Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics

Book excerpt: Cognitive poetics is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature employing the tools offered by cognitive science. Cognitive science is an umbrella term covering the various disciplines that investigate human information processing: cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence and certain branches of linguistics and of the philosophy of science. These explore the psychological processes involved in the acquisition, organization and use of knowled in fact, in all information processing activities of the brain, ranging from the analysis of immediate stimuli to the organization of subjective experience. Cognitive poetics explores the possible contributions of cognitive science to poetics: it attempts to find out how poetic language and form, or the critic's decisions, are constrained and shaped by human information processing. It assumes that in the response to poetry, cognitive devices that were initially acquired for survival in man's physical and social environment, are turned to aesthetic ends. It offers cognitive theories that systematically account for the relationship between the structure of literary texts and their perceived effects. By the same token, it discriminates which reported effects may legitimately be related to the structures in question and which may not.This book uses cognitive theories to illuminate literature rather than use works of literature to illustrate cognitive theories. It emphasizes the particular differences between cognitive processes in general and their unique exploitation for literary purposes; its generalizations are wide enough to be applicable to a great variety of literary works of art, while at the same time, it provides means to make meaningful distinctions between, or within, specific works of literature. Such an approach requires the combination of the tools of cognitive science with those of the more traditional disciplines of literary criticism, literary history, linguistics and aesthetics. An important task of cognitive poetics is to explore the possibilities and limitations of such combinations.This book attempts to illuminate the cognitive aspects of poetic structure on a wide variety of strata and from a wide variety of angles: the sound stratum of poetry, the units of meaning stratum and the world stratum; literary history; period sty stylistic typology; genre; archetypal patterns; aesthetic qualities; poetry and altered states of consciousness.