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Rhyme and Cognitive Poetics
Abstract
In this essay I provide a comprehensive cognitive view of rhyme, one of the most powerful resources of poetic language. Readers and critics have strong intuitions on the matter of rhyme but find it difficult systematically to address its manifestations and the construction of its overall affect in the poetic passage. Hence critics all too frequently discuss rhymes impressionalistically, in sporadic, ad hoc semantic analyses, and rely on readers to work out how these account for a poems perceived affect(s). At other times, critics gorund their argument in intertextuality, recasting rhyme as an enigma displaced from one text to another. Here I attempt to uncover the sources of possible affects of rhyme, suggesting critical tools for addressing it in a meaningful way in the hope of systematically relating its affects to its structure. Speech sounds are abstract categories, from which rich precategorical sensory information is typically stripped away. Nevertheless, some of this information does reach the cognitive system, reverberating briefly in short-term memory and facilitating, by way of certain cognitive tasks, the processing of certain verbal material. Rhyme exploits and enhances this sensory information. There is some experimental evidence that memory traces of two words that appear consecutively, that is, spread out in time, may be fused and perceived as if they were simultaneously present. Basing some of my findings on adaptations of gestalt psychology, I suggest that similar processes may occur in the interaction between phonetic categories and the underlying acoustic information, enhancing them or toning them down. Further, I consider the possible interaction of semantic or thematic features with acoustic information underlying speech sounds, as well as some conditions that maximize our tendency to respond to groups of individual stimuli as unified percepts, which may account for the perceived qualities regularly associated with certain rhyme patterns, and I examine the relatively rare dactylic rhyme in and attempt to account for some contradictions regularly ascribed to it
... Experiments have corroborated the effects of adjacent rhymes on emotion. Tsur (1996) compared participants' ratings for Gray's Elegy written in a country churchyard, which we quoted earlier, which has a rhyme scheme of abab, with a rearrangement of the lines to yield a rhyme scheme of aabb: ...
Poetry evokes emotions. It does so, according to the theory we present, from three sorts of simulation. They each can prompt emotions, which are communications both within the brain and among people. First, models of a poem's semantic contents can evoke emotions as do models that occur in depictions of all kinds, from novels to perceptions. Second, mimetic simulations of prosodic cues, such as meter, rhythm, and rhyme, yield particular emotional states. Third, people's simulations of themselves enable them to know that they are engaged with a poem, and an aesthetic emotion can occur as a result. The three simulations predict certain sorts of emotion, e.g., prosodic cues can evoke basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and anxiety. Empirical evidence corroborates the theory, which we relate to other accounts of poetic emotions.
... One of its chief proponents, Reuven Tsur, states that speech sounds, which originate as acoustic events, in the process of decoding are converted into a string of abstract phonetic categories, and the effect is, as he puts it, "that very little sensory information reaches consciousness subliminally. " 48 This "rich precategorical sensory information" that carries these categories is usually stripped away during the stage of what he calls "phonetic coding, " which "consists in substituting an abstract phonetic category for the acoustic information that transmitted it from the speaker to the hearer. " 49 The message reduced purely to its content, divorced from the sounds that carry it, is passed through strings of abstract phonetic categories. ...
The aim of this article is to tackle the controversial issue of sound dimension in Poe’s poetry in the context of Poe’s own aesthetic views and influential German Romantic theories of poetry and its relation to music. The main thrust of the argument is to question the opinion, still persisting in some critical quarters, about Poe as overly preoccupied with metrical and musical effects, which supposedly leads to the dissolution of meaning in his poems. The article aims to prove that his poems are unique phono-semantic structures, and their musicality, their meticulous metrical and phonetic orchestration, contributes to the creation of meaning. For the purpose of demonstrating the crucial relation between sonority and meaning in his poetry two texts have been chosen—“The Conqueror Worm” and “To One in Paradise”—but in fact many of Poe’s poems could serve as excellent cases in point. By analogy to musical compositions, poems of Edgar Allan Poe develop their “suggestiveness,” their “under current, however indefinite of meaning,” also by their intricate sound design. Therefore, this aspect of his poetry certainly calls for reappraisal and invites further inquiry.
