Showing papers in "Style in 2002"

Metaphor identification: A cognitive approach

Abstract: 1. The Cognitive Paradigm and Linguistic Metaphor identification One paradoxical effect of the cognitive turn in metaphor studies has been the neglect of the linguistic analysis of metaphorical language. Many metaphor scholars have concentrated on fleshing out the presumed conceptual connections between related metaphorical expressions, but they have not really turned back to examine how and why which conceptual metaphors are expressed in the way they are in which contexts of language use. In recent years there has been some improvement of this situation, but the balance has still not quite been adjusted (cf. Cameron and Low; Deignan; Goatly Language of Metaphors; and Gibbs and Steen). One of the reasons for this slow development of an examination of linguistic metaphor is that it involves a transition from one type of metaphor research to another. Most cognitive linguistic research on metaphor may be characterised as theory building, in which concepts and hypotheses are developed about the nature of conceptual metaphor. To be sure, such theories have empirical underpinnings, in that their authors are careful to collect many linguistic examples that corroborate their theoretical constructs. To put this slightly differently, these are theories meant to be put to the test in empirical research. In that respect, they are not like the hermeneutic theories of philosophers like Ricoeur or the analytical theories of philosophers like Davidson. However, when such cognitive-linguistic ideas are actually tested in linguistic research, practical problems arise which require their own solutions. In particular, the most urgent problem is the reliable identification of metaphors in on-going discourse. If cognitive metaphor theories are to be tested or applied to authentic language use, the reliable identification of linguistic metaphors is a conditio sine qua non. For linguistic research does not set out with a preconceived set of conceptual metaphors, but instead has to deal with spontaneous metaphorical expressions as they are encountered in concrete uncontrolled language use. There is a decided difference between the postulation of conceptual metaphors such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, HAPPY IS UP, and so on, as well as their illustration by well-chosen examples, on the one hand, and the technical identification in on-going discourse of expressions presumably related to such postulated conceptual metaphors, on the other hand. Of course, many researchers have attempted to bridge the gap between the cognitive theory of metaphor and the identification of linguistic metaphor in analyses of individual texts and discourse, or, indeed, in their development of textual materials for experimental purposes. However, these researchers have all had to rely on their own solution to the problem of formulating an operational definition of linguistic metaphor. A meta-analysis of such studies might well be able to show that there is a good deal of variation between these definitions. An explanation of this lack of a reliable instrument for metaphor identification may lie in the two main traditions dealing with cognitive metaphor. Psychologists do believe in the importance of reliable measuring instruments, but, as far as metaphor identification is concerned, they have not really needed one for their experimental purposes. They can simply adopt the same strategy as the cognitive linguists who are in the business of theory formation, and restrict themselves to relatively clear and pre-selected cases. Cognitive anthropologists, linguists, and pocticians, by contrast, do not work in a tradition where the reliability of a measuring instrument has to be evaluated and reported. Scholars who work on literary texts or on the analysis of metaphor in conversation, in particular, are used to supporting their method with argumentation, often celebrating the combination of analysis and interpretation rather than separating them out in the service of achieving reliability. …

The Englishing of Juvenal: computational stylistics and translated texts

Abstract: The Englishing of Juvenal: Computational Stylistics and Translated Texts1 Introduction Comparisons between translations and their originals often shed light on cultural differences, large and small. At one level of meaning, such inter-language comparisons draw our attention to the elusive connotations and the ultimate untranslatability of conceptual words like anima and natura or, again, of words like amor, caritas, and amicitia.At another, we find small Saussurian mismatches like those between sword and gladius or between otiose and otium. But comparisons among several English versions of any much translated text give a sharper focus to many suggestive points of style. Such intra-language comparisons are likely to be of special interest when the translators themselves are authors of distinction. Consider the opening lines of Juvenal's Tenth Satire, the poem upon which the present paper concentrates: Omnibus in terris, quae sunt a Gadibus usque Auroram et Gangen, pauci dinoscere possum uera bona atque illis multum diuersa, remota erroris nebula. quid enim ratione timemus aut cupimus? (1-5) In his literal prose version of 1852, Lewis Evans renders these lines as follows: In all the regions which extend from Gades even to the farthest east and Ganges, there are but few that can discriminate between real blessings and those that are widely different, all the mist of error being removed. For what is there that we either fear or wish for, as reason would direct? (p. 102) John Dryden's rendering (1693) is brief and vigorous: Look round the Habitable World, how few Know their own Good; or knowing it, pursue. How void of Reason are our Hopes and Fears! (I-3) The best known English version of the poem is Samuel Johnson's imitation, The Vanity ofHuman Wishes (1749). It is only about two-thirds as long as Dryden's version, chiefly because Johnson reduces Juvenal's satirical illustrations to terse, ironic apophthegms. But, at the beginning, Johnson launches expansively and moves forward at a stately pace: Let Observation with extensive View, Survey Mankind, from China to Peru; Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife, And watch the busy Scenes of crouded Life; Then say how Hope and Fear, Desire and Hate, O'erspread with Snares the clouded Maze of Fate, Where wav'ring Man, betray'd by vent'rous Pride, To tread the dreary Paths without a Guide; As treach'rous Phantoms in the Mist delude, Shuns fancied Ills, or chases airy Good. How rarely Reason guides the stubborn Choice, Rules the bold Hand, or prompts the suppliant Voice The passage is less marked than most by the resonant Latinisms in which Johnson customarily takes advantage of every pertinent connotation in either language ("And restless Fire precipitates on Death" (20, emphasis mine]). But, beyond the typically Augustan compounds of epithet and noun or the formal balancing of abstracts, Johnson declares his own particular hand in phrase after phrase. If "the busy Scenes of crouded Life" are those of London, his other imitation of Juvenal, the prospect of "tread[ing] the dreary Paths without a Guide" takes us to the little elegy on Robert Levet. If "fancied Ills" and "airy Good" are at the heart of Rasselas, the somber view of life that underlies this passage is epitomized in the Soame Jenyns review and pervades the whole of Johnson's oeuvre. And whereas Reason, the sovereign faculty, should guide, rule, and prompt our thoughts and actions, we are easily deluded by the "treach'rous Phantoms" of the Imagination. While Johnson shares these concepts with many of his contemporaries, the metaphors that bear them are very much his own. Any devoted reader of Style is well equipped to refine on these few observations. The same may be said of anyone who benefited from a youthful acquaintance with Brower's The Fields of Light (1951) and other notable works of a time when our purpose as readers, we were taught, was rather to submit ourselves to the text than to submit it to our predilections. …

Mapping the Mind and the Body: On W.H. Auden's Personifications

Abstract: "The will of one by being two At every moment is denied." (W. H. Auden, "The Sea and The Mirror," Collected 413) 1. Introduction: Mind, Body, and Personification Despite our traditional view of the body and mind as divided, one figurative way for representing the two in our thought and in our language is the unified method of metaphor. For example, because we have easier access to bodies than to minds, our everyday notion of body language means we "map" from the body to the mind to interpret the behavior of others. As Simon Baron-Cohen has argued, this normal psychological mapping provides us with a "theory of mind" that some autistic children appear to lack for successful social cognition. We may not be fully aware of such mappings, but they conceptually link the body to the mind, making the body indexical of the mind in a way that closely integrates them and nearly negates dualism. Apart from these non-verbal mappings, mappings from the body to the mind in language, according to Eve Sweetser, motivate how physical verbs like grasp take on mental meanings like "know" during a language's evolution. As we would imagine, these connections between mind and body, between the mental and physical, also appear in literature, particularly in bodily descriptions, the language of emotions, and the use of mind or body metaphors. W. H. Auden is one case in point since he was forever writing about the mind and the body in his poems. Usually, Auden depicts body and mind in general via metaphor and personification in particular. What makes Auden's mind and body personifications strange, however, is that they are unlike the imaginary abstractions we often associate with personification. Personification was vital to Auden. According to Bernard Bergonzi, the four main features of Auden's poetic style were the "copious use of the definite article; unusual adjectives and adjectival phrases; surprising similes, which have a reductive or trivializing effect; and personified abstractions" (70). Indeed, Auden's personified abstractions bothered readers like Karl Shapiro, who wrote in his 1947 Essay on Rime, "An all-purpose abstraction is a form / Dear to the tired mind that must malinger / And precious to the talentless [...] History is but one / Of Auden's ill-starred words. Luck is another" (qtd. in Bergonzi 68). Irvin Ehrenpreis also found that "Auden at his best did not stop at personification; he embodied the abstractions in curious or supreme examples" such as southern Italy's limestone landscapes in the poem "In Praise of Limestone" (498-99). Shapiro, Bergonzi, and Ehrenpreis have all recognized Auden's tendency to personify and embody abstractions. However, Auden also tended to personify the mind and the body, entities which are perhaps less abstract than we recognize. We personify when we metaphorically ascribe agency to normally inanimate objects, turning non-existent or imaginary entities into realistic actors or agents. As the cognitive linguist would describe it, to personify is to "map" information from a "source domain" onto a "target domain" (what I. A. Richards once called vehicles and tenors). Mapping occurs simultaneously at conceptual and linguistic levels. Novel metaphors in language often reflect conventional metaphors in thought. In eroding classical boundaries between figures of thought and figures of speech, personification is apt for study from the cognitive viewpoint because a metaphor in language normally reveals a related conceptual metaphor in thought (Gibbs 311). Simply put, one metaphor can hide another. Therefore, it is fruitful to consider personification as both a product of thought and a product of speech. Personification is one of our most basic and frequently utilized metaphors. Its high frequency in children's literature suggests that we can understand it very early in life and that it is our "prototypical metaphor" built from "nonhuman topic--human vehicle" mappings (MacKay 87). …

Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas

Abstract: Andrew Gibson. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. London: Routledge, 1999. x + 230 pp. $80.00 cloth; $26.95 paper. The much-acclaimed "ethical turn" that some literary critics and theorists took in the nineties would appear to be a turn against deconstruction. Not so in the case of Andrew Gibson who makes the case for a criticism informed by a deconstructive ethics, following the example of J. Hillis Miller's The Ethics of Reading rather than that of Wayne Booth's The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. In Gibson's view, Booth is wedded to an obsolete "essentialist conception of ethos" (9) and unaware of recent problematizations of representation and narrative form. Gibson's point of departure is the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. A central role in this philosophy is played by the encounter with the other, an encounter that unsettles the subject and demands that he or she become responsive to and responsible for the other. There are several aspects to this encounter. The first of these is epistemological: the other occasions a failure of the subject's cognitive powers, exceeding the categories that the subject would impose on the world. A second aspect is the privileging of the emotions over the intellect. The experience of the other is first and foremost affective; the forms that the intellect devises to structure the world betray that experience. A third aspect of the encounter with the other is that it is an event, a singular occurrence that is not subject to any rules and therefore not to be predicted. One consequence of this emphasis on the event is a linguistic distinction that Levinas makes between the Said and the Saying. While the former falsifies the event by imprisoning it in a general category, the latter is alive to its singularity and irreducibility. The ideas summarized here have considerable consequences for the analysis of novels. They have a bearing, for instance, on narratorial knowledge and point of view, on how far a narrator is able to know and understand the others depicted in his or her narrative. In Willa Cather's short novel, A Lost Lady, the story of Marian Forrester is told mainly as it is perceived by the teenager Niel Herbert; but this point of view is abandoned when Mrs. Forrester commits adultery, an episode in which young Niel cannot be present as a witness. Far from seeing this shift in point of view as an awkward breach of narrative consistency, Gibson prizes it as a moment when the other eludes the cognitive grasp of the subject (particulary as the subject here is male and the other female; the deconstruction of gender categories is a concern to which Gibson returns repeatedly in this book). Cather's shift in point of view, however, offers only a very limited equivalent to Levinas's notion of the encounter with the other; even the passage in which the point of view is shifted is still wedded to the principles of mimetic or representational storytelling. From Gibson's point of view, this kind of story-telling is suspect. The moral criticism based on it, such as F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition, is flawed in that it assumes ethical values to be embodied in characters and plots; Leavis's ethics of fiction is bound up with representation. In Gibson's view, representation is like cognition in that it amounts to a kind of ontological imperialism, "an exertion of violence [... J, a denial of the independence of existents" (57). Thus Gibson values the procedures in twentiethcentury fiction and criticism that run counter to representation, emphasizing the importance of the ineffable and unnameable. In a related argument, he challenges the critical aim of seeking unity in a text, of organizing its multiplicity in terms of one overarching pattern or principle. Instead, the critic should acknowledge the irreducible multiplicity that is prior to any attempts to inflict unity upon a text. The reader who has followed me thus far may have become impatient to see where ethics enters into the argument of this book. …

