), who has argued that we need to go beyond semantics in the field of cognitive poetics. Experiments using fMRI scanners have shown that readers’ brains ›fire up‹ holistically but that engaging with poetry and prose activates different regions of the brain (cf. Jacobs 2015). So one task of cognitive poetics is to look more closely at the aesthetic experience of literary texts. The sonnet is arguably a suitable test case for a cognitive poetics that is interested in form. After all, received wisdom has it that the sonnet abides by a rigid formal pattern: »it is a fourteen-line poem with a particular rhyme scheme and a particular mode of organizing and amplifying patterns of image and thought […] usually [rendered in] iambic pentameter« (Levin 2001, xxxvii). Accordingly, matters of form should play a crucial part when sonnets are read. At the same time, due to its »particular mode« of organisation, the sonnet is often thought to be a poetic form that is prone to cognitive processes. Helen Vendler (1997, 168) claims, for example, that Shakespeare’s Sonnets reflect »the fluidity of mental processes (exemplified in lexical and syntactic concatenation)«. And according to Raphael Lyne (2011, 198), Shakespeare’s sonnets are an »ideal place« to investigate »thinking in a cognitive rhetoric«. Following Vendler and Lyne in their focus on cognitive processes when discussing the sonnet, I will challenge simplistic notions of poetic form that – in the case of the sonnet – are limited to structural features like the fourteen-line rule. Aberrations like the sonetus retornellatus, a sixteen-line sonnet, testify that the number of lines is not a decisive formal feature for the sonnet form. The poetic form, I will argue, is indeed brought to the fore when we focus on the particular internal organisation of thought, and I will point to Shakespeare’s »Sonnet 126«, a twelve-line sonnet, in order to highlight cognitive approaches to the sonnet form. Bringing Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) to the sonnet form is thus a promising endeavour. We need to make sure, however, that CLS is mindful of rhetorical strategies and logical patterns that inform and form the sonnet. And CLS needs to take into account that mental processes and poetic form are locked into a dynamic process: form resonates with cognitive skills rooted in rhetoric and logic, and at the same time shapes those mental processes. If we accept that poetic form is not given but evolves while stimuli for cognitive processes and emotional responses are provided, research in c
当我们想到认知科学和文学时，我们通常会想到将神经科学的专业知识引入文学文本。然而，这种性质的跨学科项目通常侧重于语义领域或叙事模式，边缘化了所研究文本的文学质量。最近，关注美学和诗歌形式的机会在斯托克韦尔(2009)之后得到了讨论，他认为我们需要在认知诗学领域超越语义学。使用功能磁共振成像扫描仪的实验表明，读者的大脑会整体激活，但阅读诗歌和散文会激活大脑的不同区域(cf. Jacobs 2015)。所以认知诗学的任务之一就是更仔细地观察文学文本的审美体验。这首十四行诗可以说是对形式感兴趣的认知诗学的一个合适的测试案例。毕竟，公认的智慧是十四行诗遵循严格的形式模式:“十四行诗是一首十四行诗，具有特定的押韵方案和特定的组织模式，并扩大了图像和思想的模式[…]通常[以]五步格呈现]”(Levin 2001, xxxvii)。因此，在阅读十四行诗时，形式问题应该发挥至关重要的作用。同时，由于其“特殊的组织模式”，十四行诗通常被认为是一种易于认知过程的诗歌形式。例如，海伦·文德勒(1997,168)声称，莎士比亚的十四行诗反映了“心理过程的流动性(以词汇和句法的串联为例)”。根据Raphael Lyne(2011,198)的观点，莎士比亚的十四行诗是研究“认知修辞学中的思维”的“理想场所”。跟随Vendler和Lyne在讨论十四行诗时对认知过程的关注，我将挑战简单的诗歌形式概念——在十四行诗的情况下——仅限于结构特征，如十四行规则。像十六行十四行诗“sonetus retornellatus”这样的异常现象证明，行数并不是十四行诗形式的决定性形式特征。我认为，当我们关注特定的思想内部组织时，诗歌形式确实会脱颖而出，我将指出莎士比亚的“十四行诗126”，一首十二行十四行诗，以强调十四行诗形式的认知方法。因此，将认知文学研究(CLS)引入十四行诗形式是一项有前途的努力。然而，我们需要确保CLS注意到十四行诗的修辞策略和逻辑模式。CLS需要考虑到心理过程和诗歌形式被锁定在一个动态过程中:形式与植根于修辞和逻辑的认知技能产生共鸣，同时塑造这些心理过程。如果我们承认诗的形式不是给定的，而是随着认知过程和情感反应的刺激而演变的，那么认知诗学的研究就必须更加重视形式的各个方面。在她对诗歌形式的全面研究中。Angela Leighton(2007, 1)在《诗歌、唯美主义和一个词的遗产》一书中指出，对于任何想要在语言领域将形式概念化的人来说，任务是解决其“倾向于物质化，倾向于成为某物的形状或主体”。作为一个抽象名词，“形式”具有静态的性质，而根据莱顿的说法，它是一个过程，一种认知活动。雷顿声称，将形式概念化为一个过程，将“改变我们所说的认识的意义”(同上，第27页)，因为它不允许从这个过程中提炼出关于诗歌形式的知识。这与约翰·g·布鲁恩(John G. Bruhn)和斯图尔特·沃尔夫(Stewart Wolf)的《作为过程的心灵》(The Mind as a Process)非常一致，他们在书中认为，在心灵研究中，需要“医学方法”和“实验室方法”来发展“面向过程的研究”(Bruhn/Wolf 2003, 84平方英尺)。因此，在认知科学的帮助下，更系统地审视诗歌形式也有望帮助我们重新定义我们的认知概念。关注情感和情绪反应的令人兴奋的实验使美学在阅读诗歌的过程中起着重要作用的概念脱颖而出(参见l<s:2> dtke 2014)。这些实验表明，图式理论依赖于已有的有意义结构，未能将诗歌阅读过程作为审美过程来把握。因此，虽然模式识别，无论是在叙事层面还是语义层面，都是诗歌阅读认知过程的一个方面，但这个过程也涉及其他方面，CLS才刚刚开始解决这些问题。Vaughan-Evans等人(2016,6)可能提供了“第一个切实的证据，证明这种联系[在诗歌的审美欣赏和隐含反应之间]是可渗透的”。 他们认为，“对诗歌和谐的自发识别是一个快速的、亚词汇的过程”(同上)，在亚词汇层面为CLS开辟了一个竞技场，这一领域仍有待研究。同样，Hermann J. m<e:1>勒等人(2017)最近进行的一项关于英语俳句阅读方式的眼动追踪研究表明，读者在第二轮或第三轮与文本的接触中，对诗歌的个人参与变得更加多样化。这可能听起来微不足道，但它确实挑战了CLS将有助于建立普遍认知模式的概念。相反，CLS可能证实了一种解释学立场:每读一首诗，都会产生新的问题;诗歌永远不会被完全理解。因此，CLS可以帮助听取Bruhn和Wolf的感叹:“我们应该更多地关注个体作为个体的反应，而不是将个体平均到群体中”(Bruhn/Wolf 2003,85)。