... n reported. For example, Fonagy (196 1) examined the different tone qualities in a group of Hungarian poems according to topic. In six aggressive and six tender poems by Petiifi, /l/, /rn/, and /n/ were more frequent in the tender poems; /k/, it/, and Irl predominated in the aggressive poems (a number of other examples are described in his report). Tsur (1996) suggests that the speech sounds acquired later by infants possess greater emotional and aesthetic value (1996: 62; cf. Tsur, 1992: 52-58). This helps to account for the power of the frequent nasal vowels and '-eur' word endings that occur in the symbolist poet Baudelaire: these two features are said to be 2.5 times more frequent in a sa ...
A strong intuition that phonemic qualities suggest meaning has motivated discussions of the sound of language since the time of Plato. However, studies of phonetic symbolism this century have been inconclusive: while systematic contrasts of meaning have often been found, these are not necessarily due to innate phonetic meanings. An alternative approach is presented based on a theory of phonemic iconicity, which suggests that phonemic patterns systematically support the presence of contrasts in meaning. A method for measuring phonemic distributions is outlined. Contrasts in vowel and consonant frequencies are shown to underlie not only differences between word groups, where phonemic contrasts can be expected, but also important differences in several literary texts. The method is tested empirically with data provided by readers of a short story. Here, phonemic contrats were found to contribute to variations in reading speed and readers' ratings of story segments, suggesting that readers were sensitive to variations in tonal patterns while reading the story.
The article is dedicated to exploring the role of rhyme in the English poetic discourse of the XXI century. Rhyme, being the central element of most poetic genres, has unique pragmatic effect both when it is present (in classical verse) and absent (in verse libre). The role of rhyme ranges from ensuring memorization to broader communicative and cognitive influences, as justified by the studies reviewed in the article. The aim of the article is to contrast practices of using and omitting rhyme in contemporary English poetry and to reveal the pragmatic potential of rhyme. For this purpose, works of contemporary poets are scrutinized via methods of comparison and contrast, pragmatic analysis and stylistic analysis. Our findings show that rhyme, whenever present, serves not only for text memorization or embellishment, but also has deeper relations with the core of the poem. In case of verse libre or blank verse, the absence of rhyme (especially when paired with the graphic element of ignoring capital letters) turns a poem into a dynamic work, an unfinished process. An increasing tendency of ignoring rhyme in contemporary English poetry might be linked to the graphic character of poetry itself. Whenever rhyme is absent, there is an “extra” element which fills its place, and usually those elements are either graphical additions or peculiarities of punctuation. The scientific novelty of the article lies in revealing the pragmatic role of rhyme and justifying that this role is fulfilled even when rhyme is absent. The theoretical and practical significance of the article lies in exploring the role of rhyme considering pragmatics, stylistics, and cognitive poetics.
El presente artículo recurre a las bases cognitivistas de la enacción y la teoría de la relevancia para proponer una nueva metodología en el estudio de la recepción poética a partir de la distinción entre texto poético y poema y entre lectura y experiencia. Por ello, defendemos una nueva definición de poema: unidad perceptiva mínima experimentada por un perceptor en movimientos simultáneos (el movimiento material y conceptual del objeto y el movimiento físico y emocional del perceptor) que resulten en una o más realidades (simbólicas y emocionales) nuevas.
Palabras clave: Cognitivismo. Enacción. Teoría de la relevancia. Recepción literaria. Experiencia del poema.
This paper draws on the cognitivist foundations of enaction and relevance theory to propose a new methodology for the study of poetic reception based on the distinction between poetic text and poem and between reading and experience. Thus, we defend a new definition of poem: a minimal perceptual unit experienced by a perceiver in simultaneous movements (the material and conceptual movement of the object and the physical and emotional movement of the perceiver) resulting in one or more new (symbolic and emotional) realities.
Keywords: Cognitivism. Enaction. Relevance theory. Literary Reception. Experience of the Poem.
