‘In the mind’s eye’: A cognitive linguistic re-construction of WD Snodgrass’ ‘Matisse: The Red Studio’

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-144
Author(s):  
Maria-Eirini Panagiotidou
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cognitive Poetics ◽  
Reader Responses ◽  
Cognitive Linguistic ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
Textual Cues ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Mind's Eye

Although ekphrastic poetry has always been a popular poetic genre, the twentieth century saw a profusion in the production of literary texts that describe art objects. Ekphrastic criticism is abundant with critical discussions raising questions concerning aesthetics, the value of artistic creations, and the nature of representation. However, these discussions rarely consider the experience of reading an ekphrastic poem or account for readers’ responses to ekphrastic texts. The present paper uses the tools and methodology of cognitive poetics to examine how WD Snodgrass’ ekphrastic poem ‘Matisse: The Red Studio’ may be mentally reconstructed. The analysis focuses on figure–ground relations and the psychological notion of attention to explore how textual cues are brought together to create a representation of the painting described in the poem. It examines the use of particular lexical items that denote colors, forms, and textures as they become available for processing into objects. While addressing Snodgrass’ questions concerning the ownership of art objects and the notion of ‘still movement’, it also illustrates the ability of cognitive poetics to account for reader responses to ekphrastic poems in a way that complements and expands on trends in linguistics and literary criticism.

scholarly journals Reflections on Linguistic Poetics

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-127
Author(s):  
O. G. Revzina
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
Cognitive Capacity ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cognitive Poetics ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Holistic Perception ◽  
The Impact

Cognitive poetics is a part of cognitive science. Cognitive science is a scholarly paradigm of the second half of the 20th – first decades of 21st cent. Cognitive science shares all traits of scholarly paradigm: critics of predecessors, new understanding of investigation object and new conceptual apparatus, new tasks and effective methods of its solution, and its indraft, in the capacity of obligatory, into material of scholarly of fiction. It’s always written about discourse of fiction, that it is at the interface of literary criticism and linguistics. It is exactly literary texts that form the “figure” of modern cognitive poetics, whereas its “background” is religious, humorous texts and also mass-media products. Cognitive poetics devotes itself to the exploration of mental processes, accompanied by communication of reader and text. Notions of prototype and uniformity, conceptual metaphor and metaphorical blending are treated, resting on works of M. Freeman, G. Lakoff, K. Hautley, P. Stockwell. Special attention is payed to incompatibility of cognitive poetics, that proclaims deligitimation of fiction, with philological and structural-semiotic approaches, with ideas of aesthetic function of language and aesthetic value of verbal work of fiction, with concepts of mimesis and catharsis by Aristoteles. In the last part analysis by M. L. Gasparov of the verse by A. Fet (Чудная картина, Как ты мне родна: Белая равнина, Полная луна, свет небес высоких и блестящий снег И саней далеких Одинокий бег) and the verse by Percy Bysshe Shelley «Ozymandias» are discussed. M. L. Gasparov is far from cognitive poetics, but he builds his analysis, resting on the major human cognitive capacity – visual perception and tridimensional text space, reconstructed by him, which implicitly refers to cognitive deixis. Holistic perception is superposed with strong emotional experience and unselfish satisfaction. P. Stockwell, on the contrary, starts from the notion of cognitive deixis and describes its kinds, but, analyzing “Ozymandias”, he applies to well-known figures of different senders and receivers. The parallel is made between sculpture and poet and then – between destroyed statue and text as an archetype. The verse is also concentrated on the production process of creation and on the act of reading: traveler reads inscription and then reads it to narrator, which in its turn reads it to us in the form of verse. Finally Stockwell reaches that explanation of the impact on the reader, made by this verse. Thus, incompatible in theory turns to be pretty compatible in practice.