From Iser to Turner and Beyond: Reception Theory Meets Cognitive Criticism

Abstract: 1. Introduction (1) "Going cognitive" is one way to define a recent trend in literary studies. Indeed, the term "cognitive" is ubiquitous with "cognitive rhetoric" (Turner Reading), "cognitive stylistics" (Semino and Culpepper), "cognitive poetics" (Tsur Toward; Stockwell; Gavins and Steen), and "cognitive theory" (Richardson and Crane), all in circulation now. Clearly a cognitive turn--some might say a "cognitive revolution" (Steen and Richardson)--has occurred in literary studies. However, "cognitive criticism," the umbrella term we adopt here for all forms of literary criticism for the cognitively-inclined, has never been recognized from the outside-nor coherently defined from the inside--as a single theory, a uniform paradigm, or a formal school of thought. This is no doubt a defensive tactic, enabling cognitive criticism to thrive. As Norman Holland claimed a decade ago, literary theory was based on "a disproven linguistics and a dubious psychology" (qtd. in Wright 530). If so, the cognitive turn was probably made in order to right this wrong. But cognitive criticism's success may be in the eye of the beholder. Its reliance on cognitive neuroscience as an explanatory tool may revive the angst the humanities traditionally feel for the sciences. Resistance to cognitive criticism, as many have noted (Gross; Herman; Jackson), has therefore been predictable albeit futile. Initial encounters with cognitive criticism may reveal strange bibliographies. For instance, Gibbs, Lakoff, Johnson, Tomasello, Rosch, Sperber, Damasio, Edelman, and Turner all seem to have made Freud, Saussure, Nietzsche, Piaget, Wittgenstein, Searle, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Derrida obsolete. Those who are not cognitive critics greet this bibliographical upgrade rather skeptically. Naturally, where one would have cited Husserl in the past as an authority to bolster one's argument, one now cites Damasio. Why? One assumes that yesterday's philosopher is wrong and today's neuroscientist is right. While this may be true, it reveals a fascination many cognitive critics have with cognitive science. Because of a preference now for findings over speculations regarding the mind and language, that fascination makes sense. Likewise, it is justifiable to build literary theories on sound psychology and credible linguistics. Holland felt we desperately needed this, which helps explain the scientific nature of cognitiv e criticism's bibliographies. When science is embraced rather than feared, the new or improved seems more trustworthy than the old or discredited. Even so, an inexplicable bibliographic hole remains in cognitive criticism. That hole is reception theory. The challenge Stanley Fish put to Wolfgang Iser in the early 1980s helps explain the hole. Once Fish told the entire profession that reception theory was doomed, many believed him. In the March 1981 issue of Diacritics, Fish unfavorably reviewed Iser's The Act of Reading. He concluded that Iser's key terms were defined so vaguely as to provide him "in advance with a storehouse of defensive strategies" and that Iser never took a side as to where exactly the production of meaning resided when it came to reading (Fish 12-13). Was it in the text, in the reader, in the author, or in the messy interaction of all three? Iser, Fish claimed, had no answers. Also, Iser's analyses often revealed "the unavailability of two acontextual entities--the free-standing text and the freestanding reader--whose relationship he promises to describe" (Fish 12; our emphasis). When Iser failed to keep his promises, Fish cut short the life of reception theory. Then, when Iser's reply in the September 1981 issue of Diacritics did not rebut all of Fish's points, Iser seemed to have lost the challenge. The consequence: Iser' s version of reception theory essentially vanished from view although New Literary History (Cohen) nevertheless dedicated a special issue to him recently. Ironically, the disappearence of Iser's theory is less common in Germany than it is in Anglo-American universities. …

Love and Anger. The grammatical structure of conceptual metaphors

Abstract: 1. Introduction This article integrates grammatical analysis into the study of conceptal metaphors. Although the study accepts lexically based work in metaphors such as Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Johnson's The Body in the Mind, and Kovecses' Metaphors of Anger, Pride, and Love, it argues that these lexical approaches are insufficient to offer rigorous and complete analysis of cross-reference mapping. It takes the hypothesis that lexis and morpho-syntax are interdependent, presented by Langacker in especially Concept, Image, and Symbol and Grammar and Conceptualization and by Talmy in "The Relation of Grammar to Cognition" and Toward a Cognitive Semantics, and examines the grammatical structure of conceptual metaphors. The analysis focuses on two emotion concepts, ROMANTIC LOVE and ANGER. Firstly, the discussion demonstrates weaknesses in a lexically based analysis of conceptual metaphors by examining ANGER. It argues that current approaches to the study of metaphors lack both sufficient means for the verification of results and sufficient tools for revealing the structure of those results. The discussion moves to resolve these issues by examining the emotion concept LOVE. Instead of focusing purely on the lexical structure of the conceptual metaphor, it combines this with a study of grammatical structure. In doing so, it demonstrates how this grammatical evidence may help resolve problems faced by lexical analyses. Moreover, by drawing on the invariance hypothesis proposed by Lakoff in "The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor" and by Turner in "An Image-Constraint on Metaphor," it reveals details of conceptual structure that are not visible in lexical analysis, further supporting the need to systematically integrate grammatica l evidence into the study of cognitive semantics. Thus, by combining the invariance hypothesis and grammatical analysis, the study demonstrates that the internal structure of conceptual metaphors is more complex than is evident from lexical approaches typically taken in the study of these metaphors. 2. ?ANGER IS GIVING BIRTH: Verifying Co-occurrence Purely lexical analyses of cross-reference mapping do not offer enough scope for the verification of the results they produce. A lexically based study of conceptual metaphors is based on an assumption. This assumption is that if there are a reasonable number of similar semantic extensions (where both the source and target domains of the extensions are similar), then these extensions indicate the existence of a conceptual metaphor. All that is necessary to identify these domains, and or schema (cf. Clausner and Croft "Domains and Image Schemas"), is the identification of lexical co-occurrence. Cognitive semantics argues that such co-occurrence in "everyday metaphors" is neither a coincidence nor a superficial lexical phenomenon, but the surface result of conceptual structuring of the semantic system. As will be demonstrated below, this is not always the case, but that co-occurrence may at times be merely "co-incidental." If lexical co-occurrence does not necessarily represent cross-reference mapping, how can w e then determine which instances of co-occurring expressions represent metaphoric correspondences and which are "coincidental" in their similarity? The following section attempts to answer this question. However, before one broaches the question of "lexical co-incidence," one must also confront the closely related theoretical problem of set membership. 2.1. Set Membership of Conceptual Domains One of the fundamental questions that face cognitive semantics is the application of prototype set theory to its processes of analysis. The work of Geeraerts, Grondelaers et al., and Kleiber, amongst many others, has demonstrated the success of this application at a lexical level. This, however, remains to be successfully achieved in the study of metaphors. The current study does not broach this issue directly, but outlines its importance and offers tools of analysis that are needed to properly investigate prototype structures in cross-reference mapping. …

Bodily Action and Metaphorical Meaning

Abstract: The human body serves as a frequent source of our metaphorical thought and language. This is not surprising given that metaphor provides the resource to understand ideas, events, and objects in terms of what is most familiar and well-understood. We know many things about the world around us. But the thing we are most familiar with, and have a felt understanding for, is our own bodies. Consider a typical use of metaphor in a literary text. The following is the opening verse of a poem by Elizabeth Bishop titled "Varick Street": At night the factories struggle awake, wretched uneasy buildings veined with pipes attempt their work trying to breathe the elongated nostrils hatred with spikes give off such stenches, too. Most readers get an immediate sense of Bishop's intention to draw a metaphorical comparison between the operations of a factory and the human body (i.e., a kind of personification). Our understanding of Bishop's intentions, and the underlying motive for her creating this poem in the way that she did, depends crucially on our ability to think metaphorically about ordinary objects, events, and people in the world. Abstract concepts such as truth, thought, justice, and friendship are also talked about in concrete ways, as if they are items that can be physically manipulated. For example, in his poem "Ultimately," Ernest Hemingway writes of truth as if it is something physical that can actually be spit out: He tried to spit out the truth; Dry-mouthed at first, He drooled and slobbered in the end; Truth dribbling his chin. Our understanding of truth as something that can be spit out, in the above case with great difficulty for the person trying to speak honestly, is dependent on some recognition of a metaphorical idea (e.g., truth as a substance that can be ingested and regurgitated when needed). Again, there is an essential tacit connection between human embodiment, especially embodied action, and how we think about different physical and non-physical concepts. Writers like Bishop and Hemingway elaborate on these bodily-based metaphorical concepts in new, creative ways that ordinary readers understand given their own embodied experiences. An increasing body of research in cognitive science suggests that significant aspects of metaphorical thought and language arise from, and are constrained by, human embodiment (Gibbs, Poetics; Gibbs and Berg; Gibbs, Lima, and Francuzo; Kovecses; Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy). Many conceptual metaphors have source domains that are rooted in pervasive patterns of bodily experience. For instance, the way we talk about life, or love, as a kind of journey refers to the very embodied experience of people moving from some starting point, along a path, to reach, or attempt to reach, some destination. This embodied, conceptual mapping underlies people's use and understanding of conventional expressions like "We are just starting off our marriage," "I am at a crossroad in my career," and "Their marriage is on the rocks" (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors). Our purpose in this article is to explore the role that bodily action has in motivating different aspects of metaphorical meaning. We present findings from different linguistic and psychological studies showing that people's intuitive sense of pervasive bodily actions constrains their understanding of many types of metaphorical language. More specifically, the precise metaphorical meanings associated with many conventionalized utterances can be explained by an examination of the ways people move and experience their bodies. Many people may already acknowledge that bodily metaphors are quite common in language. But our claim is that when the body is examined as a source domain for metaphors of language, emotion, and other things, we see that bodily metaphors taken as a group, form a coherent system that is supported by a few image schemas such as containment, source-path-goal, balance, in-out, and front-back. …

Corpus-Based Text Analysis from a Qualitative Perspective: A Closer Look at NVivo

