Emotion, Memory, Meaning, Directions: A Response to Kirsten Marie Hartvigsen and Thomas J. Kraus

This response article reviews the contributions of Kirsten Marie Hartvigsen and Thomas Kraus to this special issue, and uses them as the basis for a discussion of some theoretical and methodological issues relevant to cognitive narratology and cognitive literary studies more broadly. Without offering substantial answers itself, the response poses questions concerning (i) the compatibility of different scientific frameworks used in cognitive models of characterization, particularly in the light of currently dominant ‘4ea’ models of cognition (there is a particular focus on the relationship between affective and (other) cognitive aspects of reader response, and on the role of memory); and (ii) the adaptability of cognitive models to dealing with “synthetic” and “thematic” (as opposed to “mimetic”) aspects of literary character. A brief conclusion argues for two-way traffic between the cognitive sciences and literary criticism.

Modelling the personage’s fictional consciousness in the play by Igor Kostetskyi “The twins will meet again”

The objective of the article is to outline the correlations between the usage of the elements of the absurdist aesthetics, different artistic paradoxes and methods of modelling the fictional consciousness of personage. The aim of research is to define internal and external dimensions of personage’s fictional consciousness construction with the help of the cognitive literary studies methodology. The methodology of cognitive literary criticism is the basis for the analysis of modelling principles, applied in the research of personage’s fictional consciousness in I. Kostetskyi’s play “The Twins Will Meet Again”. Thus, the study of the play is based on actualization of cognitive phenomena and establishing their correlations with forms of artistic reflection. The cognitive method is used to determine the theoretical foundations of the functioning of the character’s fictional consciousness in the dramatic work. The poetics of the absurd in a drama defines agglutinative forms of reflection of the personages’ fictional consciousness.

Jellyfish, Lions, and Ducks: Sideways Spirals of Growth in Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport

Focusing on the felt experience of consciousness, Lucy Ellmann's novel for adults Ducks, Newburyport (2019) undermines clear distinctions between the human protagonist's child and adult selves. Alongside references to non-human animals by this human narrator, entire sections present a mountain lioness's perspective. This essay places the concept of growing sideways from queer studies and children's literature scholarship into dialogue with cognitive literary studies to examine the human protagonist's spiralling between child/adult and human/non-human.

Reading texts, reading people: Cognitive literary science and pedagogy

Cognitive literary science has explored the the complex relationship between literary reading and social cognition. However, this insightful work about reading literature is frequently distanced from discussions about teaching literature. This essay discusses the results and ramifications of a pedagogical study conducted in two sections of an introductory literature course that was redesigned around cognitive literary studies. Qualitative and quantitative data is collected and analyzed in order to see if a pedagogy rooted in cognitive literary science affects students’ perspective-taking. The essay also illustrates how such a teaching practice might be incorporated into any undergraduate literature curriculum.

Lene Asks Kjære Rikard som utgangspunkt for utvikling av emosjonell literacy og mentaliseringsevne

The article explores whether reading Lene Ask’s documentary graphic novel Kjære Rikard (‘Dear Rikard’) may provide children and adults with training in, and an increased awareness of the importance of, emotional literacy and theory of mind. In order to investigate this question, the authors of the article conduct a close reading of Ask’s novel, using terminology from narratology, picture book and comics’ theory, and look for connections between the findings from the analyses and insights from reader-response theory and cognitive literary studies. The authors suggest that in combination, Ask’s fictive and documentarist drawings and the excerpts from the hand-written correspondence between young Rikard in Stavanger and his father, a missionary in Madagaskar in the 1890s, invite both children and adult readers to develop a keen sense of the value of emotional literacy and theory of mind.

Coda: Literature, language, and creativity

Literature 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.

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

Creativity 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.

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.