{"title":"The Confines of Cognitive Literary Studies: The Sonnet and a Cognitive Poetics of Form","authors":"F. Sprang","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract When we think of the cognitive sciences and literature, we usually think of bringing expertise from neuroscience to literary texts. However, interdisciplinary projects of this nature usually focus on semantic fields or narrative patterns, marginalizing the literary quality of the texts that are examined. More recently, the opportunities that come with a focus on aesthetics and poetic form have been discussed following Stockwell (2009), who has argued that we need to go beyond semantics in the field of cognitive poetics. Experiments using fMRI scanners have shown that readers’ brains ›fire up‹ holistically but that engaging with poetry and prose activates different regions of the brain (cf. Jacobs 2015). So one task of cognitive poetics is to look more closely at the aesthetic experience of literary texts. The sonnet is arguably a suitable test case for a cognitive poetics that is interested in form. After all, received wisdom has it that the sonnet abides by a rigid formal pattern: »it is a fourteen-line poem with a particular rhyme scheme and a particular mode of organizing and amplifying patterns of image and thought […] usually [rendered in] iambic pentameter« (Levin 2001, xxxvii). Accordingly, matters of form should play a crucial part when sonnets are read. At the same time, due to its »particular mode« of organisation, the sonnet is often thought to be a poetic form that is prone to cognitive processes. Helen Vendler (1997, 168) claims, for example, that Shakespeare’s Sonnets reflect »the fluidity of mental processes (exemplified in lexical and syntactic concatenation)«. And according to Raphael Lyne (2011, 198), Shakespeare’s sonnets are an »ideal place« to investigate »thinking in a cognitive rhetoric«. Following Vendler and Lyne in their focus on cognitive processes when discussing the sonnet, I will challenge simplistic notions of poetic form that – in the case of the sonnet – are limited to structural features like the fourteen-line rule. Aberrations like the sonetus retornellatus, a sixteen-line sonnet, testify that the number of lines is not a decisive formal feature for the sonnet form. The poetic form, I will argue, is indeed brought to the fore when we focus on the particular internal organisation of thought, and I will point to Shakespeare’s »Sonnet 126«, a twelve-line sonnet, in order to highlight cognitive approaches to the sonnet form. Bringing Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) to the sonnet form is thus a promising endeavour. We need to make sure, however, that CLS is mindful of rhetorical strategies and logical patterns that inform and form the sonnet. And CLS needs to take into account that mental processes and poetic form are locked into a dynamic process: form resonates with cognitive skills rooted in rhetoric and logic, and at the same time shapes those mental processes. If we accept that poetic form is not given but evolves while stimuli for cognitive processes and emotional responses are provided, research in c","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0022","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41737860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Over the past two decades cognitive literary studies (CLS) has emerged as a new subfield of literary studies. Despite the success of cognitive theories in some areas of research such as in narratology, however, the impact of CLS on the academic discipline of literary and cultural studies as a whole has not been as profound as predicted. Major schools of research, e.g. postcolonial studies or gender studies, remain virtually untouched, and the vast majority of literary scholars are still sceptical or indifferent towards this area of research. Reasons for this scepticism include, for example, epistemological and methodological uncertainties concerning the interdisciplinary intersection of science and literature. But scholars have also begun to address another lacuna in contemporary research that may prove to be of equal or even more profound consequence: the lack of a solid and widely accepted conceptual and analytical bridge between cognitive approaches and the wide field of cultural studies. It is a well-known fact that the study of culture in its many theoretical guises has taken a lead role in philology departments around the globe. Though not every scholar welcomes this development, it would certainly be unwise to ignore the general impact of cultural studies on philology. For this reason, my paper argues that CLS not only needs to engage in a productive interdisciplinary dialogue between literary scholars and cognitive scientists but it also needs to incorporate cultural studies into this dialogue. In other words, an important challenge lies in making cognitive approaches relevant for cultural analysis. This paper engages with current attempts to face this challenge. It provides a survey of approaches that aim to build a conceptual bridge between culture and cognition and thus take a step towards extending cognitive approaches into the field of cultural studies. For this purpose, I adopt the distinction between so-called ›first‹ and ›second generation‹ approaches in order to group this research heuristically into two academic camps: (1) approaches that emphatically foreground so-called second