Abstract: This review presents information on a powerful yet easy-to-use entry-level qualitative text analysis tool called NVivo NVivo is quite different from analysis tools readers may be familiar with already, such as TACT and Wordsmith Tools, two of the most commonly used text analysis tools currently available, in that the latter are quantitative analysis programs NVivo can be used either to complement these quantitative tools or to explore an alternative form of analysis readers may have previously not considered undertaking in their studies I am assuming that most readers will already be familiar with programs such as TACT or Wordsmith Tools, but if they are not, they can learn more about them by reading Rochester's recently published review of both programs Released in a second edition in 2000, NVivo works much like its quantitative counterparts, although from a theoretical standpoint, it is meant to analyze data in a very different way NVivo is the latest version of NUD-IST, a program originally created in 1991 by Tom and Lyn Richards, founders of Qualitative Solutions and Research Pty, Ltd (Richards 7) NVivo is available on CD-ROM with two different manuals from QSR (http://wwwscolaricouk/qsr/qsr_nvivohtm) for a fee that varies depending on the type of license purchased At the time of publication, a single academic license for the program is available for [pounds sterling]270 (about $430 US), and a value package of five academic licenses is available for [pounds sterling]892 (about $1400 US) A comparable qualitative text analysis program, such as SPSS's TextSmart, is available for $699 US for a single academic license Although the program includes two manuals, the help files contained within the program itself will be sufficient for most users The CD-ROM also contains an interactive tutorial NVivo can process and analyze ASC-II or rich-text files, and any results that users wish to output can be saved in ASC-II text, which can be opened in any word-processing application for further analysis or incorporation into reports Additionally, the program allows users to export node diagrams for use in programs such as Inspiration and Decision Explorer At present, NVivo is available only for the Windows platform (1) The system requirements for the second edition are the following: 32 MB of available RAM (although 64 MB is recommended), an Intel Pentium 100 MHz or better processor, Windows NT4 or 95 and above, and 80 MB of hard drive space for installation of the program itself (Fraser 187) Essentially taking the concept of KWIC (Key Word in Context) from programs such as TACT or Wordsmith Tools and developing it in a different direction, NVivo is designed to allow users to conduct sophisticated analyses of electronic text data contextually Instead of allowing users to focus on micro-level frequency-based analysis of language at the word level, as does TACT or Wordsmith Tools, NVivo allows users to focus on language within the context of macro-level text unit relations, particularly at the sentence or paragraph level This makes NVivo a useful tool for looking at symbolic or metaphorical relations between spans of text or for discovering trends within the data that might not necessarily be revealed by statistical text analysis methods The program focuses not on the production of descriptive statistics, but instead on description of the data themselves In spite of the differing strengths, TACT, Wordsmith Tools, and NVivo do share some similarities Namely, like its quantitative counterparts, NVivo can be used to search texts for particular words, phrases, or collocations, and it does so primarily through the use of two different types of searches: text-string searches and text-pattern searches Text-string searching allows the user to perform simple word and phrase searches, provided that he or she is looking for exact matches of the words or phrases entered For example, if a user wanted to look for the exact sequence of letters contained in the word love (but not lover, glove, clover, etc …

The "Moreness" or "Lessness" of "Natural" Narratology: Samuel Beckett's "Lessness" Reconsidered

Abstract: In Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (1996). Monika Fludemik reconstitutes narativity on the basis of experientiality, i.e., humanity's embodiedness in the world, and claims that incomprehensible texts can be made more readable if one attempts to narrativize them. Since Samuel Beckett's short prose work "Lessness" is one of the most enigmatic texts of the twentieth century, it serves as an ideal test case for this new narratological paradigm. "Lessness" does indeed lose its initial strangeness if one reads this piece as narrative. Moreover, although a "natural" narratological analysis paves the way for a new interpretation of "Lessness," the new paradigm provides only a partially satisfying analysis of it. To make the text fit into the new consciousness-oriented paradigm, Fludernik's quasiuniversal naturalizing mode has to ignore certain aspects such as the mechanical structure of "Lessness." Beckett's later prose work challenges narrativization and the "natural" narratological project. A reading of "Lessness" should be liberated from the confines of experientiality and instead concentrate on the role of chance and chaos. Beckett's text must be located in a counterworld, a limbo between signifier and signified. One should allow this limbo world to seep into the "real world" and not attempt to explain this different counterworld by means of "real-world" knowledge. 1. Introduction According to J. E. Dearlove, the fragmentary short prose works that Samuel Beckett produced in the period following the publication of Comment C'est(1961), i.e., "All Strange Away" (1963-64), "Imagination Dead Imagine" (1965), "Enough" (1965), "Ping" (1966), "Lessness" (1969), and "The Lost Ones" (1966, 1970), might strike readers as "utterly alien and incomprehensible," and by thrusting the burden of creating order and meaning on readers, "demand a new critical response" ("Last Images" 104, 116). Similarly, Mary Bryden points out that some readers have reacted adversely to Beckett's later prose, seeing it as "perversely uncommunicative" and "teasingly mysterious" (137). The short prose work "Lessness" is definitely one of the most enigmatic texts of the period after How It Is. Because of the initial shock that this strange and incomprehensible prose work might produce in readers, it may be used as a case to test the new narratological approach Monika Fludernik puts forward in Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (1996). Fludernik attempts to counteract some of the shortcomings of classical narratology and other traditional approaches to narrative theory. Her aim is the radical "reconceptualization of narratology" and "the creation of a new narrative paradigm"(xi), a paradigm, however, that despite its interdisciplinary make-up, will still be identifiable as narratological. As Gibson notes, Fludernik sets out to redefine narrativity in terms not of plot but of cognitive or what she calls "natural" parameters. These parameters are based on our experience, on our sense of embodiedness in the world ("Review" 234). Whereas structuralist narratology employs formal categories defined in terms of binary oppositions, Fludernik wishes to institute organic frames of reading. She reconstitutes narrativity on the basis of experientiality, a feature derived from research on oral narrative established by Labov (Language). At the same time experientiality relates to Kate Hamburger's thesis that narrative is the only form of discourse that c an portray consciousness, particularly the consciousness of someone else (83). Since, for Fludernik, the prototypical case of narrative is given in its oral version (textual make-up is considered to be a variable), the "natural" narratological paradigm, as Ronen suggests, identifies narrativity with conversational parameters in a storytelling situation (647). Furthermore, Fludernik wishes to institute a reconceptualization of the term "natural" within a more specifically cognitive perspective. She argues that "natural" narratives, i. …

Apostrophe in Life and in Romantic Art: Everyday Discourse, Overhearing, and Poetic Address

Abstract: If a zone of convergence is emerging between literary studies and the cognitive sciences, then a fundamentally new understanding of figurative language marks its epicenter. (1) The study of rhetorical figures, especially metaphor, became a key research area for cognitive linguists, computer scientists, and cognitive psychologists soon after the cognitive revolution began in earnest. (2) Their interest was inspired in no small part by the notable failures of early artificial intelligence programs to handle figurative utterances that human speakers readily took in stride. One early text-processing program (called FRUMP), fed a news article beginning "The death of the Pope shook the world," issued the following summary: "There was an earthquake in Italy. One person died" (Abelson 39). Why was it so unlikely, almost unimaginable, for any native speaker to make such an error? What did the effortless and automatic interpretation of rhetorical figures say about the architecture of human cognition and the widespread, perhaps universal properties of natural Languages? Once consigned largely to rhetoric, itself increasingly seen as a minor subdiscipline of literary scholarship, the study of figurative language suddenly became a topic of great moment for cognitive science. Two cognitive theorists in particular, the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson, made metaphor crucial to their novel conception of what would eventually be called the "figurative mind." As the title of their first book, Metaphors We Live By (1980), suggests, for Lakoff and Johnson metaphor is pervasive in everyday language and metaphorical mappings characterize even pre-linguistic thought processes. Where an earlier philosophical tradition had long viewed figurative language as ornamental and deviant, Lakoff and Johnson insisted on the constitutive character of figurative thought and on the naturalness of figurative language. As they summarized it in retrospect, Metaphors We Live By presented "evidence that conceptual metaphors are mappings across conceptual domains that structure our reasoning, our experience, and our everyday language" (Philosophy in the Flesh 47). Mark Turner, one of the first literary scholars to notice the growing prominence of figurative language for cognitive resear ch, declared that rhetoricians now had a key role to play in the "science of the mind" (Death 9-10). If, as Lakoff and Johnson argued, our effortless (and largely unconscious) production and comprehension of rhetorical figures reveal the figurative structure of thought and speech, then for Turner the "literary mind is the fundamental mind" and the traditional concerns of literary analysis can be refashioned within the larger orbit of cognitive science (Literary Mind v). A number of cognitive psychologists, including Ellen Winner, Richard Gerrig, and Raymond Gibbs, agreed, and controlled studies of how human subjects use figures like metaphor, metonymy, and irony soon made a central part of their research agendas. Gibbs became an important proponent of the key claims staked out earlier by Lakoff and Johnson; his 1994 book, The Poetics of Mind, summarizes years of empirical research designed to show that "human cognition is fundamentally shaped by various poetic or figurative processes" (1). It should not be surprising that so few scholars in departments of literature shared Turner's early enthusiasm for the cognitive study of figurative language. For the rise of what Turner called "cognitive rhetoric" in the 1980s was largely eclipsed by an equally challenging, and at the time much more compelling, recasting of metaphor and related figures of speech in the service of deconstruction. Paul de Man's essay "The Epistemology of Metaphor," first published in 1978, set the tone for much of the work that followed in emphasizing the "proliferating and disruptive power of figural language" (28), what Jacques Derrida had earlier called the "abyss of metaphor" (253). …

Cognitive Mapping in Literary Analysis

Abstract: Literary analysis takes many forms, depending on the critical approach adopted. Critical theories vary in the ways they accommodate the three components of literature--the writer, the reader, and the text. At one extreme are those theories that focus almost exclusively on the text itself, such as formalist or structuralist approaches; at the other, those that focus on the writer (biographical, psychoanalytical) or the reader (reader response); and then there are approaches that fall somewhere between, adopting elements of more than one component (historical, cultural). Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses in illuminating the nature and role of literature in a given society. A cognitive linguistic approach to literature provides a methodology by which the insights of these literary theories may be reconciled. Because cognitive linguistics is concerned with the conceptual workings of the embodied mind, all aspects of human experience and behavior, whether from the perspective of the writer, from the perspective of the reader, or from the perspective of the text itself, are relevant and are integrated into a cognitive understanding of the literary experience. In addition, cognitive linguistics further contributes to literary studies by revealing the extent to which the imaginative powers that both create and comprehend literary works reflect the general workings of the human mind. One question raised by a cognitive linguistic approach to literature, as Claiborne Rice notes, is whether "textual production and reception necessarily rely on identical, or even similar, integration networks" (43). Joseph Grady provides some evidence for experiential motivation for conceptual metaphor that would indicate that speakers and hearers share the same cognitive network structures. Fauconnier and Turner's claim that these conceptual integration networks are "the way we think," rather than just the way we speak (or write), would indicate that the same structures are at work in both production and reception. Norman Holland relates the conceptual processes of the reader to those of the writer in his work on the poetry of Robert Frost. Indeed, it would be strange to contemplate the notion that the human mind has two discrete and independent conceptual components for formulating and understanding language. In this paper, therefore, I explore some general cognitive processes at work in literary texts and show how readers utilize these same cognitive processes in understanding them. I restrict my analysis to the work of one poet, Emily Dickinson, to show that these cognitive strategies are not ad hoc or randomly chosen but pervasive and structurally significant in creating human conceptual reasoning. The way poets think is the way we think. Recent work in cognitive linguistics explores the analogical processes by which the human brain makes sense of its world (Fauconnier and Sweetser; Fauconnier and Turner; M. Johnson; Lakoff and Johnson). The human mind, under this view, thinks analogically. Analogy is the process underlying all the topoi of classical rhetoric (such as definition, classification, comparison and contrast) and figures of speech (such as synedoche, metonymy, metaphor). It also informs the structure of poetry. Its components include cognitive mapping skills that create levels of identification across different domains and projections across multiple mental spaces. In order to understand what literary critics do when analyzing a literary text, we need to identify the kinds of cognitive mappings they use. Analogical Mapping Understanding the meaning of a speaker's sentence involves more than understanding the words. A linguistic expression is made significant when it is understood in the context of a knowledge domain, or, in Lakoff's term, an idealized cognitive model (ICM). These knowledge domains are also culturally determined. (1) The notions of "God" and "Heaven" in Dickinson's poetry, for example, depend on a cognitive model that is Christian and Protestant, a cultural model that situates the poems in nineteenth-century Puritan New England, and Dickinson's individual stance toward that idealized cognitive cultural model (ICCM). …