Addison as Critic and Critical Theorist

2021 ◽  
pp. 95-114
Author(s):  
Marcus Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Critical Word ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Critical Theorist

In the first half of the twentieth century Addison’s literary-critical and theoretical works were understood as early formulations of a literary aesthetics, as important theoretical statements on wit and imagination, as pioneering exercises in the analysis and sponsorship of vernacular literary texts, as influential popularizations of philosophical ideas. These writings have in recent decades, however, been less regularly a subject of attention. Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s Addison’s essays in literary criticism and theory were often treated as though they were covert works of political ideology, as affirmations of ‘a hierarchic Chain of Seeing’. This essay takes Addison at his literary-critical word. It stresses the epistemological, rather than the sensational, elements in Addison’s critical theorizing. In particular, it argues that Addison the critic was fundamentally concerned with recognizably Aristotelian pleasures of mimesis. As readers we take a double mimetic pleasure, not only from our recognition of literature’s imitations of the natural world but also from our recognition of the contextual particulars—political, historical, literary, discursive—which inform writings of earlier times.

Katherine Mansfield and Translation

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Specific Interest ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Critical Interest

Our understanding of Anglophone modernism has been transformed by recent critical interest in translation. The central place of translation in the circulation of aesthetic and political ideas in the early twentieth century has been underlined, for example, as well as translation’s place in the creative and poetic dynamics of key modernist texts. This volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies offers a timely assessment of Mansfield’s place in such exchanges. As a reviewer, she developed a specific interest in literatures in translation, as well as showing a keen awareness of the translator’s presence in the text. Throughout her life, Mansfield engaged with new literary texts through translation, either translating proficiently herself, or working alongside a co-translator to explore the semantic and stylistic challenges of partially known languages. The metaphorical resonances of translating, transition and marginality also remain key features of her writing throughout her life. Meanwhile, her enduring popularity abroad is ensured by translations of her works, all of which reveal sociological and even ideological agendas of their own, an inevitable reflection of individual translators’ readings of her works, and the literary traditions of the new country and language of reception. The contributions to this volume refine and extend our appreciation of her specifically trans-linguistic and trans-literary lives. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of translation on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of translation on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism.

TRANSLATION AS MENTAL INTERPRETATION ACTIVITY IN LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (28) ◽  
pp. 43-53
Author(s):  
Svitlana Gruschko
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Cultural Communication ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Cross Cultural Communication ◽  
Cross Language

In the article the phenomenon of translation is regarded as mental interpretation activity not only in linguistics, but also in literary criticism. The literary work and its translation are most vivid guides to mental and cultural life of people, an example of intercultural communication. An adequate perception of non-native culture depends on communicators’ general fund of knowledge. The essential part of such fund of knowledge is native language, and translation, being a mediator, is a means of cross-language and cross-cultural communication. Mastering another language through literature, a person is mastering new world and its culture. The process of literary texts’ translation requires language creativity of the translator, who becomes so-called “co-author” of the work. Translation activity is a result of the interpreter’s creativity and a sort of language activity: language units are being selected according to language units of the original text. This kind of approach actualizes linguistic researching of real translation facts: balance between language and speech units of the translated work (i.e. translationinterpretation, author’s made-up words, or revised language peculiarities of the characters). The process of literary translation by itself should be considered within the dimension of a dialogue between cultures. Such a dialogue takes place in the frame of different national stereotypes of thinking and communicational behavior, which influences mutual understanding between the communicators with the help of literary work being a mediator. So, modern linguistics actualizes the research of language activities during the process of literary work’s creating. This problem has to be studied furthermore, it can be considered as one of the central ones to be under consideration while dealing with cultural dimension of the translation process, including the process of solving the problems of cross-cultural communication.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

Double Thoughts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Dean
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
De Man ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

Coetzee’s interest in destabilizing the boundaries of literature and philosophy is most evident in later fictions such as Elizabeth Costello. But as Andrew Dean argues in this chapter, this interest in moving across boundaries in fact originates much earlier, in Coetzee’s quarrel with the institutions and procedures of literary criticism. Coetzee used the occasion of his inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Cape Town (Truth and Autobiography) to criticize the assumption that literary criticism can reveal truths about literature to which literary texts are themselves blind. Influenced in part by such figures as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Coetzee posed a series of challenging questions about the desires at stake in the enterprise of literary criticism. Developing these thoughts, Dean explores the way in which Coetzee’s earlier fiction, including such texts as Foe (1986), is energized by its quarrelsome relationship with literary criticism and theory, especially postcolonial theory.