generation cognitive science as their prime source of inspiration, i.e. approaches that engage with enactive, embedded, extended, and embodied aspects of cognition; and (2) studies which do not explicitly situate themselves within this paradigm and rather seek innovation by turning to more ›classical‹, foundational ›first generation‹ concepts of mental representation, information- and text processing. By discussing examples from both lines of research, including work by Kukkonen/Caracciolo (2014), Strasen (2013), Sommer (2013), and Hartner/Schneider (2015), my survey attempts to provide an impression of the wealth of creative thinking currently at work in CLS. In this context, the paper discusses some of the major challenges cognitive approaches are facing today; it traces a selection of current developments in the field, including work on the c
{"title":"Bodies, Spaces, and Cultural Models: On Bridging the Gap between Culture and Cognition","authors":"M. Hartner","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Over the past two decades cognitive literary studies (CLS) has emerged as a new subfield of literary studies. Despite the success of cognitive theories in some areas of research such as in narratology, however, the impact of CLS on the academic discipline of literary and cultural studies as a whole has not been as profound as predicted. Major schools of research, e.g. postcolonial studies or gender studies, remain virtually untouched, and the vast majority of literary scholars are still sceptical or indifferent towards this area of research. Reasons for this scepticism include, for example, epistemological and methodological uncertainties concerning the interdisciplinary intersection of science and literature. But scholars have also begun to address another lacuna in contemporary research that may prove to be of equal or even more profound consequence: the lack of a solid and widely accepted conceptual and analytical bridge between cognitive approaches and the wide field of cultural studies. It is a well-known fact that the study of culture in its many theoretical guises has taken a lead role in philology departments around the globe. Though not every scholar welcomes this development, it would certainly be unwise to ignore the general impact of cultural studies on philology. For this reason, my paper argues that CLS not only needs to engage in a productive interdisciplinary dialogue between literary scholars and cognitive scientists but it also needs to incorporate cultural studies into this dialogue. In other words, an important challenge lies in making cognitive approaches relevant for cultural analysis. This paper engages with current attempts to face this challenge. It provides a survey of approaches that aim to build a conceptual bridge between culture and cognition and thus take a step towards extending cognitive approaches into the field of cultural studies. For this purpose, I adopt the distinction between so-called ›first‹ and ›second generation‹ approaches in order to group this research heuristically into two academic camps: (1) approaches that emphatically foreground so-called second generation cognitive science as their prime source of inspiration, i.e. approaches that engage with enactive, embedded, extended, and embodied aspects of cognition; and (2) studies which do not explicitly situate themselves within this paradigm and rather seek innovation by turning to more ›classical‹, foundational ›first generation‹ concepts of mental representation, information- and text processing. By discussing examples from both lines of research, including work by Kukkonen/Caracciolo (2014), Strasen (2013), Sommer (2013), and Hartner/Schneider (2015), my survey attempts to provide an impression of the wealth of creative thinking currently at work in CLS. In this context, the paper discusses some of the major challenges cognitive approaches are facing today; it traces a selection of current developments in the field, including work on the c","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45318472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The present article addresses the question whether the wide and disparate field of Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) has met the goal set by its representatives: to provide more authentic, intelligible and meaningful work than the traditional literary scholarship against which it positions itself. When »cognition« entered literary studies in around the 1990s, this was seen to announce the dawning of a new era, characterised by a rejuvenation of the field with the aid of interdisciplinary input, which simultaneously promised a return to its fundamental interest in literary texts. These objectives were accompanied by a growing disaffection with dominant theoretical paradigms (e.g. post-structuralism) and a forthright commitment to bridging the Cartesian dualism purportedly dominating the humanities. From the outset, however, CLS