Resources for Discourse Analysis in Composition Studies

Abstract: Introduction The field of composition studies takes as its object of study written language--its production, interpretation, and acquisition in context. Research in the field ranges from classical rhetorical analyses to ethnographies of writing in the contemporary workplace, with a special interest in the teaching of writing in college. Although written language as an object of study would seem to position the field of composition studies closely to the field of linguistics, which takes as its object of study the structure and function of language in general, the relationships between the two fields have been varied, at best (Barton and Stygall, "Introduction"). One methodological bridge between the two fields, however, is discourse analysis, because this method holds the potential to contribute significantly to the research agendas of both fields. In this review essay, I first describe some new resources for discourse analysis in the field of linguistics. I then consider the possibilities of discourse analysis in composi tion studies in more detail, briefly discussing the history of discourse analysis research in the field and then describing several important and promising areas of discourse analysis research in the field of composition studies. I argue in support of an increased role for discourse analysis in the field of composition studies, based upon its methodological potential to contribute uniquely to our knowledge about the production, interpretation, and acquisition of written language. Discourse Analysis in Linguistics The object of study in discourse analysis, as it developed in the field of linguistics, is the structure and function of language in use (Brown and Yule); discourse analysis pays particular attention to the ways that language in context is organized at and above the level of the sentence. Work in discourse analysis in linguistics concentrates primarily upon oral language, with a focus on face-to-face conversation as the prototypical situation of language in use, although recently more attention has been paid to language in institutional settings such as classrooms, courtrooms, and clinics. Discourse analysis can investigate features of language that are small and specific--for example, whether speakers or writers preface their sentences with markers like oh and well (Schiffrin), or whether they organize sentences according to the pattern of given information followed by new information (Chafe, Discourse). Discourse analysis also can investigate aspects of language that are complex and abstract--for example, h ow speakers and writers Orient their language in institutional settings (Drew and Heritage), or how socio-cultural worldviews affect the production and interpretation of language (Duranti and Goodwin). One of the key concepts of discourse analysis in linguistics is the understanding of conventions of language use. Many years ago, Jerry Morgan defined conventions of language use as "govern[ing] the use of sentences, with their literal meaning, for certain purposes. [...] Conventions of usage are a matter of culture (manners, religion, law)" (261, 269). Morgan goes on to note that conventions of use involve contextual occasions and purposes (269), giving rise to the "purpose-meaning connections between the occasion of usage and the expression used" (271). At the time Morgan was writing, conventions of use were assumed to be simple and straightforward: Morgan's example is the utterance Can you pass the salt?, with its literal meaning of ability and its conventional meaning of a request. But as research in discourse analysis developed over the past twenty-five years, conventions have come to be seen as complex and abstract connections between the repeated use of a linguistic feature and its function or interpre tation in a text or context. Conventions range from small and specific linguistic features (e.g., the conventional use of supportive back channels like um-hmm by female speakers) to longer stretches of text (e. …

Assembling Spaces: The Conceptual Structure of Allegory

Abstract: 1 Allegory, Rhetoric and Theory Allegory is a Mount Everest for critics It drives some to renounce theory and descend to particulars, while inspiring others to new heights Northrop Frye's work on allegory "obstinately adhered to a much larger theoretical structure" (vii), and so became Anatomy of Criticism Allegory was the paradigmatic figure for the semiological theory of rhetoric Paul de Man envisioned for deconstruction I suggest we can assess aspiring frameworks by how they meet the challenge of allegory, and that cognitive rhetoric fares better than most Mark Turner calls Death is the Mother of Beauty a "modern rhetoric which makes use of insights from contemporary cognitive science and linguistics" to analyze the whole mind of the audience--"conceptual systems, social practices, commonplace knowledge, discourse genres, and every aspect of a common language, including syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology" (3-4) Like Frye and de Man, he seeks to extend new discoveries about language, and trace out far-reaching ramifications for the understanding of the mind Allegory has been a shaping force in the growth of blending theory, too A typical allegorical scene runs against the expectations of the conceptual theory of metaphor that was Turner's springboard in two related ways: abstract sources structure concrete targets, and many source-domains structure single scenes (1) Allegories by Martianus Capella, Milton, Gower, Blake, and Spenser reveal to Turner the workings of kinship metaphor, because kinship metaphors breed personifications But personifications who act like kin as well as like concepts reveal multi-space integration (2) Turner's collaboration with George Lakoff, More Than Cool Reason, introduces literary metaphor via the conceptual theory, and presents the first close analyses of personifications, notably the Grim Reaper, that become canonical references for theoretical points The complex metaphorical models and grammatical constructions in Reading Minds often suggest protoallegorical scenes (3) In The Literary Mind and elsewhere, Dante's Bertran de Born and nonliterary analogies to literary allegories (political cartoons, advertisements, fables and parables) figure prominently as examples And Turner quotes from C S Lewis's Allegory book the idea that parable is a property of "mind in general" (Literary 7 "Figure" 48) The theory of basic metaphor has informed valuable criticism (4) But some critics see its theoretical idealizations as cutting out the roots of literature They complain of its neglect of rich imagery, affect, and the issue of belief; and charge that reductionism results In short, it does not capture the complexities of literary experience (5) Turner too saw that while CMT had something to say about other rhetorical figures that are one-way mappings (metonymy, synecdoche), it foundered on more complex ones (6) The expansion of the theory to engage with a wider range of forms of language and thought meant moving in the direction of other figures and figure in general, that is, towards a view of rhetoric as a dynamic, structured ability, and a theory of its principles of operation He returns to cognitive rhetoric with the network model of conceptual integration, which works the theory of basic metaphor into a systematic view of conceptual connection (7) It clarifies non-metaphoric mappings, metaphor combination, and relations between metaphors and categories It treats rhetorical figures as pairings of form and meaning, like the "constructions" of cognitive grammar The attention to "online construction of full meaning" removes many literary reservations about CMT, making room for detailed, active, and creative imagery and emotion Reintroducing the strange complexities of allegory to Turner's model should illuminate both subjects 2 Themes Rosemond Tuve remarked in 1966 on "The number of words spent defining and delimiting allegory in this decade" (3), and later years have been equally loquacious …

Adaptationist Literary Study: An Emerging Research Program

Abstract: 1 Introduction In the past decade or so, a small but rapidly growing band of literary scholars, theorists, and critics has been working to integrate literary study with Darwinian social science These scholars can be identified as the members of a distinct school in the sense that they share a certain broad set of basic ideas They all take "the adapted mind" as an organizing principle, and their work is thus continuous with that of the "adaptationist program" in the social sciences Adaptationist thinking is grounded in Darwinian conceptions of human nature Adaptationists believe that all organisms have evolved through an adaptive process of natural selection and that complex functional structure in organic development gives prima facie evidence of adaptative constraint They argue that the human mind and the human motivational and behavioral systems display complex functional structure, and they make it their concern to identify the constituent elements of an evolved human nature: a universal, species-typical array of be havioral and cognitive characteristics They presuppose that all such characteristics are genetically constrained and that these constraints are mediated through anatomical features and physiological processes, including the neurological and hormonal systems that directly regulate perception, thought, and feeling Adaptationist social scientists identify "the adapted mind" as the foundation of human culture Adaptationist literary scholars concur, and they seek to bring literature itself' within the field of cognitive and behavioral features susceptible to an adaptationist understanding They identify human nature as a biologically constrained set of cognitive and motivational characteristics, and they contend that human nature is both the source and subject of literature They are convinced that through adaptationist thinking they can more adequately understand what literature is, what its functions are, and how it works--what it represents, what causes people to produce it and consume it, and why it takes the forms it does What I propose in this article is to give a sense of where Darwinian literary study now stands and to suggest where it might be headed After sketching out the history of Darwinian social science, I shall distinguish the adaptationist research program from other forms of evolutionary thinking in literary study I shall identify the main contributors to adaptationist literary study and describe some of their accomplishments At the end of the article, I shall take up a basic problem within the adaptationist program--the problem of the adaptive function of imaginative constructs--and propose a solution for that problem The Origin of Species was published in 1859, and within a decade it had almost completely changed the general view of evolution in the minds of the educated public While writing the Origin, Darwin had been fearful of endangering his general theory of evolution by alarming people in their most tender ideological anxieties Consequently, he had mentioned human beings only in passing Close to the end of the Origin, surveying the prospects for the theory he has propounded, he declared, "In the distant future, I see open fields for far more important researches Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" (488) The future was not so distant as Darwin fancied, at least not in the short run Darwin was himself much surprised by the magnitude of his success in establishing the basic principle of "descent with modification," and the success gave him the heart to fulfill his own prediction--to throw light on man and his history, and to place psychology on a new foundation In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), he located human beings in their ancestral lineage as primates …

Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies

Abstract: Nick Lacey Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies New York: Palgrave, 2000 x + 268 pp $5995 cloth; $2495 paper Narrative and Genre is the second installment of Nick Lacey's projected trilogy of practical classroom textbooks that respond to the fact that "all individuals experience media as a set of interrelated and interacting systems" The series is strongly oriented to a very specific rationale, and has a very specific audience and use in mind It takes its lead from a British Film Institute report's "signpost questions": WHO is communicating, and why? WHAT TYPE of text is it? HOW is it produced? HOW do we know what it means? WHO receives it, and what sense do they make of it? HOW does it PRESENT its subject? These lead to the key concepts of media agencies, categories, technologies, languages, audiences, and representations (1, qtd from Bowker 5-6) Lacey's first book, Image and Representation (1996), addresses language and representation; this one addresses categories and languages; the third, Media Institutions and Audiences (just published), addresses agencies and audiences Technologies are dealt with in relation to the other categories Lacey aims to "give the student the basic skills they require for post-16 [in American terms, precollegiate] education," and also, by emphasizing key concepts, to make his book relevant to any future media syllabus Narrative and Genre "differentiates between the pre- and post-16 student, a difference that represents not just 20 months of study but, for most, the rapid intellectual development of 16-18 year olds" It is organized accordingly: "each of the key concepts is dealt with, first, at a basic level, appropriate for students at the beginning of the course The following chapters introduce more advanced theories, such as ideology and semiotics, which are then applied to the concepts" (1-3) The first half of the book covers the theory of narrative, the second half the theory of genre Each subject has introductory and advanced chapters, and a "history of narrative" chapter is sandwiched in between the narrative theory parts Both the strengths and the weaknesses of the book derive from its very distinct practical aim Its strengths are its clarity of organization and writing, and its coverage of a fair amount of ground in narrative and genre theory Its style is straightforward, clear, and conversational The wealth of examples, taken largely but not wholly from pop culture, helps articulate difficult ideas Each chapter starts with a summary of aims and is clearly sectioned into topics and subtopics All these things, plus the scattered diagrams, tables, and exercises, recommend it to the beginning student Its weakness is an overly accommodating, uncritical stance towards the theoretical material it brings together It manages an uneasy synthesis of broad structuralist generalizations and "new historicist" ideological analysis of texts Lacey's exposition and application of the terms and concepts and arguments on which he relies does not provide the rigorous scrutiny it should The result is oversimplification-at worst, misreadings of texts, and general discussions burdened by conventional dogmas Following Tzvetan Todorov, narrative is seen as a "causal transformation": initial situation > disruption > resolution Lacey distinguishes story from plot, following Viktor Shklovsky and David Bordwell He describes Vladimir Propp's narrative structure as "character functions" in a series The "advanced" chapter integrates Barthesian semiotic and ideological analysis Genre is undertheorized, compared with narrative, which turns out to be a strength Instead of a bricolage of theories, we get more examples The description of the conventions of film noir and other genres in terms of character types, setting, iconography, narrative, and style is quite convincing (136-63) But I often found myself grouching in the margins of related discussions …