Poetry, defined as language divided into lines, is found in most known human cultures. This masterful survey of poetry and its constituent components demonstrates the functions performed by metre, rhyme, alliteration and parallelism, arguing that each line of a poem fits as a whole unit into the limited capacity of human working memory. Using examples from around the world, Fabb surveys the wide varieties of poetry and the ways they are performed, including those in songs and signed literatures. Focusing on language, form and memory, he helps us understand why poetry is a particularly valued way of using language. A fresh exploration of poetry, the book will be welcomed by students and researchers of literature, linguistics and psychology, as well as anyone interested in poetry.
Cet article porte sur la (re)construction discursive de la valeur sociale complexe du « chez-soi » dans les contes de littérature d’émergence en Océanie. Cherchant à démontrer qu’un modèle d’analyse sémantico-discursif tel que la Sémantique des Possibles Argumentatifs (SPA) peut mettre en évidence que ces histoires sont porteuses d’héritage culturel intangible, notre étude dévoile de quelle manière les discours élaborent un lien social en agissant sur la transmission, la préservation et le renouvellement de représentations culturelles, linguistiques et cognitives. L’étude du cas du conte Mèyènô (Ponga, 2004) illustre le pouvoir transformateur d’un récit grâce au dialogue entre les représentations de Soi et de l’Autre. En nous appuyant sur les théories de la poétique cognitive (Tsur, 1983), nous montrons l’intérêt des cartes cognitives qui, alliées à la méthodologie SPA, soulignent la capacité de la langue à (re)construire l’identité culturelle d’une communauté.
This article investigates alliteration in Old and Middle English poetry as a particular type of discourse-structuring device. It explores the use of this device in the context of a mainly anonymous and oral-formulaic tradition, and – in Construction Grammar terms – as a type of fragment chunker for both local conceptualization at the phrasal level and also one that permits (even encourages) a counterpoint conceptualization across syntactic structures, with an impact on literary meaning. The discussion will encompass the metrical aspects of this device, its role in the proliferation of poetic-only terms for key concepts that recur in extant verse texts, and implications for our understanding of medieval mental grammars.
Gwendolyn Brooks's 1949 long poem Annie Allen can be read as an example of midcentury modernist poetry that favors inductive assemblage to the totalizing operations of linear narrative, joining other midcentury poems such as Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos, William Carlos Williams's Paterson, and H. D.'s Trilogy. Annie Allen is frequently read as the last major work Brooks undertook before her break with European and Anglo modernist forms, when she aligned her aesthetics with the revolutionary poetics of the Black Arts movement. More significant than the shift in poetic practice that the book signals, however, is the way in which lyric speech in Annie Allen reveals ideologies of literary innovation. This essay argues that Brooks's long poem dramatizes the intersection of competing narratives of experimentalism and politics for African American poetics, for modernism, and, in a broader sense, for an understanding of what it means to write poetry as social critique.
La relazione tra uomo e narrazione è molto stretta e affonda le sue radici nelle basi biologiche e nei processi neurologici più profondi del cervello. In particolare, la fiaba si configura come un genere cognitivamente connaturato, in grado di corrispondere alle esigenze e alle strutture della mente umana. Questa convergenza tra l’architettura testuale del fiabesco e le strutture cognitive può, almeno in parte, spiegare il carattere di universalità del genere e la sua diffusione come dispositivo mnemonico, in grado di convogliare significati individuali e collettivi, e come ‘microsceneggiatura’ utile per agire nel mondo reale.
This article deals with the effects of stanza form on the discourse of narrative poetry. It starts by exploring the antagonistic relationship between stanzas and epic. Milton, writing in an age of rhyme, eschews stanzas in Paradise Lost. Dante invents a stanza, terza rima, that is not self-contained, but allows forward extension. Tasso remains dissatisfied with his ottava rima Gerusalemme liberata and eventually writes an unrhyming epic, Il mondo creato. The article goes on to examine the more harmonious relationship between stanzas and comic or romance narrative and also investigates how different stanzas develop different types of narrative. Ottava rima lends itself to medley poems such as Orlando furioso and Don Juan, which delight in antithesis. Both rhyme-royal and the Spenserian stanza avoid the blatant contrasts inherent in ottava rima and are hence suited to less directly ironic types of narrative voice.