was greeted with criticism both regarding the reliability of its methodological basis and the usefulness of its results. These weaknesses have on the whole not been remedied and their continuing presence is highlighted by the field’s location at the margins of literary scholarship a quarter of a century after the »cognitive turn«. My taking up the longstanding debate surrounding CLS and returning to issues that may appear dated to some is not only indicated per se, but especially with view to its projected revitalisation of the fields on which it has had a bearing, which – all ambitious self-promotion by representatives of CLS notwithstanding – has not taken place. I begin by considering the methodological flaws that critics of CLS identified already at its inception, focusing on the one hand on the unsubstantiated foundations of its claims and on the other on its resistance to providing a precise definition of its key concept »embodiment«. As many other critics have already pointed out, the field’s most problematic assertion is that the products of the human mind, be they mental schemata or figurative language (especially metaphors), are indicative of how human cognition works generally. While this naturalisation of literary form as the structuring principle of human cognition may entail a reassuring revaluation of literary scholarship, it is based on rather simplistic and often unsupported assumptions about the nature of cognitive processes. At the same time, this conflation of literary language and cognitive structure has prevented scholars from asking questions of genuinely literary import. Instead, CLS tends to take literature as a repository of natural language to be scanned for evidence of whatever cognitive phenomena are at stake. Furthermore, CLS’s attention to the text is also indicative of insufficient attention within the field to all that literature does not say in so many words and, by implication, of a general indifference to readers’ cognitive and affective contribution to the construction of textual meaning – something of a paradox given that reader reception and emotion are avowed areas of interest
{"title":"Cognitive Literary Studies: On Persistent Problems and Plausible Solutions","authors":"Anja Müller-Wood","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The present article addresses the question whether the wide and disparate field of Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) has met the goal set by its representatives: to provide more authentic, intelligible and meaningful work than the traditional literary scholarship against which it positions itself. When »cognition« entered literary studies in around the 1990s, this was seen to announce the dawning of a new era, characterised by a rejuvenation of the field with the aid of interdisciplinary input, which simultaneously promised a return to its fundamental interest in literary texts. These objectives were accompanied by a growing disaffection with dominant theoretical paradigms (e.g. post-structuralism) and a forthright commitment to bridging the Cartesian dualism purportedly dominating the humanities. From the outset, however, CLS was greeted with criticism both regarding the reliability of its methodological basis and the usefulness of its results. These weaknesses have on the whole not been remedied and their continuing presence is highlighted by the field’s location at the margins of literary scholarship a quarter of a century after the »cognitive turn«. My taking up the longstanding debate surrounding CLS and returning to issues that may appear dated to some is not only indicated per se, but especially with view to its projected revitalisation of the fields on which it has had a bearing, which – all ambitious self-promotion by representatives of CLS notwithstanding – has not taken place. I begin by considering the methodological flaws that critics of CLS identified already at its inception, focusing on the one hand on the unsubstantiated foundations of its claims and on the other on its resistance to providing a precise definition of its key concept »embodiment«. As many other critics have already pointed out, the field’s most problematic assertion is that the products of the human mind, be they mental schemata or figurative language (especially metaphors), are indicative of how human cognition works generally. While this naturalisation of literary form as the structuring principle of human cognition may entail a reassuring revaluation of literary scholarship, it is based on rather simplistic and often unsupported assumptions about the nature of cognitive processes. At the same time, this conflation of literary language and cognitive structure has prevented scholars from asking questions of genuinely literary import. Instead, CLS tends to take literature as a repository of natural language to be scanned for evidence of whatever cognitive phenomena are at stake. Furthermore, CLS’s attention to the text is also