The Bog Body as Mnemotope: Nationalist Archaeologies in Heaney and Tournier

Abstract: The sometimes beautifully preserved Iron-Age bodies that used to turn up from time to time in the peat-bogs of northwestern Europe have moved and intrigued writers since P. V. Glob published his classic archaeological account, The Bog People, in 1965. Locating the specificity of the literary bog body in its ability to compress time and to render the past visible in the present, the figure functions as a mnemotope, defined provisionally as any chronotopic motif that manifests the presence of the past, the conscious or unconscious memory traces of a more or less distant period in the life of a culture or an individual. Texts by Seamus Heaney and Michel Tournier serve to focus a study of the play of mnemotopic values in archaeologies purporting to shed light on the workings of national and cultural memory. Analysis of these texts foregrounds the part played by bog bodies in rhetorical strategies that have proved particularly controversial. In following the entrails of ancient Nordicisms may we not be in danger of overlooking, for instance, the polylingual coincidence whereby bog, in modern Danish, is the word for book? (Brown 153) "High modernism," writes Brian McHale, "conspicuously privileged the spatial dimension of verticality or depth; indeed, the figure of depth was arguably one of modernism's master-tropes" (239). Which is not to claim that the widely held view of a modernism characterized by its temporal dominant is in urgent need of revision. "For 'depth' in modernism is spatialized time, the past (whether personal and psychological or collective and historical) deposited in strata" (240). Given the requirements of an argument framed by an overarching distinction between modernist and postmodernist poetic practices, McHale's sustained emphasis on the tensions between space and time comes as no surprise. His highly entertaining analysis of the archaeological tropes of modernism and their postmodernist detournement consistently foregrounds the devices used by modernist poets to privilege time over space, depth over surface, and the ingenious efforts of postmodernist poets to reverse those hierarchies. For my part, less concerned with making distinctions between modern and postmodern I will be slower to oppose time and space in my reflections on archaeological narratives, preferring to dwell, at least initially, upon their articulation in the work of archaeology and on the different ideological constructions placed upon that work, particularly with regard to issues of nation and nationalism. My approach will be informed by Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope. As with any chronotope, the artifact in an archaeological excavation is "the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied," where "[t]ime becomes, in effect, palpable and visible"; it functions as "the primary means for materializing time in space," "makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins" (Bakhtin 250). Bakhtin's "Concluding Remarks," a late postscript (1973) to "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," are of particular interest here in that, turning away from the major chronotopes of the essay proper providing the basis for distinguishing between genres, they focus attention on minor chronotopes or chronotopic motifs. As motifs, these chronotopes are coextensive with the texts in which they appear, as are the artifacts I wish to discuss. Since the primary function of the archaeological artifact as chronotope is to materialize a past in the present, to serve as a vehicle for personal and cultural memory, I will refer to it as a mnem otope, a term that should be fairly transparent but that I will define provisionally as a chronotopic motif manifesting the presence of the past, the conscious or unconscious memory traces of a more or less distant period in the life of a culture or, metaphorically, an individual. Of course, the mnemotope might come in many guises and be inflected by attitudinal values ranging from nostalgia and melancholy through desire, obsession and remembrance to horror and denial. …

A short guide to the theory of the sublime

Abstract: The article concerns selected important issues of poetics and its history. The authors analyze and interpret the history of the notion of the sublime. The article is an introduction to a theoretical part of a book about a possible theory of the literary work of art and communication that results from the experience of the sublime. The introductory article presents to the reader questions which are relevant to the sublime mainly in contemporary theoretical reflection (cf. Lyotard). The survey accounts for the period from the first century AD till twentieth century and deals with the theories of the sublime by Pseudo-Longinos, Nicolas Boileau, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Artur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, J.-F. Lyotard and others.

Metaphor Comprehension as Problem Solving: An Online Study of the Reading Process. (1)

Abstract: 1. Interaction Theory and Problem Solving A special issue on "Cognitive Approaches to Metaphor" very fittingly calls forth a collaboration between a literary critic and a cognitive psychologist. Taking advantage of the unique skills afforded by each discipline, we have attempted to forge an interdisciplinary approach to metaphor that--for the literary critic-- concretizes the hypothesized cognitive processes involved in reading the poetic text (e.g., image generation, filling in of "gaps," drawing of analogies), while--for the cognitive psychologist--provides the commentary which bears on the wider cultural and literary contexts of this text. Our particular convergence of literary criticism with cognitive psychology is to be found in the Interaction theory of metaphor. While this theory of metaphor is not a dominant one within which empirical research is currently being conducted, (2) it has the potential, as the literary critic Ina Biermann has stated, for providing "a sound basis for the empirical study of metaphor in literature and specifically in poetic texts" (63). What is more, Interaction theory--by drawing "attention to the creative, 'online' strategic aspects of metaphor" (Gineste, Indurkhya and Scart 120)--is particularly suited to analyzing complex metaphors, to be appreciated in full when a poetic text is unraveled into its constituent parts and their interaction made explicit by the reader (as in the present study). In a previous essay, we have detailed the relationship between Interaction theory and Gestalt psychology, demonstrating that the very qualities of a metaphor which are stressed by Interaction theorists enable the study of metaphor to fall within the scope of a Gestalt-oriented cognitive psychology. (3) These major qualities are: (1) A metaphor is an emergent whole, created by an interaction between its primary and secondary subjects; (2) A single metaphor should be understood within a larger context (such as provided, typically, by the literary text); (3) Comprehending a metaphor is akin to problem solving, and in its most creative form ("productive thinking"; Wertheimer) involves an act of perceptual and semantic restructuring. The first two qualities make explicit the identification of a metaphor with a gestalt as a "shape or form": it is an emergent whole, which is fully comprehended once the interaction between its primary and secondary subjects is fully analyzed; such an analysis must be conducted at a higher level than that of a comparison of features (Tversky) and therefore requires a full textual-interaction analysis. In summary, these two qualities foreground the Gestalt emphasis on the significance of context in determining form and were the focus for our previous essay. The present essay focuses on the third quality, which readily lends itself to an empirical investigation. Such an investigation is important for a number of reasons. One is theoretical, derived within Gestalt psychology itself. A second is metatheoretical, creating a bridge between two different paradigms of cognition and among different areas of research. A third is pragmatic: to quote the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, "there is nothing so practical as a good theory" (169). We address each of these considerations in turn. First, in stressing problem solving we are placing textual analysis and metaphor comprehension within a Gestalt tradition of questioning "what happens if one really thinks, and thinks productively, and what may be the decisive features and the steps?" (Wertheimer 2). Our Gestalt-Interactionist approach views the reader as being faced with a problem-situation presented by the metaphor and by the text. We postulate that the reader will be going through a process of textual interpretation (i.e., the revision of suppositions and the filling in of semantic gaps, as discussed by Perry and Steinberg) while reading. The objective of the present study is thus to provide empirical support for viewing metaphor comprehension in terms of the cognitive process of problem solving, as students of literature begin to unravel a whole poetic text. …

Discovering and (re)covering the seventeenth-century religious lyric

Abstract: Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric Edited by Eugene R Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001 viii + 408 pp $5900 cloth Although the title-page of this essay collection does not indicate its status as a festschrift, one of its main purposes is evidently "to honor the teaching and scholarly career of John R Roberts" (viii) The focus chosen for the collection is indeed most apt, since extending the informed critical discussion of early modern English religious lyrics has been the achievement of Jack Roberts's career His pioneering annotated bibliographies of critical writing on Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, as well as his own articles and essay collections, and his unfailing support of younger scholars, have combined to enable the increased attention given to the seventeenth-century religious lyric over the past three decades As Claude Summers writes in the closing contribution to this volume, Roberts's "calculated strategy of restraint" in the bibliographies has made them available to critics of every tradition (336) His evenhandedness in presenting critical approaches with which he might not personally agree "bespeaks," in Summers's elegant formulation, Roberts's "understanding of the winding ways of scholarship and the mysteriousness of the creative process" (337) An annotated bibliography, in the hands of a sensitive and objective scholar such as Jack Roberts, can function as literary history in itself, charting the shifting currents of critical taste Criticism, after all, is an expression of an age as well as of the individuals who contribute to it The volume under discussion is no exception, being very much an essay collection of our time in its expressed aim to extend the canon of the poems generally implied by the phrase "seventeenth-century English religious lyric" The essays devote attention to a number of hitherto neglected groups, including women writers and English Catholics, as well as to poets who might be termed "minor" but whose work nevertheless adds to our understanding of the religious lyric and of the era As Kari Boyd McBride vividly puts it, the canon can have the same effect as urban light pollution, erasing the "dimmer stars" and leaving us with a "manageable set of constellations and bright suns" This volume takes us away from the familiar perspective, into the "desert, where darkness reveals the innumerable lights of the night sky and masks the relationships we thought we understood" (40) The rediscovered heavenly "lights" in this volume span the period from Robert Southwell and Elizabeth Middleton in the late sixteenth century to Joseph Beaumont and Thomas Traherne towards the end of the seventeenth Holding true to the editors' conviction that there are many more stars in the sky than the sparkling Donne and Herbert, the fifteen essays explore exciting new constellations The Scottish poet William Drummond keeps company with the anonymous author of Eliza's Babes, and the failed monk Patrick Cary finds himself in an adjacent essay to the maternal Mary Carey, author of the verse lament "Upon ye Sight of my abortive birth" In reviewing an essay collection it is impossible to give detailed attention to every contribution, though there are many here deserving of serious reading Among the most valuable, in my view, are those which implicitly or explicitly redefine the religious lyric through the individual case studies they have chosen: Patrick Cook's perceptive reading of Aemilia Lanyer's "Description of Cookeham" as a devotional lyric, for example, and Donna J Long's plausible claim that women's elegies form a gendered subgenre, the "recuperative religious lyric" Several essays situate devotional poets more firmly in their appropriate denominational group or doctrinal context, such as Ann Hurley's discussion of the "vivifying force" of Protestantism in the work of An Collins (234), and Kate Narveson's invented term "Anglianism" for the conformity to the established church evinced in the poems of William Austin (163) …

