The MINUTES of the ‘Cognitive Poetics/Stylistics:
Appraising the Present, Configuring the Future’ workshop
PALA Istanbul (26/06/03)
Organiser/Chair: Michael Burke
Minutes: Rocio Montoro
Some background information …
This year cognitive ‘poetics’ (aka ‘stylistics’) has moved firmly into the pedagogical arena. This has been made possible by a number of publications including Stockwell 2002; Semino & Culpeper 2002 and Gavins & Steen 2003. Simultaneously, for the first time this summer a one-day Cog-Lit theme session was held at the ICLA Conference in La Rioja (organised by Freeman, Freeman & Popova). In light of these developments, it seemed appropriate that we in PALA pause and take stock. Hence, this 2-hour get-together was set up purposely to have the character of both a workshop and a meeting. Its central aim was to seek to appraise the present situation in cognitive approaches to literature and try to configure its immediate future. In order to facilitate this there was a presentation of teaching reports, a presentation of ongoing research and a specific discussion session addressing just what we at PALA understand by cognitive poetics/stylistics.
THE WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
[with comments/questions from the floor inserted]
1. Introduction (M. Burke)
2. Reports from the ‘shop floor’ (M. Burke & J. Gavins)
3. Presentation (P. Crisp)
4. Discussion session (M. Freeman)
5. General comments/suggestions from the floor
6. Close of session/Final remarks
1. INTRODUCTION
2. REPORTS FROM THE ‘SHOP FLOOR’
This session consisted of two pedagogical presentations [both given by Burke in Gavins’s absence] on the teaching of cognitive poetics in the recent 2003 Spring semester at the University of Sheffield and the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. The general aim was to share experiences in this relatively new field and in doing so help all those currently teaching similar courses to improve their own programmes by avoiding the pitfalls encountered in Sheffield and Amsterdam. After a general introduction to the structure of the individual departments and how the cognitive poetics courses were designed to fit into them, the general points for attention included an account of students’ responses to cognitive poetics/stylistics (in the case of Amsterdam, this was based on weekly questionnaires) and, more importantly, personal evaluations of the teaching experience itself. Participants were invited to pose questions and share their own teaching experiences in cognitive poetics in the short discussion session at the end.
Generally speaking, both Burke and Gavins noted that both their courses were hugely popular and that students warmed to the field. Both courses were evaluated highly by the students. A cognitive approach to stylistics was experienced by the students as being “less clinical” that ‘traditional’ textual stylistics. However, both Burke and Gavins were of the opinion that a solid grounding in general stylistics would be beneficial (if not essential) for the successful teaching of cognitive stylistics/poetics. The teachers also showed some concern that students tended to choose the more ‘discourse-based’ topics for their final end-of-term papers (e.g. narrative comprehension, text-world theory, etc.), while avoiding such essentially ‘sentence-level’ topics as cognitive grammar, cognitive deixis and prototypes. Both Burke & Gavins were of the opinion that this has to be addressed in some way.
[For a full copy of either Michael Burke’s or Joanna Gavins’s teaching report please email the respective person at either michael.burke@let.uu.nl and/or j.gavins@sheffield.ac.uk]
Comments from the floor pertaining to this session included …
C. Emmott suggested that a stylistics background is not always necessary for a better understanding of the field (e.g. a text-world theory, narrative comprehension or general grammatical approach might be equally relevant).
M. Benari thought that cognitive approaches to literature should be introduced at any BA level. (This was in response to Burke who suggested in his teaching report that these courses should perhaps be limited to senior undergraduates (i.e. 3rd year students) and MA students).
As an alternative W. van Peer explained the approach he takes in his classes, namely that he dispenses with the ‘classical’ model of a course set-up. Instead, his students have 6 weeks of intensive reading - (2 topics per session to be discussed in class). The 8 following weeks are based on research, i.e. no teaching at all.
O. Vorobyova explained that her own courses on ‘regular’ stylistics (1 lecture) + ‘advanced’ stylistics (MA level) last for 8 weeks. She noted that in her native Ukraine (Kiev) there are practical problems with regard to cognitive poetics, namely that there is a lack of books. On a different topic, she suggested that an integration might take place of different theories (conceptual metaphor and blending, for instance). She suggested that this might produce a better response from students.
3. PRESENTATION by Peter Crisp from the University of Hong Kong (on his ongoing research into blending in literature)
TITLE: Allegory, blending and possible situations
BLURB: Mark Turner has argued that allegories are blended spaces. Although this idea contains very important insights, it is, taken literally and straightforwardly, wrong. The language of allegory provides the basis for constructing a text world, or possible situation, containing a range of virtual or possible referents. In mental space terms, this possible situation can be used to provide input to an input space which then in turn itself forms one of the inputs to a metaphorical, blended space. Fauconnier has repeatedly emphasized that a possible situation is not a mental space. Language, Fauconnier argues, does not refer to elements in mental spaces but is used to set up mental spaces from which reference then proceeds. Turner's argument that allegories are mental spaces is thus wrong. Nevertheless, this argument, when appropriately modified, contains valuable insights into the nature of allegory and its power. This paper will be an attempt to show how issues to do with truth are vital to a full realisation of a cognitive analysis. In doing this, it will be particularly concerned with exploring the borderline in allegory between possible situation and blended space.