indicative of insufficient attention within the field to all that literature does not say in so many words and, by implication, of a general indifference to readers’ cognitive and affective contribution to the construction of textual meaning – something of a paradox given that reader reception and emotion are avowed areas of interest","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49059006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The topic of this essay is the concept of experience which, in the field of literary studies, is often used as if it were divided into an objective and a subjective aspect. Advocates of so-called ›empirical‹ approaches to the study of texts and minds tend to proceed from experience only to abstract impersonal (or objective) ›data‹ from it. By contrast, phenomenological and hermeneutic methods are frequently said to work through more immediately personal (or subjective) responses to, and engagements with, literary works. Thus experience, it seems, must either be read in terms of statistical diagrams and brain images, or else remain caught up in an activity of reading that, being characterised as singular and eventful, is believed to resist most attempts to convert it into such allegedly objective forms. Drawing on the radical empiricism of William James, this essay seeks to reintegrate the experience of reading and the reading of experience, both of which are ambiguously condensed in my title. The main argument of the piece therefore hinges on James’s and John Dewey’s claim that experience is »double-barrelled« (James 1977, 172), which is to say that it refers to »the entire process of phenomena«, to quote James’s own definition, »before reflective thought has analysed them into subjective and objective aspects or ingredients« (James 1978, 95). Made up of both perceptions and conceptions, experience, as James views it, is the medium through which everything must have passed before it can be named, and without (or outside of) which nothing, therefore, can be said to exist. With this radical account of empiricism in mind, I revisit some of the assumptions underpinning cognitive literary criticism, before turning to an interpretation of the dramatic poetry of Robert Browning, which has been described as a version of »empiricism in literature« because it is concerned with »the pursuit of experience in all its remotest extensions« (Langbaum 1963, 96). More specifically, my article engages with »Fra Lippo Lippi« and »An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician« in order to show that Browning’s dramatic monologues make experience legible as an activity by means of which perceptions come to be turned into conceptions while conceptions, conversely, are continuously reaffirmed, altered, or enriched by whatever perceptions are added to them as life goes on. As I argue, Browning’s personae speak from the inside of an experience in the making, rather than about a series of events that has already been brought to an end. Readers of these poems are therefore invited to read along with, as well as to reflect upon, the creative activity through which characters and circumstances come into existence and through which they are sustained and transformed. It follows that Browning’s writings offer their readers nothing to be processed from a mental vantage point above, or outside of, them. Instead, they involve the act
{"title":"Reading Experience: William James and Robert Browning","authors":"Philipp Erchinger","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The topic of this essay is the concept of experience which, in the field of literary studies, is often used as if it were divided into an objective and a subjective aspect. Advocates of so-called ›empirical‹ approaches to the study of texts and minds tend to proceed from experience only to abstract impersonal (or objective) ›data‹ from it. By contrast, phenomenological and hermeneutic methods are frequently said to work through more immediately personal (or subjective) responses to, and engagements with, literary works. Thus experience, it seems, must either be read in terms of statistical diagrams and brain images, or else remain caught up in an activity of reading that, being characterised as singular and eventful, is believed to resist most attempts to convert it into such allegedly objective forms. Drawing on the radical empiricism of William James, this essay seeks to reintegrate the experience of reading and the reading of experience, both of which are ambiguously condensed in my title. The main argument of the piece therefore hinges on James’s and John Dewey’s claim that experience is »double-barrelled« (James 1977, 172), which is to say that it refers to »the entire process of phenomena«, to quote James’s own definition, »before reflective thought has analysed them into subjective and objective aspects or ingredients« (James 1978, 95). Made up of both perceptions and conceptions, experience, as James