This article assumes that poets use "masculine" and "feminine" rhymes not only in order to conform with conventions based on grammatical rules, but also because they are heard different. It explores possible combinations of two independent variables: stress placement in, and phonetic structure of, rhyme words. Masculine rhyme in the tonic-syllabic metre consists of a metrical strong position occupied by a stressed syllable, generating an abrupt cut-off point. In the feminine rhyme, by contrast, this clear-cut ending is followed by an unstressed syllable rendering the halt more gradual, more fuzzy-edged. Consequently, it is perceived as softer, less forceful, more pliable. Clive Scott pointed out similar effects in French versification: "masculine rhymes are abrupt, unrelenting, circumscribed,⋯ feminine rhymes are evanescent, yielding, reverberant." Speech sounds too may be either [+ABRUPT], or [+CONTINUOUS], [±PER10DIC], [±NASAL], Both feminine rhymes and nasals may be described as reverberant. These two variables can be combined in unforeseen combinations with each other and with meaning, yielding unforeseen perceptual qualities. Such qualities are not inferred but directly perceived, and can be discussed only after the event.
In the 1980s', 'Cognitive poetics' arose from the interaction between literary studies and cognitive sciences. This paper focuses on the history of Cognitive poetics and shows how theories of embodied cognition, metaphorical mapping and conceptual integration (also known as conceptual blending theory) provide insightful tools with which to account for the creative process of inven-tio. The Author illustrates the different research domains within Cognitive poetics and pinpoints its connections with previous aesthetic theories, particularly with structuralism, reader-response criticism and post-structuralism.
This essay interrogates the genre "verse novel" into which a great many new texts are being placed by publishers and authors. Since the ancient genre of narrative poetry already exists, and the novel is defined by most theorists in opposition to poetry and verse, the term "verse novel" may well be seen not only as an unnecessary affectation, designed to sell books, but also as a contradiction in terms. However, the essay argues, narrative poetry is a commodious genre, accommodating many subgenres. One of these is the romance, a class which includes both verse and prose and of which some texts dubbed "verse novel" may be members. But, since the majority of these texts are wholly realistic, resembling the popular realistic novel far more than they do the romance or any previously existing poetic genre, the subgenre "verse novel" is recommended for their accommodation after all. Interestingly, this subgenre is, of course, also a subgenre of the novel. Because several novel theorists, including, significantly, Ian Watt, identify the novel exclusively as a prose genre, the essay queries the distinction between prose and verse, questioning, among other things, prose's priority over verse and its reputation as a less stylized, more "natural" form. The essay concludes that verse novels are an embodiment of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of the idea of the purity of genre; they are hybrid texts that very openly participate in two ostensibly mutually exclusive genres at the same time.
Where do poetic conventions come from? I argue that they are active cognitive (sometimes depth-psychological) processes and constraints that became fossilized in time. I confront two rival approaches to conventions, the migration (or influence-hunting) approach, and the cognitive-fossils (or constraints-seeking) approach. The migration approach transfers the problem from one place to another, without trying to solve it. Consumers of poetry cannot acquire the meanings, emotional import and perceptual qualities of conventions by relying on conventional knowledge (that would be circular), only by relying on cognitive strategies acquired for adaptation purposes. Novel poetic inventions may become conventions when in the process of repeated social transmission they come to take forms which have a good fit to the natural capacities and constraints of the human brain. There are different degrees of fossilization. Such verbal devices as interjections, exclamations, vocatives and repetitions have emotive force owing to their relation to the right hemisphere of the brain. In Elizabethan drama interjections followed by repeated vocatives become a hackneyed convention. In the ballad "Edward" the same conventions turn into rigid formula, perceived as "ballad style" rather than expressive devices. The rhythmic processing of poetry is constrained by the limited channel capacity of the cognitive system. This has shaped a wide range of versification conventions in a number of languages and versification systems. Thus, in the majority of English iambic pentameter lines caesura occurs after the fourth position (out of ten). The influence-hunting approach attributes this to French influence. According to the cognitive-constraints approach, the limited channel capacity of immediate memory requires that of two parallel segments the longer should come last, both in English and French poetry. The influence-hunting approach has no answer to why French poetry should have placed the caesura after the fourth position in the first place, and why English poetry should have adopted this practice in a different versification system. Finally, I point out that going against those cognitive constraints may have its own expressive value too, even when it is an established convention.