The presentation was greeted warmly.
Some comments from the floor pertaining to this session included …
That we need to be much more rigorous in our use of terminology (M. Freeman)
That more empirical work is needed on what real readers are actually doing when these ‘processes’ are taking place (W. van Peer)
4. DISCUSSION SESSION (Chaired by Margaret Freeman)
Starting point = What is cognitive poetics/stylistics?
A further starting point for this discussion was the DRAFT LIST of cognitive poetic principles (coordinated by Margaret Freeman), which was circulated to all participants by email beforehand for scrutiny (see below).
Principles underlying cognitive poetics—
the application of cognitive linguistics to literature
1. the embodied mind. The detailed nature of our bodies, our brains, and our everyday physical and cultural functioning in the world, both temporally and spatially, structures rhythmic movement, sound production and perception, human concepts, and human reason.
2. the cognitive unconscious. The term “cognitive” refers not to mental activity in the Cartesian sense but to all conscious and unconscious activity, including conceptualization, intuition, feeling, and emotion. Most brain activity is unconscious—not repressed in the Freudian sense but simply inaccessible to direct conscious introspection.
3. metaphorical thought. For the most part, human beings conceptualize abstract concepts in concrete terms, using ideas and modes of reasoning grounded in the sensory-motor system. The mechanism by which ideas are represented in terms of other ideas, including comprehending the abstract in terms of the concrete, is called conceptual metaphor.
4. radial categories. Concepts show prototype effects rather than the Aristotelian paradigm based on necessary and sufficient conditions.
5. creativity. The human mind is capable of producing new ideas through a process of conceptual integration which is dynamic, supple, and active in the moment of thinking. The mechanism by which emergent structure is created is called blending.
6. meaning. Syntax cannot be described independently of semantics.
7. form and iconicity. Basic principles of the embodied mind motivate how poetry integrates its (simultaneous) use of meter, rhythm, versification, visual form, sound, prosody, syntactic form, syntactic function, lexical meaning, rhetorical schemes, tropes, speech acts, speech genres, allusion, and also motivate non-lyrical literary modes (narrative, drama, song).
8. aesthetics. The ability of the mind to discriminate among sensuous perceptions by means of feelings and emotions.
9. distributed cognition. In addition to being *embodied*, or grounded in
sensori-motor experience, cognition is *socially embedded*. That is, it
cannot be characterised as a purely 'mental' activity nor can it be
restricted to the individual assumed to be acting alone. Rather cognitive
activity operates within individuals but also both among and between those
individuals and those *cognitive artefacts* engaged in that activity and
does so in such a way that it may be partly external (in varying degrees) to
any one individual.
10. cognitive artefacts. Cognitive artefacts are shared by individuals and
communities. They are the temporary result of a process or set of processes
and may be incorporated into further processes. They are thus,
simultaneously, products and tools of cognition. A cultural artefact
(such as a poem) is a type of cognitive artefact. It may change with time
and context and is not simply the residue of an individual's thoughts and
feelings.
Some questions & comments from this session included …
M. Freeman began by posing the following question: What is the relation between cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics/stylistics? She also observed that both cognitive poetics and stylistics play close attention to texts. Cognitive Poetics seems to indicate a more general idea and it is basically a ‘semantic’ theory.
W. van Peer found the ‘poetics’ versus ‘stylistics’ labelling discussion somewhat superfluous (this was echoed by some sections of the group).
M. Freeman suggested that cognitive ‘stylistics’ is a problematic term because it bends the definition of stylistics too far. The issue at hand is (i) how to ‘bag’ conceptual issues and (ii) how to analyse the textual aspect of it. Cognitive stylistics seems to apply to point (2) a bit more clearly than cognitive poetics.
Donald Freeman added that one has to think of this in terms of ‘theory construction’ & ‘theory evaluation’ _ ‘real theory’ (a meta-theoretical principle).
C. Emmott expressed her concern about the term ‘Cog-Lit’ (or cognitive ‘poetics’). She asked ‘what about ‘non-narrative’ texts … (she is working with ‘health-related’ texts) and less ‘literary’ texts.
M. Freeman pointed out that there has been a failure to come up with a better term for the idea of ‘blending’.
P. Stockwell stated that blending was not a principle but a method. Blending shouldn’t be part of the suggested principles. Blending is a model of language.