views it, is the medium through which everything must have passed before it can be named, and without (or outside of) which nothing, therefore, can be said to exist. With this radical account of empiricism in mind, I revisit some of the assumptions underpinning cognitive literary criticism, before turning to an interpretation of the dramatic poetry of Robert Browning, which has been described as a version of »empiricism in literature« because it is concerned with »the pursuit of experience in all its remotest extensions« (Langbaum 1963, 96). More specifically, my article engages with »Fra Lippo Lippi« and »An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician« in order to show that Browning’s dramatic monologues make experience legible as an activity by means of which perceptions come to be turned into conceptions while conceptions, conversely, are continuously reaffirmed, altered, or enriched by whatever perceptions are added to them as life goes on. As I argue, Browning’s personae speak from the inside of an experience in the making, rather than about a series of events that has already been brought to an end. Readers of these poems are therefore invited to read along with, as well as to reflect upon, the creative activity through which characters and circumstances come into existence and through which they are sustained and transformed. It follows that Browning’s writings offer their readers nothing to be processed from a mental vantage point above, or outside of, them. Instead, they involve the act ","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42763694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract For the past two decades, the scholarly discussion about the merits of neuroscience and cognitive science for literary studies has been, in Germany at least, a rather heated affair. This debate, however, has been much less interdisciplinary than the subject matter would suggest and has mainly taken place within literary and cultural studies, often merely adapting scientific theories of the mind, the nervous system, and the brain, in order to make statements about either empathy within literary texts or the processes underlying their reception. The debate is, moreover, closely linked to a crisis of literary theory in general, especially regarding the demise of the postmodern deconstructionist paradigm and the call for a more scientific and factual approach to the object of study – literature. Since the 1990s at least, deconstruction has frequently been dismissed as a mere stance of scepticism and relativism verging on randomness. Ever since, Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) has promised to provide a way out of the impasse by offering a more objective approach to literary artefacts based on scientific knowledge and therefore on hard scientific facts. In this paper I will argue that it is necessary not only to rely on present-day cognitive science but to historicise the relationship between literature and science as well. The need to historicise this relationship is part of a more encompassing claim. I believe it is necessary to focus on theory not as something external to, but as a self-reflexive aspect of, literature itself. This implies the need to investigate the mind and cognition only if it is part of the literary work’s self-reflexive scope within a given historical context. Historically, this reflexion presupposes a network in which scientific theories of the mind play a key role. My main example is the imagination. In this context, I will also focus on the rejection of dualism, or rather: the way that René Descartes’s philosophy, especially his distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, has been treated. One key argument in favour of CLS has been the stern denunciation of Cartesian Dualism – most famously described as Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio in his influential 1994 book. Diametrically opposed to this traditional dualist approach is embodied cognition, which Gerhard Lauer describes as the bedrock of the new interdisciplinary approach: »To put it bluntly, cognitive literary studies are ›against Cartesian interpretation‹« (Lauer 2009, 150). CLS is therefore constructed in strict opposition to a mind-and-body dualism dominant in Western thought ever since the first half of the seventeenth century – a dualism first of soul and body, and then, since the middle of the nineteenth century, of mind or cognition, on the one hand, and the brain on the other. Taking these developments into account, this paper takes its cue from another stance, however: the need to historicise the scientific and philosophical approaches to cog