Prose Styles, Genres, and Levels of Analysis

Abstract: Defining style or determining how to analyze it has frequently been pronounced problematic, but recent work on another problematic concept--genre--can help clarify our understandings of style The increasing attention to non-fictional genres now coming from discourse studies--the interconnected fields of rhetoric and composition and applied linguistics--often makes little mention of style, but it nevertheless helps illuminate parallels between patterns of genres and patterns of styles I review here some of the ways in which work on written, but non-fictional, genres can help bridge two kinds of disciplinary divides in the study of style and genre: one between literary studies and discourse studies as well as another within discourse studies I then discuss one of the most frequently studied non-fictional styles, the epistemic style, which stands in opposition to a more verbal style typical of fiction, and some of the territory in between the epistemic and the verbal Disciplinary Approaches to Style The divide between literary studies and discourse studies has been rooted in understandings about value and purpose Literary studies has traditionally assigned value to fictional prose that it considered elevated, unique, or impressively difficult to achieve On that hierarchy of value, non-fictional styles have been considered less important subjects for stylistic analysis except when the writer of non-fiction has had a highly distinctive style A non-fiction writer like Carlyle, for instance, might be of interest for literary or unusual qualities in his style Discourse studies, on the other hand, has increasingly ignored literary style as a result of its own disciplinary mission: to help novice writers reach higher levels of proficiency in academic, professional, or workplace genres Discourse studies, therefore, has often been interested in humbler non-fictional texts or texts appearing to contain plain functional prose New work on genres over the last decade or two and new understandings of the highly differentiated nature of writing in different contexts have led to increased focus on the conventions and patterns in non-fictional genres--not the distinctive or individual traits of style that might earlier have led a scholar to compare Howells and Hemingway (Gibson) or Conrad, Lawrence, and James (Leech and Short) When we attempt to understand style in relation to genres, rather than individuals, the patterns of genre correspond closely to the patterns of style within them, and some of the larger patterns become clear A second divide occurs within discourse studies and involves levels of analysis The conceptual difficulty surrounding the term style seems to me best approached by seeing style as a level of analysis to be understood in relation to other more macro and micro levels The story of this divide is told partly in word choice Style, as a subject for analysis, occurs here and there in discourse studies, but not as often as it might Style, for instance, has been slowly disappearing from titles of sessions at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication Work on style still turns up in various guises, however, in rhetoric and composition Among rhetorical analysts, for instance, style may be discussed under the heading of tropes or figures of speech (Fahnestock and Secor) Similarly, linguists have their own disciplinary preferences for analyzing what the literary scholar might call style In 1971, linguist Nils Erik Enkvist wrote that "style and register are types of linguistic variation that linguists have tended to neglect" (49), and this seems still true despite increasing interest in genre among applied linguists Style seems not to be the word of choice or the level of analysis most comfortable for the linguist, who is likely to have disciplinary reasons for choosing register or lexicogrammatical In 1969 Crystal and Davy criticized the concept of register (61), but register has continued to be a preferred category among applied linguists …

The Sounds of Silence: Songs In Hollywood Films Since the 1960s

Abstract: Since the 1960s, filmmakers have responded to the demise of the classical Hollywood musical, especially to the loss of the convention that characters could spontaneously "burst into song" without realistic motivation. Nashville, All That Jazz, Yentl, and Everyone Says I Love You, as well as films we do not ordinarily think of as musicals, such as The Graduate and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, have developed new conventions for presenting song in film that build upon traditions established by studio-era musicals. When MGM brought out That's Entertainment in 1974, the anthology of spectacular musical numbers seemed like Hollywood's own eulogy to the end of an era in which song and film were united. The implicit message of That's Entertainment--delivered as much by the old film clips as by Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and the other aging stars who chattily introduced the numbers--was that they don't film songs like they used to. The message was essentially accurate: Hollywood no longer makes the type of film musical that flourished between the 1930s and the 1950s. Indeed, film critics have often lamented the musical's demise, as David Thompson did a few years ago in Sight and Sound: "Whatever happened to the musical?" Is it just that Astaire, Rogers, Kelly, Garland, and Charisse got too old--or too dead--to do it anymore? Did the astonishing age of American songwriting just lapse? [...] Did rock and roll crush the musical? Did the genre need the studio system, rich in chorines, arrangers and choreographers? Was it MTV? But if it was MTV (at least a derivative of music), why haven't the movies been capable of fashioning decent musicals since the late 50s? One moment we were getting Funny Face (1956), Silk Stockings (1957), and Gigi(1957)--and then there was nothing. (22) Crippled by economic difficulties, changing film and music styles, and the loss of the convention that allowed movies to present songs as spontaneous expressions of characters' feelings, contemporary cinema had to develop new conventions in order to incorporate musical entertainment into film narrative. While in fact the kind of musical Thompson describes has died, several films of the past forty years use songs just as imaginatively as did the films evoked by That's Entertainment. Nashville (1975), All That Jazz (1979), Yentl (1983), and Everyone Says I Love You (1996), as well as films we do not ordinarily think of as musicals, such as The Graduate (1967) and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1975), have developed new conventions for presenting song in film, conventions that build upon traditions established by the "classical" Hollywood musicals of the studio era. These new conventions, which we will explore, all in some way respond to the demise of the classical Hollywood musical, especially to the loss of the convention that characters could "burst into song" without realistic motivation. In order to understand the relation between recent approaches to presenting song and the history of songs in movies, we must first briefly survey the ways in which Hollywood initially developed the conventions for incorp orating songs into narrative cinema. Incorporating Song in the Classical Hollywood Musical The conventions of cinematic realism seemed to preclude the stage practice of spontaneously breaking into song to express one's feelings. In operettas and stage musicals, audiences had come to accept such outbursts as conventional, and applause after a song cushioned the awkward transition back to dialogue. But, in the late 1920s, film had no comparable conventions to rely upon for bridging the separation between singing and "regular" speech. Hence, very early film musicals nearly always concerned professional singers who sang only when they were performing for an on-screen audience, in order to provide a realistic "excuse" for the musical numbers. The Jazz Singer (1927) established cinema's "song-as-performance" convention. …

Stylistics: Oxford Introductions to Language Study

Abstract: Peter Verdonk. Stylistics: Oxford Introductions to Language Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiii + 124 pp. No price. Peter Verdonk's Stylistics deals with important theoretical issues in a clear and accessible manner. The book is refreshingly new and different from many other introductions to stylistics, in that the author avoids the "toolkit" approach popular with textbook writers. The latter frequently include overlong lists of stylistic and rhetorical devices, each illustrated with a few decontextualized examples. Underlying such approaches, one can feel a hankering for objectivity and scientificity: if readers have the right tools, they can successfully uncover the true or deep meaning of the text. Verdonk, mercifully, steers well away from such an approach; instead, he puts the emphasis squarely on the analysis of texts and only introduces particular stylistic devices if he needs them to show how the text under discussion achieves its effect. Moreover, all his analyses are not only meticulous but also sensitive, imaginative, and insightful. In the first couple of chapters the author discusses general issues, but the orientation remains practical throughout: thus, style and stylistics are defined with reference to the language of a newspaper headline, the context-embeddedness of style is discussed with reference to the blurb on the back cover of a volume of stories by Margaret Atwood, and the distinction between representational and referential use of language is introduced through the example of a poem by Thomas Hardy. Verdonk is particularly good on point of view or perspective, which he considers in relation to painting and poetry as well as narrative fiction. He makes a distinction between visual and mental, emotive, or ideological point of view, and shows how both perspectival dimensions are drawn upon in Pieter Saenredam's painting Interior of the Church of St. Bavo in Haarlem, 1636. Literary texts tend to be even more complex because they frequently contain multiple perspectives. The author looks at how the diversity of perspectives is represented in a poem by John Betjeman and in the opening paragraphs of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel An Artist of the Floating World. In his discussion of the latter passage, Verdonk also carefully disentangles the different voices of the first-person narrator, in particular the clash between "the voice of aesthetic appreciation" and "the voice of materialism" (33). The detailed analysis includes a consideration of such textual features as deixis, given-new information, and modality, as part of an overall evaluation of the narrator's ambivalent attitude and the reader's positioning with respect to it. This then leads on to an examination of the different methods of presenting speech and thought, focusing on the ambiguities involved in the use of free indirect discourse and the differences in the stream-of-consciousness techniques of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Chapter 6 is an attempt to draw all the previous strands together in the detailed interpretation of one complete literary text: a sonnet by Seamus Heaney included in the sequence "'Clearances': In memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984." Verdonk provides an interesting analysis of the inner conflict within the speaker, who finally, in an "undoubtedly well-intentioned attempt at self-denial" (60), betrays his professional standards in order to re-establish his union with his mother. Verdonk then shows how this inner conflict is represented by the "tortuous," "tension-ridden" language of the poem (61, 62). His analysis of the tensions arising from the pattern of enjambments is particularly insightful. The two-step approach that Verdonk advocates should be clear by now: an impressionistic discussion of the literary effect of the text is followed by a detailed analysis of stylistic features which either confirm or disconfirm this general impression. Thus, there is a movement from the macro- to the micro-level, with the two levels complementing each other. …

The Power of the Past: Structural Nostalgia in Elizabeth Bowen's the House in Paris and the Little Girls

Abstract: Elizabeth Bowen subjects both her characters and her readers to the dynamics of nostalgia in two of her novels. The House in Paris and The Little Girls are unique in Bowen's oeuvre in their use of "structural nostalgia"--a tripartite structure containing a section that takes place in the past put between two sections that take place in the present. Though this structure suggests that readers may simply engage in a nostalgic return along with the characters, Bowen uses it instead to force both her characters and her readers into a conscious examination of both the pleasures and the problems created by nostalgia. "Do we compromise in this matter of loving life by loving it at one remove-- in the past?" --Elizabeth Bowen, "The Bend Back" Of the enduring concerns that characterize twentieth-century fiction, an interest in the plasticity of narrative conventions and a sense of irrevocable change in the perception of time and history most fundamentally transformed our understanding of the novel. Nor are these two interests unrelated, for, as Paul Ricoeur asserts, "narrativity is the mode of discourse through which the mode of being we call temporality is brought to language" (99). A certain perception of time is inherent in any narrative, and narrative is one of the means by which we both depict and examine our conceptions of time. Therefore, it is not surprising that with the sense of rupture between past and present at the turn of the century came an unprecedented degree of experimentation with the form of narrative itself, and, indeed, Ricoeur calls the works of Woolf, Mann, Proust, Conrad, and Joyce "veritable laboratories for a fictive experience of time" (350). The authors of these laboratories push narrative conventions literally to their breaking point--to the point at which they no longer function as instruments of communication, which is what conventions are designed to enable and facilitate, but instead impede communication so that each text becomes, as Robert D. Newman suggests, "a narrative combated by its narration" (83). Elizabeth Bowen's interest in the way we live in time places her in direct dialogue with her experimental contemporaries. While her novels appear traditional by comparison, they nonetheless betray a high awareness of the intersection of time and narrative that manifests itself in Bowen's examination of the mechanics of nostalgia. This focus resonates with the project of writers like Woolf, who, horrified by the fragmentation of modern life, depict the unifying potential in shared nostalgia. Bowen's interest, however, lies more in exploring the dangers of an overwhelmingly personal and therefore isolating nostalgia, as the contrast between herself and her fellow countryman W. B. Yeats makes clear. Yeats, a supporter of the Gaelic League and its efforts to recover a culture that is all but, lost exploits popular nostalgia in an attempt to bring the Irish nation together, but Bowen, more properly a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy than Yeats, saw too much of the damage that nostalgia can do to a culture unwi lling to face present realities. The Big House culture that Bowen knew clung to a narrowly focused nostalgia that, far from uniting it with the rest of its country, further isolated it and led to its eventual dissolution. Consequently, Bowen is sensitive to nostalgia's negative effects more than its positive potentials, and her fiction reflects her own attempts to confront and correct the excesses of nostalgia. Two novels in particular stand out from her larger oeuvre because of the way in which they structurally recreate the disjunction between past and present. In both The House in Paris (1935) and The Little Girls (1964), Bowen twists the chronology of her fairly typical tripartite structure so that the middle section takes place in the past and divides the two sections that deal with the present. On one level such a framework implies simply a nostalgic return, but Bowen does much more than this with her temporal architecture. …