Using the word spondee to refer fairly broadly to the phenomenon of contiguous stresses in English poetry - and, occasionally, speech - this article is a sustained demonstration of the relation between prosodic stress and emotional stress. It also summarizes the debate about the spondee's existence, in both the literary and the linguistic context, concluding that this existence depends on both textual and readerly factors. The textual factors include a potentially stressful semantics, a diction favoring monosyllabic, lexical words, and a syntax that omits many of the nonlexical items such as articles and prepositions. The readerly factors include a reader both willing and able to pronounce spondaic rhythms and a reading event in which emotional and prosodic stresses are emphasized. All these factors are derived from poetic analyses that show how a particular intonation of a line is a manifestation of a particular interpretation. Some of the lines are taken from Shakespeare and Donne, but-more attention is paid to the style of Hopkins and Crane, two poets whose verse is unusually spondaic.
TOWARD THE END of “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” Wallace Stevens states that “above everything else, poetry is words; and that words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds” (CPP 663). Such an explicit, even totalizing declaration of the value and centrality of sound by the poet has stimulated an impressive body of work recognizing and theorizing the place of sound in Stevens’ poetry and thinking. While, as Lisa Goldfarb observes, “Nearly every critic on Stevens has, in some way, acknowledged the centrality of sound and music in his work” (28), understanding the role that sound plays within the poetry remains a challenge. Stefan Holander notes sound’s double potential to accomplish “a ‘defamiliarizing’ moment of radical deception” while also producing “a sense of integration and participation, a heightened experience of language as the physical and semantic aspects of a poem appear to work together” (70). By contrast, other critical strands have sought to explore “the possibility that the sound of words admits play without involving a particular semantic register” (Gerber, “Prosody” 186).
Anca Rosu’s The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens, for instance, situates sound in the murky area beyond the representational. According to Rosu, Stevens brings sound to a point of exhibiting a “reversal of what we consider to be the normal relation between reality and language,” as when language approaches charms or incantations, a kind of verbal magic that “conjure[s] up a reality instead of representing one” (34). And one explanation that Peter Middleton offers for Stevens’ “immersion in sound” is the possibility that “Stevens may well be trying to resist the cognitive subsumption of the work of art under a philosophical or cultural paraphrase by retaining a resistant stratum of sound in the same manner that visual artists use brushwork and texture to resist easy pictorialization of the work by viewers” (75). The idea that sound conjures up its own reality in the poem, and resists, rather than aids, legibility, stands in opposition to Alexander Pope’s dictum, in the second part of “An Essay on Criticism,” that “The sound must seem an echo to the sense.” If in Pope sound should accompany, serve, and illuminate sense, there is also the possibility that sound, in its materiality, physicality, or texture, resists or obfuscates sense. But how can such obfuscation be achieved in a poem? As I will show, sound in Stevens often works to obfuscate sense and resist legibility by tampering with our cognitive mechanism of encoding and recalling words with similar sounds. This particular effect of phonemic overlap, or sound similarity between words, has been studied by cognitive scientists in the context of “serial recall,” experiments in which subjects are asked to repeat a group of words that they hear, in the correct order. In a series of experiments published in 1966, A. D. Baddeley first played sequences of words to subjects and then asked them to write down the words they heard. These words either shared similar sounds (mad-man-mat) or did not (cow-day-bar). Baddeley found that sequences of similar-sounding words were overwhelmingly less correctly reproduced than different-sounding ones: relatively few subjects were able to write down the similar-sounding words in order. From these results, Baddeley inferred that phonemic similarity blurs words in our short-term memory and makes them difficult to recall.