{"title":"Cognitive Literary Studies, Historicism, and the History of the Imagination","authors":"R. Haekel","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract For the past two decades, the scholarly discussion about the merits of neuroscience and cognitive science for literary studies has been, in Germany at least, a rather heated affair. This debate, however, has been much less interdisciplinary than the subject matter would suggest and has mainly taken place within literary and cultural studies, often merely adapting scientific theories of the mind, the nervous system, and the brain, in order to make statements about either empathy within literary texts or the processes underlying their reception. The debate is, moreover, closely linked to a crisis of literary theory in general, especially regarding the demise of the postmodern deconstructionist paradigm and the call for a more scientific and factual approach to the object of study – literature. Since the 1990s at least, deconstruction has frequently been dismissed as a mere stance of scepticism and relativism verging on randomness. Ever since, Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) has promised to provide a way out of the impasse by offering a more objective approach to literary artefacts based on scientific knowledge and therefore on hard scientific facts. In this paper I will argue that it is necessary not only to rely on present-day cognitive science but to historicise the relationship between literature and science as well. The need to historicise this relationship is part of a more encompassing claim. I believe it is necessary to focus on theory not as something external to, but as a self-reflexive aspect of, literature itself. This implies the need to investigate the mind and cognition only if it is part of the literary work’s self-reflexive scope within a given historical context. Historically, this reflexion presupposes a network in which scientific theories of the mind play a key role. My main example is the imagination. In this context, I will also focus on the rejection of dualism, or rather: the way that René Descartes’s philosophy, especially his distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, has been treated. One key argument in favour of CLS has been the stern denunciation of Cartesian Dualism – most famously described as Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio in his influential 1994 book. Diametrically opposed to this traditional dualist approach is embodied cognition, which Gerhard Lauer describes as the bedrock of the new interdisciplinary approach: »To put it bluntly, cognitive literary studies are ›against Cartesian interpretation‹« (Lauer 2009, 150). CLS is therefore constructed in strict opposition to a mind-and-body dualism dominant in Western thought ever since the first half of the seventeenth century – a dualism first of soul and body, and then, since the middle of the nineteenth century, of mind or cognition, on the one hand, and the brain on the other. Taking these developments into account, this paper takes its cue from another stance, however: the need to historicise the scientific and philosophical approaches to cog","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42041562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This paper discusses biblical poetry in relation to the ancient Greek-Latin tradition of lyric poetry. Since the Greek word »lyric« and the Hebrew word »psalterion« each have musical connotations, there must be some connection between biblical psalmody and lyric poetry. Indeed, the liturgical superscriptions of many psalms and the numerous hints to musical instruments and singing within them suggest that many texts were originally used for accompaniment to music and so could be seen as ›lyric poetry‹ in the strictest sense. There are, of course, key differences between ancient and biblical lyric poetry. Hebrew poems are formally marked not so much by metre or rhyme as by more general conventions of sonority and word-play, perhaps to facilitate memorisation. Furthermore, Hebrew poetry is particularly recognizable by its balanced expression of thought, a ›parallelism‹ which includes repeated or contrasting ideas and figurative language. This feature is also evident in some Hebrew prose: this ›blurring of the boundaries‹ between prose and poetry is another feature which distinguishes biblical poetry from ancient Greek or Latin lyric poetry. One other distinctive feature of psalmody is that, although rooted in the liturgy of the first Temple (950–587 BCE), and developing in the liturgy of the second Temple period, it continued to thrive even after the fall of the Temple in 70 CE. The liturgical use of the psalms resulted in its continual prominence throughout Jewish and Christian history; and because the essence of Hebrew poetry is more dependent on sense than sound this has also enabled a rich tradition of translation. So Hebrew psalmody is ›re-invented‹ through the several Greek, Latin, and Aramaic versions, as well as through the many languages of the early modern period, right up to the contemporary vernacular. In this sense psalmody is unusual: unlike ancient classical poetry it provides an ongoing and living tradition for a community of faith.