"Life without Parole": Metaphor and Discursive Commitment. (1)

Abstract: "Life without Parole": Metaphor and, Discursive Commitment1 Polonius. My Lord, the Queen would speak with you, and presently. Hamlet. Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? Polonius. By the' mass and `tis, like a camel indeed. Hamlet. Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius. It is back'd like a weasel. Hamlet. Or like a whale. Polonius. Very like a whale. Hamlet. Then I will come to my mother by and by. -Shakespeare Hamlet 3. 2. 374-83. Poor Polonius. The Prince is a mystery to him-and master of the nonsequitur. As Hamlet switches perceptions, dropping one to form the next, Polonius can only follow tamely behind. The dialogue is a whimsical lesson on authority but also a strong lesson on language and thought. It shows directly that figurative thought, the understanding that seeing is seeing-as, requires a capacity for unmaking perceptions as well as making them, and a capacity for irony as well as metaphor, a real-time awareness that the figures of perception are contingent and approximate, both true and not true at the same time. This is a view that differs in significant ways from the one offered by cognitive linguists in their recent work on a theory of metaphor. A leading figure among linguists working on metaphor, and probably the most recognizable to non-linguists, is George Lakoff. In a series of books, Metaphors We Live By in 1980, co-authored with philosopher Mark Johnson; Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things in 1987; and Philosophy in the Flesh in 1999 (also coauthored with Mark Johnson), Lakoff has worked out the details and implications of a cognitive semantics that he characterizes as an "embodied" or "experiential" realism. At the core of this account is a theory of bodily experience and the image schemas and primary metaphors growing out of that experience to form the basis for conceptual thought. The strong claim throughout Lakoff's work is that thought and language are not disembodied phenomena; nor is metaphor a special case of verbal activity, unique to poetry or art; instead, metaphor is fundamental to thought across all areas of cognition. Now, I am broadly convinced by the argument that mind, language, and metaphor are in some way embodied. But the way the argument is worked out, and the frequently large claims made for it, especially in Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh, have made me increasingly skeptical. Their manner of explaining metaphor as the activation of unconscious, basic-level schemas makes it difficult to account for the activity of a cultural subject acting as an ethical, intuitive agent capable of judgment. How this is so is something I can only sketch in for now. To do this, I am going to focus on the theory of metaphor proposed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, a theory which is an advance over Lakoff and Johnson's. And I am going to argue that the figure of the ethical, intuitive subject appears only as a ghost in the model of mind informing their theory of metaphor. An "ethical" subject, in this view, is not engaged necessarily in good ethical behavior, but is situated always and inevitably in a scene describable in ethical terms-a subject understood to be always at least somewhere, doing something, in relation to someone (this is the basic pragmatic premise). And an "intuitive" subject is a subject intelligently aware of being not only in but involved in a situation and in the actions and meanings in play within it. Though Turner and Fauconnier's theory requires such a figure and depends fundamentally on its capacity for judgment, the theory itself offers no account of it. But Turner and Fauconnier's theory does important work, and metaphor is only one example of a wide range of cognitive phenomena that they seek to describe according to a general model of conceptual integration or blending. Still, metaphor is a central topic for them, as typified by Turner's account of the sentence, "Vanity is the quicksand of reason," an example of a general XYZ figure, or "X is the Y of Z," as in "money is the root of all evil," or "brevity is the soul of wit" (Turner 53). …

A Minimal, Lexicalist/constituent Transfer Account of Metaphor

Abstract: Cognitive Theories of Metaphor Within literary study, the most prominent cognitive approach to metaphor is that of George Lakoff and Mark Turner. In the Lafoff/Turner account, metaphor is pervasive in cognition. It organizes and orients how we think. It even creates entities that we think about. Metaphor, in this view, is not merely a local phenomenon of the sort found in explicit comparisons, such as "Billboards are warts on the landscape." Metaphor is, rather, a complex hierarchy of structures in which local, and often implicit, comparisons serve as instances of much more abstract metaphorical schemas, instances that are interpretable only in light of those larger schemas. Thus "We lost him," spoken by a doctor and referring to a patient who died in surgery, is a metaphor that operates unconsciously by reference to an encompassing metaphorical structure, DEATH IS DEPARTURE (Lakoff and Turner 2). In cognitive science more generally, there are, of course, other accounts of metaphor as well. The Lakeoff/Turner view is certainly significant, but it is not the only contender. Another prominent account derives from the work of Tversky, Ortony, and others. In this account, metaphor is fairly localized. It may organize and orient how we think, but it does so primarily in explicit and self-conscious cases. In Ortony's view, the implicit metaphors isolated by Lakoff and others are lexicalized ("Emotion"). In our mental lexicons, lose simply includes a meaning along the lines of "try to keep someone alive and fail." It is not a metaphor. For Lakoff and Turner, metaphors are most importantly broad schemas, such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY, through which we organize our thought about target domains. For Tversky, Ortony, and others adopting constituent transfer (CT) approaches, metaphors are most importantly local comparisons in which we transfer lexical constituents from a source to a target, as when we transfer "ugly" and "disfiguring" from "wart" (the source) to "billboards" (the target) in "Billboards are warts on the landscape." In short, there are two significant, complementary differences between these accounts. The first concerns lexical storage--whether most common idioms are fully lexicalized, thus non-metaphorical, or continue to rely on metaphorical processes. The second concerns the nature and extent of metaphorical processes--whether metaphor is global or local, primarily unconscious or primarily conscious, etc. The issues here are not inconsequential. Most obviously, we are likely to understand the human mind differently if we see it as employing metaphorical models locally and self-consciously, with some cases of implicit metaphorical thought, or if we see it as operating primarily by unconscious patterns of metaphor which actually create significant portions of the structure of our target domains (i.e., create a great deal of the objects we imagine ourselves to be studying). In keeping with this, some writers have seen the work of Lakoff, Turner, and others as contributing to a post-structural and even deconstructive project in which the certainties of logical inference and empirical investigation may be exposed as tropes. Moreover, this view of metaphor has been extended to cross-cultural study by writers such as Kovecses, who has argued that there are significant cultural differences in conceptual metaphor and thus that universals in this area are quite limited. This runs directly contrary to what one might expe ct from some other linguistic approaches (e.g., approaches inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, according to which there is only one language, Human [Chomsky 26; for discussion, see Jenkins 78-79]--though Chomsky does not treat metaphor per se). In addition to these, "structural" differences, there is the procedural question of how the Lakoff/Turner account generates and interprets non-lexicalized metaphors "algorithmically." It is a general principle of cognitive science that any explanation should be set out in a series of steps involving only structures and contents of the cognitive architecture. …

Reading Literature/culture: A Translation of "Reading as a Cultural Practice"

Abstract: In September 1983, Pierre Bourdieu and Roger Chartier concluded an interdisciplinary conference in the Provencal town of Saint-Maximin with a discussion on the practice of reading. The conversation between the two men was published with essays from the conference under the title Pratiques de la lecture (Practices of Reading) in 1985, edited by Chartier. In their stimulating dialogue published as "La Lecture: Une Pratique culturelle" ("Reading as a Cultural Practice"), Bourdieu and Chartier synthesize and comment on many of the themes presented by other scholars at the conference. Their commentary on reading as a cultural practice should be of particular interest to scholars and students of French intellectual culture and of literary and cultural studies. Those interested in the development of Bourdieu's thought will find that his comments form a useful introduction to his ideas on cultural production. The exchange between the two French thinkers is presented here for the first time in English. Long before his death in January 2002, Pierre Bourdieu had joined the prestigious ranks of France's most celebrated scholars and intellectuals. The sociologist had taken his place among an impressive list of contemporaries-- including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault--in the tradition of French intellectuals. Bourdieu's extensive and wide-ranging body of research has been of tremendous impact in a number of academic disciplines in France and abroad as well as in other more mainstream realms of French society--what Bourdieu influentially theorized as "fields." His influence in America stems from the success of certain of his books, especially Distinction and The Rules of Art. In France, Bourdieu's reputation dates back much further, originating in his work on Algeria and the French education system in the sixties, and it bore much more radical connotations than it did in America. This is in large part due to his association with the intellectual effervescence of the sixties and to the correspondence betwee n his key themes--education, culture, Marxist critique--and those of May '68. In addition to the reach of his most well-known books, Bourdieu's influence spread further through his prestigious university posts (including the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the College de France) and esteemed publishing outlets. From his editorship of the collection "Le Sens Commun" for Editions de Minuit and the series "Raisons d'Agir" for Editions du Seuil to his direction of the journals Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales and Liber, Bourdieu brought about an impressive lineage of scholarship and research dedicated to examining the production of culture through the various lenses of history, sociology, and anthropology. Roger Chartier's historical research shares a number of commonalities with that of Bourdieu. A generation younger than Bourdieu, Chartier has made himself known in academic circles for a more traditional historical brand of research, one that nonetheless recalls Bourdieu's style of sociology. He has written extensively on early modern France and Europe in investigations of print culture, education, and the changing meaning of authorship. The social nature of writing, reading, and literary production is a constant theme in Chartier's work, and his influence has been most directly felt in the development of book history (e.g., Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, and The Order of Books). In some ways similar to New Historicism, book history examines the conditions and constraints of writing and publishing as well as their relationships with cultural institutions in the production and circulation of meanings. The central idea of the dialogue can be summed up by Chartier's statement that "reading [...] can never be reduced to what is read" (672). The discussion between the two men proposes ways in which, in Bourdieu's words, "[r]eading obeys the same laws as other cultural practices" (667). …