This cognitive phenomenon, known to memory researchers as “acoustic confusion,” occurs in a specific sound strategy Stevens employs. This strategy has, to the best of my knowledge, escaped systematic treatment even by critics attuned to Stevens’ sound precisely because unpacking its operation requires understanding of the psychological mechanism Stevens exploits to achieve his effects. In this particular sound strategy, Stevens uses a pair of words with some degree of phonemic overlap. The overlap may involve weaker sound-relations between the two words, like partial rhyming or consonance, or stronger sound-relations, like full rhyme. In either case, the words recur, typically together, but often in varying locations throughout a poem: the pair can appear and reappear within the same line, across two different lines, at the ends or beginnings of lines, or even in different stanzas. So, too, the number...
Poet Alice Major was given a book on relativity at the impressionable age of ten, so she never quite understood why science came to be dismissed as reductive or opposite to art. She surveys the sciences of the past half-century -- from physical to cognitive to evolutionary -- to shed light on why and how human beings create poems, challenging some of the mantras of postmodern thought in the process. Part memoir, part ars poetica, part wonder-journey, Intersecting Sets is a wide-ranging and insightful amalgam.
It is generally acknowledged that verbal auditory imagery, the reader's sense of hearing the words on a page, matters in the silent reading of poetry. Verbal auditory imagery (VAI) in the silent reading of narrative prose, on the other hand, is mostly neglected by literary and other theorists. This is a first attempt to provide a systematic theoretical account of the felt qualities and underlying cognitive mechanics of narrative VAI, drawing on convergent evidence from the experimental cognitive sciences, psycholinguistic theory, and introspection. The central argument is that distinctions within the domain of embodied VAI also apply to higher-order meaning-making. That is, based on the imaginer's level of self-implication in their production, discrete types of VAI are associated with discrete tendencies in spontaneous literary interpretation. More generally, the aim of this paper is to isolate a new set of embodied experiences which, along with previously researched phenomena such as sensorimotor enactment or emotion, contribute to our understanding of literary narrative.
The objective of this article is twofold. In the first part, I will discuss two issues central to any theoretical inquiry into mental imagery: embodiment and consciousness. I will do so against the backdrop of second-generation cognitive science, more specifically the increasingly popular research framework of embodied cognition, and I will consider two caveats attached to its current exploitation in narrative theory. In the second part, I will attempt to cast new light on readerly mental imagery by offering a typology of what I propose to be its four basic varieties. The typology is grounded in the framework of embodied cognition and it is largely compatible with key neuroscientific and other experimental evidence produced within the framework.
Metre and meaning intertwine in manifold ways. The aim of this paper is to discuss the interplay between the metric and semantic structures in poetry in the light of the work of a Finnish poet, Ilpo Tiihonen. Throughout his career, which started in the 1970s, he has been one of the few Finnish contemporary poets to make constant use of metric structures and rhyme. The article also aims to shed some light on questions that arise when metrical poetry is translated from one language into another, in this case from Finnish into English.
We live in an era that loves to lament, and countless texts repeat the same refrain: a death notice for literature, condemned to decline in a world which, we are told, is becoming more and more hostile to culture in general and to literature in particular. If we are being honest, the complaint is not unique to our time: it has long been an obligatory gesture in the humanities. This is certainly not enough to disqualify such a complaint. What does disqualify it, however, is that it is false.
Perhaps it is banal to observe that the future of literature is not threatened. Never in the history of humanity have people read as much as they do today. The first reason for this is that never before has so large a proportion of humanity known how to read and write. This is especially true in "developed" countries. Although a few pockets of illiteracy exist in our societies and there are a few localized eruptions of ignorance, we should not forget that today's literacy rate is far superior to what it was at the end of the nineteenth century. This is even more true at the global level: since the middle of the twentieth century access to writing has grown exponentially in all regions of the world. The current expansion of the internet is part of this progression. It is at once an effect and a cause: an effect because mastering the use of online information presupposes that one can read and write; a cause inasmuch as technical access to the internet is itself a catalyst for learning to read and write. Thus, if reading and writing do not have the same place in cultural life that they did a few generations ago, this does not mean that they have a lesser place. Their places have simply changed.
