Coda: Literature, language, and creativity

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Media Environments ◽  
Cognitive Literary Studies ◽  
Creative Media

AbstractLiterature is often considered the creative expression of language par excellence. This coda considers how the perspectives from Construction Grammar, as they are outlined in this special issue, can enter into dialogue with recent developments in how literary studies address creativity. Construction Grammar concerns itself with the productive generation and manipulation of language in everyday contexts, but, as this special issue goes to show, these processes can also be discussed in terms of creativity and deployed to shed light on creative processes in the arts. Convergences between Construction Grammar and (cognitive) literary studies appear to emerge in particular around the question of creative practice in literary language and (1) in how far writing gives rise to particular kinds of creativity; (2) how one can generalize between different creative media, such as literature, painting and music; and (3) how writing-based creativity can be investigated. Literary studies with its interests in media environments, social/historical context and textual analysis might provide a larger testing ground for claims about the compatibility and incompatibility of everyday and literary creativity as they are put forward in this special issue.

Cognitive Literary Studies, Historicism, and the History of the Imagination

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralf Haekel
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Creative Imagination ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cognitive Literary Studies ◽  
The Mind

AbstractFor the past two decades, the scholarly discussion about the merits of neuroscience and cognitive science for literary studies has been, in Germany at least, a rather heated affair. This debate, however, has been much less interdisciplinary than the subject matter would suggest and has mainly taken placeThe need to historicise this relationship is part of a more encompassing claim. I believe it is necessary to focus on theory not as something external to, but as a self-reflexive aspect of, literature itself. This implies the need to investigate the mind and cognition only if it is part of the literary work’s self-reflexive scope within a given historical context. Historically, this reflexion presupposes a network in which scientific theories of the mind play a key role. My main example is the imagination. In this context, I will also focus on the rejection of dualism, or rather: the way that René Descartes’s philosophy, especially his distinction betweenOne key problem within CLS has been the focus on theThis historicist approach to cognition as a self-reflexive aspect of literature, on the one hand, and a reflection on science, on the other, necessarily implies a rejection of any universalising approach to literary works of art. The theoretical historicism proposed in this paper presupposes a turn towards the time-bound and the particular, and respective conceptualisations of authorship, literary production, and the text itself. In order to make my point, I will focus on one key concept and cognitive faculty in the history of the humanities: the creative imagination. A historical approach to the imagination in the light of cognitive science – such as championed by Alan Richardson and Mark J. Bruhn in the field of Romantic Studies – thus serves as my starting point. To make my argument, I will focus on three historically crucial phases as they are periods of transition both within literary history and the history of science: the early seventeenth century as the beginning of the scientific revolution, the Romantic period as a second scientific revolution, and literary Modernism as the formative phase of our contemporary scientific worldview. All three literary examples – Shakespeare, Coleridge, Joyce – can and must be seen as paradigmatic of their age as well as instrumental in bringing about literary change. At the same time, these examples will serve as flashlights to highlight a general trend.

scholarly journals Embodied Social Cognition and Comparative Literature

Poetics Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-186
Author(s):  
Lisa Zunshine
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Cognitive Approaches ◽  
Cognitive Literary Studies ◽  
Social Mind

There is a growing sense among scholars working in cognitive literary studies that their assumptions and methodologies increasingly align them with another paradigmatically interdisciplinary field: comparative literature. This introduction to the special issue on cognitive approaches to comparative literature explores points of alignment between the two fields, outlining possible cognitivist interventions into debates that have been animating comparative literature, such as those concerning “universals,” politics of translatability (especially in the context of world literature), and practices of thinking across the boundaries of media. It discusses both fields’ indebtedness to cultural studies, as well as cognitive literary theorists’ commitment to historicizing and their sustained focus on the embodied social mind.

Construction grammar and creativity: Evolution, psychology, and cognitive science

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Hoffmann
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Evolutionary Adaptation ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Present Issue ◽  
Verbal Creativity ◽  
Interdisciplinary Perspective ◽  
Cognitive Literary Studies ◽  
The Way

AbstractCreativity is an important evolutionary adaptation that allows humans to think original thoughts, to find solutions to problems that have never been encountered before, and to fundamentally change the way we live. Recently, one important area of creativity, namely verbal creativity, has attracted considerable interest from constructionist approaches to language. The present issue builds on this emerging field of study and adds an interdisciplinary perspective to it by also presenting the view from cognitive literary studies as well as psychology. First, however, this introduction surveys the recent issues arising in constructionist studies of verbal creativity.