Minding the Gap: Visual Perception and Cinematic Gap Filling

Abstract: Models of narrative in film narratology and cognitive psychology are problematic since they rely on linguistic models of computation and complex, high-order cognitive operations. But because visual perception and cognition operate differently from language perception and cognition, the existing models are unable to address the effects of visual data on film comprehension. Gap filling, in particular, requires the perceiver to draw on visual and audio memories, ones that are not necessarily computed in propositional, high-order cognitive sequences. A sample analysis of a scene from Dead Poets Society that features a dramatic gap not only exposes the problematics of existing models but also points toward new and more inclusive models of narrative comprehension. These models rely on a variety of mechanisms of memory storage and retrieval, ones that operate simultaneously and, therefore, explain the speed and efficiency of cinematic gap filling. Introduction Imagine a screening of Vertigo stopped once Madeline is found dead by the tower, and the audience is asked "What happened? How did she die? Was she killed?" The audience may find it difficult to answer definitively; different perceivers would provide different scenarios, and they are unlikely to argue about which is true, but instead assume that the film will provide both explanation and closure in due time. Indeed, narratives operate in a curious way: while they tell us stories, we, the perceivers, are rarely willing to commit to plot lines or even to predictions about the progression and conclusion of the story before the text delivery is over. While narratives set-up expectations (which take the form of hypotheses), they often take new and surprising plot directions, ones that require perceivers to rearrange knowledge of plot in significant ways. Importantly, then, perceivers are ready to alter, cancel, or embrace new hypotheses as the text provides them with new information. In other words, the fabula, or the complete story is a product that a perceiver commits to only after the perception of the text is over. (1) And while the narrative as a product is being constructed during the perception, it is constantly in flux, or open to be in flux, until perception is over. Consequently, the conclusive narrative of a text is a post-perception product. Moreover, as a post-perception product, the narrative is constructed from memories reorganized in a causal order so as to yield the most coherent story possible. Thus it is important to understand that story, or fabula, is a product of an array of high-order cognitive activities significantly different from low-order perceptual processes. (2) Empirical research on narrative suggests that narrative structures are a product of high-order mental operations. In a series of related experiments, Gee and Grosjean asked subjects to read and then recount a short narrative. They analyzed spontaneous pause duration between sentences and then matched them with Lehnert's complex analysis of narrative structure into simple plot units. What Gee and Grosjean found was that "as the narrative complexity of a break between two sentences increases, the pause produced by a speaker also increases -- and in a very systematic way" (72). But while Gee and Grosjean were primarily interested in providing empirical evidence of narrative structure, their research reveals another important phenomenon. They found a correlation between story parsing and pauses only when subjects retold a story after reading it to themselves. When they asked subjects to read the story aloud (even in a second reading), the pauses did not equally well match the narrative structure parsing (81). Gee and Grosjean do not explain why spontaneous retelling reflects so much more accurately a story's narrative structure, but in the context of our discussion it is clear; retelling takes into account that a narrative has been fully comprehended and interpreted before it is retold. …

Anti-Edibles: Capitalism and Schizophrenia in Margaret Atwood's the Edible Woman

Abstract: Typically, critics have read Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman as either an optimistic celebration of female "liberation" or a materialist-feminist protest. But Atwood's style--primarily her manipulation of a shifting narrative point of view and her use of an unbalanced, tripartite structure--reflects a more complex picture of capitalism and female subjectivity in the 1960s. By varying structural and narrative form within the novel and by using anorexia as a discursive technique, Atwood constructs states of paranoia, decomposition, and schizophrenia to emphasize the dynamic nature of the capitalist system--its exploitative disposition as well as its potential to release female desire from systemic constraint. "[S]ee that she eat and drink as a good Christian should, comporting herself to her condition, and making the best of it." --Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, Or The History of a Young Lady Recent feminist critics of Margaret Atwood's 1969 novel The Edible Woman tend to be divided on the question of whether Marian, the novel's heroine, achieves "liberation" from the economic and power system of the early 1960s that scripts her subordination. The criticism of the novel generally turns on the meaning of the "edible-woman" (a cake shaped as a woman). Taking the cake as a consummate image for the novel, critics tend to read it as either a symbol of Marian's liberation from or as her reentry into the field of consumer capitalism. (1) To Glenys Stow, the cake "is of course, a deliberate symbol of the artificial womanhood which her world has tried to impose on her," and with the "crazy feast" at the novel's conclusion "Marian breaks out of the expected social pattern" (90). Sharon Wilson concedes that Marian "returns to [the] society" that has oppressed her, but maintains there is symbolic agency in Marian's return: "By baking, decorating, serving, and consuming the cake-woman image she has been condit ioned to project, Marian announces, to herself and others, that she is not food" (96). (2) Meanwhile, critics like Gayle Green affirm that even though "The cake lady [...] is a powerful symbol, a gesture of resistance to a system that would devour her [,...] it is difficult to see how this symbol will translate into action [...]. Marian evolves--in the terms of the novel--from prey to predator" (96, 111). But as Robert Lecker and Darlene Kelley have pointed out, the novel's final chapter does not provide comfortable closure, for it raises more questions than it answers. (3) When readers complete the novel, when the edible woman is finally digested by Duncan and Marian, the question that seeps beyond the text is, "what now?," and the answer does seem to be one of two options--that Marian continue her career by returning to her position at Seymour Surveys or finding a similarly dead-end job (she tells Duncan that she is looking for another job) or that she get married and become a mother. These are her choices within the system. In "A Note from the Author," Margaret Atwood herself has said that the novel's "self-indulgent grotesqueries [... derive [...] from the society by which she found herself surrounded. [...] It's noteworthy that my heroine's choices remain much the same at the end of the book as they are at the beginning: a career going nowhere, or marriage as an exit from it. But these were the options fo r a young woman, even a young educated woman, in Canada in the early sixties" (312-13). For this reason, I would argue that the way to solve the impasse in criticism of The Edible Woman is not to focus on the novel's final chapter, not to seek closure and stable interpretation, but to listen to the silences of a conclusion that returns readers again to the place where the heroine's troubles began. Thus, we should resist imposing final, stable meaning onto the "edible-woman" cake, and rather seek the space where the silences abound, where Marian loses the ability to speak for herself in the first person, where her body speaks through anorexia--in short, the space where she becomes not only most marginalized from dominant culture but also at the same time one of its most penetrating critics. …

Trapped in Language: Aspects of Ambiguity and Intertextuality in Selected Poetry and Prose by Sylvia Plath

Abstract: The interplay of intertextuality and ambiguity is a major feature in the work of Sylvia Plath. Critics may avoid biographical readings of her work by combining linguistic and literary approaches. Emphasis on the linguistic and meta-linguistic aspects of selected examples of her poetry and prose illustrates that what is unsettling about Plath's style is in fact unsettling about language in general. "Language speaks," to adopt the by-now proverbial dictum; it speaks all the diachronic changes of which it is the repository. Historically determined and shaped, language has its own dynamics, and users of language, however contrived the transformations they impose upon it, cannot escape them. While Plath skillfully exploits this potential by creating intertextual nets derived from a variety of cultural and personal experiences, she nevertheless falls prey to the very ambiguities she thereby establishes. I In our everyday scheme of things, we like to separate "literary" from "ordinary" language use. While literary language is often marked by the deliberate exploitation of linguistic ambiguity, ordinary language use relies strongly on conventionalized elements of speech, whose rules and regularities have been agreed upon by the members of a given culture. To put it more bluntly: where ordinary speech seeks to communicate, literary language often consciously furthers the confusion of the reader by accepting or exploring those aspects of language use that run counter to smooth communication. This broadly corresponds to our distinction between representation and reference: while literature creates the representation, the version of a world, ordinary language pretends to point to the real world. But this distinction between ambiguous literary representation and communicative reference is never absolute, and both uses of language include elements from either mode. Contemporary literary theory and criticism is cognizant of the ambiguous nature of literary representation. Indeed, it has been stipulating ambiguity as a critical paradigm or sine qua non of "literature" for quite sometime. It is therefore striking that some critics or critical ideologies remain so strongly attracted to the possibility that an author's biography might remove ambiguity and promise interpretive closure. Their presumption is that, superimposed on the poetic material, a chronology of events of an author's life can provide the oeuvre with narrative coherence and resolve its inherent ambiguities. Criticism of the American poet Sylvia Plath offers a good case in point. Her suicide in 1963 continues to be taken as the telos toward which her life as well as her writing moved with relentless inevitability. From this perspective, her every poem makes another small step toward this terrible finale. Such a critical angle can serve particular aesthetic and political" aims, for it provides her late poetry especially with a particular, deadly authenticity while confirming Plath's role as victim of patriarchal society in general and of her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, in particular. This is a position often adopted by feminist critics. Sadly, rather than freeing the poet from the dismissive epithet "confessional" that has been bestowed upon her, especially by male critics, feminist defenders of Plath have thereby only confirmed the biographical quality of her work. (1) Furthermore, such criticism has ignored significant aspects of Plath's poetic style that have implications far beyond the limits of her life and work and that inevitably also concern the critic looking for closure. (2) As a consequence of such problems, we will attend to those aesthetic and stylistic issues raised by Plath's poetry neglected by criticism intent on reading her work biographically. Our point of departure is the ambiguity of literary language, its paradoxically enabling and undermining effect on the poet. Ambiguity is an omnipresent stylistic feature in Sylvia Plath's work and intrinsically linked to her use of intertextuality. …

Meaning, Language, and Mind: An Interview with Mark Turner

Abstract: June 2001 James W. Underhill (JU): For a long time, metaphor was considered to be simply one of a number of rhetorical figures or tropes which were used for special effect in speech, and poets were thought to be their undisputed masters. Philosophers tended to follow Plato in not trusting metaphor, considering it to be a tool used by the sophist to bewitch and mislead the naive listener. In any case, few philosophers have followed Aristotle's more tempered view that metaphor can be a useful pedagogical tool as long as both the user and the listener are aware that they are engaged in using figurative language. In recent years, however, the status of metaphor in intellectual debate has been radically revised. Since the 1970s, scholars from various academic disciplines have placed metaphor at the center of debates on literature, language, philosophy, and cognitive science. Among the philosophers, Derrida and de Man have argued that rhetoric is inescapable. According to them, the metaphors of philosophers' discourse can no longer be treated as having a decorative function; rather their metaphors structure and shape their discourse. Certain linguists have also taken up the idea that metaphor is far more fundamental and pervasive. In 1985, for example, the editors of The Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic science, Wolf Paprotte and Rene Driven, chose the title The Ubiquity of Metaphor when they included, in their 29th volume, articles from psychologists trying to determine at what age the child's mind begins to master metaphor and articles from linguists looking at the relationship between metaphor and word formation (for example, we arrive at dragonfly by metaphoric reference to both dragons an d flies). Geoffrey Leech, the English linguist, in his Semantics (1974/1981), considered metaphor not as a peripheral issue, but rather as a fundamental form of semantic transfer (214-19) that can allow us to make what he calls a "conceptual fusion," as in his example from an Anglo-Saxon poem, meer-hengest (sea-steed), in which a boat is considered metaphorically in terms of a horse. Perhaps one of the most interesting developments in the study of metaphor is the Lakoff-Johnson argument that a great deal of our language (and, consequently, our understanding of the world) is, in a certain way, "structured" by a series of proto-metaphors, underlying conceptual structures which are implied by the language that we use. Lakoff and Johnson argue, for example, that we can only understand the sentence "That's an indefensible argument" in metaphoric terms, by referring to the underlying proto-metaphor: ARGUMENT IS WAR, which implies that there are attackers and defenders, territories to be defended and castles to be a ssailed, etc. They argue that another proto-metaphor, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, underlies numerous everyday expressions and phrases. We might, for example, think of "Our relationship is really going places," "Our relationship has come to a standstill," "You and me are going nowhere." The idea that proto-metaphors Form a basic cognitive structure to which we often refer without thinking in everyday language can be used to reinterpret much oF our speech. "You're wasting my time!" could be reinterpreted using the Lakoff and Johnson hypothesis as being structured along the lines of a fundamental premise: TIME IS MONEY. It is only because we can. count money and measure time, then superimpose counting on measuring, that the idea of wasting time becomes intelligible in terms of wasting money. There is, according to Lakoff and Johnson, something very useful in perceiving and organizing the world in terms of proto-metaphors. Our metaphors highlight aspects or facets of something, allowing us to describe something unfamiliar or obscure in terms of something that we know well. The problem is that metaphors and proto-metaphors not only highlight, but also hide aspects of a thing. Love may share some characteristics with a journey. …