Extending the embodied semiotic square: A cultural-semantic analysis of “Follow your Arrow”

Pelkey’s anchoring of the semiotic square in embodiment is excellent news for cognitive literary theory, a dynamic field still in search of itself. However, his validation of the square, though theoretically unexceptionable, suffers in the execution, for his interpretation of the country song “Follow your Arrow” is less successful. The present article benefits from Pelkey’s validation as it organizes a tool of cultural-semantic analysis (CS-tool) as a ‘deviant’ semiotic square. The article then shows how this particular semiotic square allows us to analyze the song in terms which build on Pelkey’s analysis, but also arrive at more satisfying results. Where Pelkey sees liberation in the song and the square, the tool uncovers manipulation in the former and closure in the latter. The article then assesses the complementarity of and differences between the two squares: Pelkey works on a local sentence-level through direct implicature, thus following the narrative/authorial voice of the poem. The CS-tool starts from a position of higher abstraction requiring a less defined, but still sufficient and more wide-ranging, three-step implicature. This allows the tool to step back from the song’s authorial voice and uncover its manipulations. The article closes by discussing the deviant features of the present square.

Cognitive Poetics

Northrup Frye expressed a scholarly impatience with what seemed to him the inconsequentiality of literary study, asking if criticism might provide “a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis, which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole" (1957). Cognitive literary theory did not actually answer to Frye’s scientism until almost fifty years later, and when it did, it moved quickly in many directions. But it did not (and still has not) coalesced into a unified theory. The vigor and excitement of the field derive from its openness to many different areas of brain science, the wide reach of its attention to so many varieties of works of imagination—their production, their reception, and their history— and its resistance to a centralizing dogma. In her introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Lisa Zunshine, scholar in the field and its best historian, describes cognitive literary critics as working “not toward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoretical paradigms in literary and cultural studies" (2015). Scholars from most traditional humanities fields: philosophers (both analytical and phenomenological and philosophers of mind and of language), cultural, literary, and art historians, literary critics and linguists, for example, and social scientists as well (anthropologists, archaeologists, and ethologists), have found the various fields of brain science to offer new perspectives on some persistent questions. Studies by developmental psychologists have made major contributions. And as brain imaging has become more powerful and widely used, the hypotheses of neurophysiologists and neurobiologists have come into the picture. Evolutionary biology has made perhaps the largest contribution by providing the overriding argument in the field—namely that human potential, individual behavior, and group dynamics can be studied as emerging phenomena. This begins with bodies that have over the millennia grown into worlds in which competition and cooperation have built and continue to build cultural life.

Towards a cognitive stylistics of the absurd: Joanna Gavins’ Reading the Absurd (2013)

Joanna Gavins’ recently published Reading the Absurd (2013) represents a new step in the research into the literary absurd as it introduces cognitive stylistics as an instrument to clarify its workings. This review article focuses on some of the innovative additions offered by Gavins’ book, specifically, the importance it attributes to the reader and his or her response to absurdist literature. In the wake of earlier studies of the absurd, the article identifies incongruity as a key feature of the absurd. Positing that a cognitive approach to incongruity is much needed in this context, the article then considers how cognitive literary theory can add to our knowledge and understanding of absurdist literature.

Affect and artifice in cognitive literary theory

This essay suggests that separating emotionally immersed and reflectively rational ways of experiencing fiction on the basis of ontological structures and spatio-temporal metaphors is hampering our understanding of the experience of fiction. Beginning in a rhetorical approach, I argue for a model where engagement with fiction is seen in terms of joint attention. Using joint attention rather than knowledge of ontological realms as a reference point has two distinct benefits: it refocuses attention on literature as a rhetorical mode, and it takes mental action to be a system of parallel processes, thus giving an alternative to the back-and-forth movement between the interior and exterior of imagined worlds. My focus is on Dave Eggers's

Illuminating a Culture, a History, a Tradition: Conceptual Blending in the St. John's Bible

In 1998, St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota commissioned Donald Jackson to produce one of the first hand-written, hand-illuminated Bibles since the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. The on-going project bridges disparate traditions in a unique blend of the medieval and postmodern eras. This article adopts cognitive literary theory to examine the St. John's Bible, specifically the frontispiece to the Gospel of John, and the text-image interaction contained within as products of conceptual blending. A cognitive historical approach to the St. John's Bible reveals the complicated relationship of the modern-day audience to the illuminated text. Tensions are inevitable within any cognitive blend; the same applies to the reader-viewer's experience of text-image integration here. The key to cognitive blending is the emergent experience of the target element. In this case, the postmodern Bible as target blends with its medieval predecessors to produce the St. John's Bible-an intersubjective, multimodal, cross-generational artifact of a cognitive blend.