The Poem as Icon

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret H. Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Major Elements ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Material Substance ◽  
Sensory Motor ◽  
Life Force ◽  
Cognitive Literary Studies ◽  
The Aesthetic

The objective in this book is to show how poetry enables us cognitively to aesthetically access, experience, and identify with the visible and invisible “being” of reality, with art as one cognitive expression of the aesthetic faculty, science another. Just as scientific knowledge of reality is achieved through physically exploring the far reaches of the visible and invisible worlds, so is poetic experience achieved through iconically simulating in semblance the “being” of reality that integrates both self and world in participatory unity. “Being” here should not be understood as the existence of material substance, but as the essence of all that is, both visible and invisible, material and immaterial, a life force in continuous flux and change. The book explores cognition as the sensory-motor-emotive-conceptual processes of “minding” and the aesthetic faculty as the processes of attention, imagination, memory, discrimination, expertise, and judgment that underlie all human cognition, including the arts and the sciences. Drawing from research such as blending and neurocognition in interdisciplinary cognitive literary studies, the book attempts to resolve long-standing questions about the function of poetry. Accepting the premise that poetry is its own artistic reason for being, it introduces the major elements—semblance, metaphor, schema, and affect—that constitute a poem as icon in motivating a poet’s intension and a respondent’s engagement. In so doing the book makes the case that a poem is a potential icon of the felt reality of being and shows that poetic iconicity provides a means for evaluating great poetry and an explanation for its endurance.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Situated Cognition ◽  
Feedback Loops ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Cognitive Literary Studies ◽  
Culturally Embedded

The introduction to this volume presents the approach of predictive processing, outlines its applicability to literary texts, and provides a sketch of the overall argument of the book. The predictions relevant for predictive processing are defined as not necessarily conscious. They unfold over a cascade of feedback loops from embodied states and movements through predictions about thoughts and larger, culturally embedded presuppositions. With this new definition, the treatment of prediction in Probability Designs extends beyond the approaches from genre and ideology. It not only links to recent developments in cognitive literary studies with embodied and historically, culturally situated cognition but also provides the flexibility of constructed, changeable predictions and probabilities.

The Poetry and Music of Science

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom McLeish
Keyword(s):  
School Leaver ◽  
Creative People ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
Poetry And Music

‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which takes a journey through the creative process in the arts as well as sciences. Visiting great creative people of the past, it also draws on personal accounts of scientists, artists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians today to explore the commonalities and differences in creation. Tom McLeish finds that the ‘Two Cultures’ division between the arts and the sciences is not after all, the best classification of creative processes, for all creation calls on the power of the imagination within the constraints of form. Instead, the three modes of visual, textual, and abstract imagination have woven the stories of the arts and sciences together, but using different tools. As well as panoramic assessments of creativity, calling on ideas from the ancient world, medieval thought, and twentieth-century philosophy and theology, The Poetry and Music of Science illustrates its emerging story by specific close-up explorations of musical (Schumann), literary (James, Woolf, Goethe) mathematical (Wiles), and scientific (Humboldt, Einstein) creation. The book concludes by asking how creativity contributes to what it means to be human.

Impact of the 2020 crises on the arts and culture in the United States: The effect of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement in historical context

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-465
Author(s):  
Stanley N. Katz ◽  
Leah Reisman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Organizations ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Sector ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis article discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement on the arts and cultural sector in the United States, placing the 2020 crises in the context of the United States’s historically decentralized approach to supporting the arts and culture. After providing an overview of the United States’s private, locally focused history of arts funding, we use this historical lens to analyze the combined effects of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement on a single metropolitan area – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace a timeline of key events in the national and local pandemic response and the reaction of the arts community to the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing that the nature of these intersecting responses, and their fallout for the arts and cultural sector, stem directly from weaknesses in the United States’s historical approach to administering the arts. We suggest that, in the context of widespread organizational vulnerability caused by the pandemic, the United States’s decentralized approach to funding culture also undermines cultural organizations’ abilities to respond to issues of public relevance and demonstrate their civic value, threatening these organizations’ legitimacy.

scholarly journals Introduction to the Special Issue “Radiative Transfer in the Earth Atmosphere”

Atmosphere ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 479
Author(s):  
Irina Sokolik
Keyword(s):  
Radiative Transfer ◽  
Earth Atmosphere ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Radiative Impact ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Recent Developments

This Special Issue aims at addressing the recent developments towards improving our understanding of the diverse radiative impact of different types of aerosols and clouds [...]

scholarly journals Special Issue on Nanoscale Thermodynamics

Nanomaterials ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 584
Author(s):  
Signe Kjelstrup
Keyword(s):  
Energy Conversion ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Recent Developments

This Special Issue concerns recent developments of a theory for energy conversion on the nanoscale, namely nanothermodynamics [...]

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