L. Jeffries suggested that literature students do ‘better’ because of a sense of lack of ‘rigour’. She also added that more empirical research is needed. She also stressed the importance of a social dimension to cognitive approaches to literature: (“Social cognition’s possibilities as something of ‘shared’ processes, as opposed to individual cognitive processes). [M. Burke noted that principle #9 in the above list goes someway toward addressing this concern].
S. Zyngier spoke of the danger of ‘fragmentation problems’. She suggested that we should be cautious about fragmenting stylistics as in her opinion it is already weak and fragmented enough. She also asked where would students’ responses fit into a cognitive approach to stylistics? She questioned as to whether we are broadening or narrowing the area?
M. Burke said he understood these ‘fragmentation’ concerns but stressed that we have to start to thinking about cognitive approaches to stylistics not as an alternative or a ‘threat’ to current stylistics but as a logical and natural extension to it … (along a cline, as it were, from the notion of contextualised stylistics). The main difference is that in addition to what we have considered up until now in our analyses we are now also taking into account the notion of the embodied, culturally-grounded human mind (involving cognitive, emotive and sometimes, where necessary, even neural considerations). He stressed that both traditional stylistics and cognitive stylistics are text-driven i.e. that they rely on textual cues. As such, they cannot and indeed must not be seen as mutually exclusive approaches. Summing up, he said that a cognitive approach to stylistics merely extends what heretofore has been possible within a contextualised stylistic, analytic framework.
P. Stockwell suggested that we need a set of questions such as: (1) How does reading literary texts affect us emotionally? (M. Burke warmly welcomed this as his research centrally deals with this issue). Stockwell also suggested that stylistics, so far, hasn’t been so successful in this respect (he alluded to Ray Gibbs’ plenary talk at PALA 2001 in Budapest as a good example of attempting to deal with emotion in literary text processing). Stockwell also suggested that we should first find out what it is we want to discover, and then draw up a list of principles.
M. Benari suggested that we should draw up a distinction between (i) the way we acquire cognitive mechanisms and (ii) the way we apply them. (A student from Bo_aziçi University who was present suggested that in his opinion students would benefit from this).
D. Hoover, taking all this into consideration, spoke of the possibility of an extended workshop next year (i.e. 4 hours instead of 2) _ at the end of the conference, which would include a panel on evaluating all different approaches in this area.
P. Stockwell suggested that institutional factors for linguistics/literature divide departments. He also spoke of the possibility of students preferring cognitive approaches because they feel they are ‘looser’. He added that we mustn’t dispense with the more ‘grammatical’ side of cognitive poetics.
M. Freeman claimed that cognitive linguistics is based on a theory which can be proved right or wrong.
P. Crisp stated that cognitive linguistics is a theoretical paradigm. No paradigm can be unequivocally proven right or wrong. Various paradigms do go on. A lot of boundary-drawing has to be understood in sociological terms.
P. Stockwell suggested a need to group together cognitive-oriented papers at future PALA conferences instead of ‘scattering’ them throughout the conference schedule. He asked that a start be made at the next conference in New York. [This point was welcomed from the floor].
[Owing to space and time constraints -- and the fact that the minute-taker was an academic (and not a professional secretary) -- not all of the responses from the workshop have been represented here … and indeed those that have may not be verbatim. Please except our sincere apologies for this.]
5. GENERAL QUESTIONS/COMMENTS/SUGGESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR
In the original workshop schedule M. Burke suggested forming a permanent PALA sub-group on cognitive approaches to language and literature that would meet annually in either a workshop or theme-session format similar to those already existent within PALA. [PALA SIG-COG is now officially activated as a PALA special interest group. All PALA members are eligible – and indeed encouraged - to join).
This was put to the group (approx. 30 scholars from institutions throughout the world) and was overwhelmingly approved. M. Burke’s email address will now function as a ‘starting point’ for discussion for next year’s workshop in New York. Please send any suggestions you might have to both of the following addresses (michael.burke@let.uu.nl & m.burke@let.vu.nl).
Burke said that he would again gladly coordinate this forthcoming theme session (this was welcomed from the floor).
David Hoover, the organiser of PALA 2004, who was present at the session reiterated his earlier comments by promising the group a 4-hour theme session in New York (instead of the current 2-hour workshop format), should it be required. Burke thanked him for this and provisionally accepted his offer. [A fitting format and theme has yet to be worked out … All suggestions are welcome].
In order to raise awareness and attract new people this report is to be published at three different sites (i) on the PALA website, (ii) the cognitive approaches to literature website, at -- http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Culture/coglit.html --- and (iii) in the hard copy of the thrice annually PALA newsletter.
6. FINAL REMARKS/CLOSE OF SESSION
The organiser Michael Burke thanked Jo Gavins (in her absence), Peter Crisp, Margaret Freeman and Rocio Montoro for their active participation in the session and indeed all those present who contributed to making the meeting the success it was. He added that he hoped to see everyone again in New York to continue in the same vein.
At this point the session was ended