Romantic Capabilities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Ecological Design ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Contemporary Media

Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and make visible ways the texts were already about their relationship to medium. Devising and modelling a methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, it contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals capabilities in media that can transform how we understand the text’s significance for the original historical context in which it was created. Following an introductory chapter that explains and justifies its approach to the archive, the book analyses significant popular “media behaviors” exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake’s pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and stereoscopic photographers to Walter Scott’s historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen’s novels and their imaginary country estates. Blake emerges from the study as an important theorist of how viral media can be used to undermine law, someone whose art deregulates through the medium of its audiences’ heterogeneous tastes and conflicting demands for wisdom. Scott’s novels are shown to have fostered a new experience of vision and understanding of frame that helped launch modern immersive media. Finally, Austenian realism is revealed as a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends.

scholarly journals Dancing with Myriam: Creating and Staging a New Metaphor for the Process of Translation

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Paula Pratt
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
African Women ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
North African ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Oral Interpretation ◽  
Doctoral Work ◽  
As Relationship ◽  
The Relationship

This article tells the story, and analyzes the development, of a “staged metaphor” for the translation process, from its chance inception over ten years ago, to the more recent revision and staging of the script. In 2005, I was teaching world literature at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, while also researching the writing of Irish and North African women. I chose to focus on those women writing in Irish, Tachelhit, Arabic, or French, whose work had been translated into English. I was initially inspired by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poem, “The Language Issue,” which compares the "sending forth" of her writing to a potential reader, to the story of Moses being discovered by Pharoah’s daughter. My ultimate goal was to produce a chamber theatre play, based on the Irish and North African texts, which would dramatize a metaphor for the translation process. This was an outgrowth of my doctoral work, in which I had drawn on oral interpretation theorists, who see the performance of literary texts as an accepted means of doing literary criticism. Accordingly, I also expanded the project to include the observations of translation theorists, and I incorporated these into the creation of the script for a chamber theatre performance. After directing a staging of the script in Morocco in 2007, I realized that I needed to add more choreographed movement, and to incorporate the character of Moses’s and Myriam’s mother into the metaphor. The addition of dance, and the foregrounding of the relationship between Myriam and her mother, draws unapologetically on female relationships. It is my conclusion that the revised metaphor, with the addition of these elements, is validated by Yves Bonnefoy’s and Henri Meschonnic's depictions of “translation as relationship with an author,” and that, the metaphor does indeed “provide . . . fresh insights.”

scholarly journals Glasnost in Soviet literary criticism: current debates on the Russian national character (1988-1990)

Literator ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 89-102
Author(s):  
H. Mondry
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
National Character ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Reforms ◽  
Leading Role

Re-evaluation of the cultural heritage of the past has been an integral part of Soviet literary criticism. From 1987 up to the present, literary criticism has played a leading role in the promotion of the economic, social and political reforms of perestroika. Literary critics use the methodology of social deconstruction in the interpretation of the literary texts of the past, actualising the problematics of the texts in accordance with their relevance to contemporary Soviet issues.

The Location of “Korean” Culture: Ch'oe Chaesŏ and Korean Literature in a Time of Transition

2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serk-Bae Suh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Early Life ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Japanese Empire ◽  
Colonial Korea ◽  
Korean Culture ◽  
Korean Literature ◽  
Cultural Autonomy ◽  
Japanese Colonial

This essay focuses on Ch'oe Chaesŏ, a leading Korean intellectual, active translator of English literary criticism, and editor in chief of Kokumin Bungaku (National Literature), a prominent Japanese-language journal published in colonial Korea. Ch'oe asserted that the unfolding of history in the twentieth century demanded a paradigmatic transition from liberalism to state-centered nationalism in culture. He also privileged everyday life as allowing people to live as members of communities that ultimately are integrated into the state. By positioning Koreans firmly as subjects of the Japanese state, his argument implied that the colonized should be treated on a par with the colonizers. Further, Ch'oe advocated Koreans' cultural autonomy as an ethnic group within the Japanese empire. Tracing Ch'oe's early life and examining his critical essays on nation, culture, and state, the author discusses how his endeavors to establish an autonomous space for Korean culture simultaneously legitimized Japanese colonial control.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document