{"title":"›I will solve my riddle to the music of the lyre‹ (Psalm 49:4). How ›Lyrical‹ is Hebrew Psalmody?","authors":"S. Gillingham","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper discusses biblical poetry in relation to the ancient Greek-Latin tradition of lyric poetry. Since the Greek word »lyric« and the Hebrew word »psalterion« each have musical connotations, there must be some connection between biblical psalmody and lyric poetry. Indeed, the liturgical superscriptions of many psalms and the numerous hints to musical instruments and singing within them suggest that many texts were originally used for accompaniment to music and so could be seen as ›lyric poetry‹ in the strictest sense. There are, of course, key differences between ancient and biblical lyric poetry. Hebrew poems are formally marked not so much by metre or rhyme as by more general conventions of sonority and word-play, perhaps to facilitate memorisation. Furthermore, Hebrew poetry is particularly recognizable by its balanced expression of thought, a ›parallelism‹ which includes repeated or contrasting ideas and figurative language. This feature is also evident in some Hebrew prose: this ›blurring of the boundaries‹ between prose and poetry is another feature which distinguishes biblical poetry from ancient Greek or Latin lyric poetry. One other distinctive feature of psalmody is that, although rooted in the liturgy of the first Temple (950–587 BCE), and developing in the liturgy of the second Temple period, it continued to thrive even after the fall of the Temple in 70 CE. The liturgical use of the psalms resulted in its continual prominence throughout Jewish and Christian history; and because the essence of Hebrew poetry is more dependent on sense than sound this has also enabled a rich tradition of translation. So Hebrew psalmody is ›re-invented‹ through the several Greek, Latin, and Aramaic versions, as well as through the many languages of the early modern period, right up to the contemporary vernacular. In this sense psalmody is unusual: unlike ancient classical poetry it provides an ongoing and living tradition for a community of faith.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46023843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Descriptions of the lyric have been stressing its artificial, self-referential character, constructing it as an intrinsically a-temporal, non-kinetic, non-mimetic and anti-illusionist mode. While the lyric certainly derives much of its effect from its horizontally superimposed patterns of formal equivalence, our pleasure as readers does not solely derive from the physical re-enactment of a poem’s sound patterns or the cognitive appreciation of its formal mastery. Many lyric texts are immersive; they project a fictional universe and prompt readers to emulate a speaker’s strongly perspectivized vision and subjective vantage point. This paper examines the lyric’s world building potential. It investigates the conditioning factors and referential components of lyric illusion, reviewing in particular the genre’s alleged inability to produce narrative sequence, embodiment and experientiality (Fludernik). Conceiving of the lyric speaker as an innovative cognitive blend (Turner/Fauconnier) provides a possible alternative to biographical constructions of the lyric self. Possible worlds theory (Ryan) is used as a way to approach the genre’s marked tendency towards cognitive mapping and conceptual innovation, towards foregrounding the human endeavour of mentally grasping and representing the world.
{"title":"Discordia Concors. Immersion and Artifice in the Lyric","authors":"Eva Zettelmann","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Descriptions of the lyric have been stressing its artificial, self-referential character, constructing it as an intrinsically a-temporal, non-kinetic, non-mimetic and anti-illusionist mode. While the lyric certainly derives much of its effect from its horizontally superimposed patterns of formal equivalence, our pleasure as readers does not solely derive from the physical re-enactment of a poem’s sound patterns or the cognitive appreciation of its formal mastery. Many lyric texts are immersive; they project a fictional universe and prompt readers to emulate a speaker’s strongly perspectivized vision and subjective vantage point. This paper examines the lyric’s world building potential. It investigates the conditioning factors and referential components of lyric illusion, reviewing in particular the genre’s alleged inability to produce narrative sequence, embodiment and experientiality (Fludernik). Conceiving of the lyric speaker as an innovative cognitive blend (Turner/Fauconnier) provides a possible alternative to biographical constructions of the lyric self. Possible worlds theory (Ryan) is used as a way to approach the genre’s marked tendency towards cognitive mapping and conceptual innovation, towards foregrounding the human endeavour of mentally grasping and representing the world.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42753030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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