However, those who bemoan the decline of literary culture—and in the same breath, sometimes, decline of culture in general—do not necessarily deny the existence of a global rise in the practice of reading and writing. Rather, they maintain that this development, "driven" by technology and "massification," far from benefitting literature, abandons it. That the new readers, according to this vision, do not read "real" but ersatz literature is but one of the signs of the generalized lack of education that characterizes contemporary societies. Instead of Joyce or Musil, they read superficial and stereotypical best sellers. Instead of reading and learning by heart the verses of Walt Whitman or Mallarmé, they listen to and learn by heart the songs that stream out of the radio and the television.
It is, alas, undeniable that every society is threatened by ignorance. But a good deal of bad faith is needed to claim that ignorance is encouraged by the political and social democracy in which the populations of certain societies, among them Europeans and Americans, happen to live. Comparison with the experience of totalitarian or even "merely" authoritarian regimes should encourage us to refrain from such assertions. It is true, however, that the democratizing dynamic that has characterized our societies since the nineteenth century has ceaselessly reconfigured the relationship between high culture and vernacular culture. Over time, the two have become so permeable in both directions that any such distinction becomes useless, if it were not already, to describe the relevant practices when we ask not only about the modalities of cultural transmission, but also their creation.
The supposed crisis of literature hides another crisis that is quite real: that of literary studies. It is in fact a triple crisis, affecting at once the transmission of literary values, the cognitive study of literary phenomena, and the training of students in literature. Where does it come from? I hypothesize that this crisis results from our tendency to reduce "literary culture" to one of its established representations, namely "Literature"— precisely that which is said to be in crisis. This vision of the literary was established by the separatist educational model of the nineteenth century and it continues to shape our current ideas. It would be better to begin with a more charitable notion of...
This conversation began at MLA in 2012 when we recognized that cognitive approaches to literature and disability studies, two rapidly and independently developing fields, must start talking to one another. The subject is autism: how it has been divergently understood and deployed and how it can be convergently understood and deployed. Kept apart, the two fields seem vulnerable to caricature. The former sometimes applies scientific and medical insights uncritically (such as the assertion that autistics have no theory of mind and, thus, cannot read fiction); the latter sometimes advances a completely social-constructionist understanding of physiological distinction (as if stigma were the entire story of alternative embodiment). Scholars in cognitive approaches to literature need the insights of disability studies to think about mind, narrative, and agency in neurodiverse ways; scholars in disability studies need the insights of cognitive approaches to literature to give the concept of neurodiversity, which is quickly becoming a kind of platitude, some actual neuroscientific content. Talking across conventional disciplinary divides has precipitated questions that we would never have thought to ask. It has also made us hope that an ongoing conversation between cognitive approaches to literature and disability studies will transform both fields. We cannot foresee the exact shape of this transformation, but the formerly distinct trajectories already feel more intertwined.
In her recent contribution to Disability Studies Quarterly, Paula C. Durbin-Westby, an autistic disability rights activist, builds on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to stress the importance of the “inclusion of autistics as active collaborators in research, rather than mere research subjects to be studied and then written about, often in language that many autistic people find demeaning. We must insist,” she writes, “on being ‘speaking subjects,’ with our participation and input used in meaningful ways, rather than being ‘spoken subjects,’ a position which can lead to misinterpretation of research results and to uninformed experiments.” Would you comment on the ramifications of this practice of adapting the rhetoric of postcolonial studies to disability studies?
The postcolonial analogy can be traced back to a number of scholars, including Arthur Frank, who in The Wounded Storyteller likens medical patients to colonized peoples: the former’s bodies have been rationally conquered and their indigenous experience of illness or disability has been haughtily disregarded. In its place, an official narrative, in something like a foreign language, has prevailed, leaving patients feeling both alienated and disempowered. But over the last thirty years or so, patients, like postcolonial subjects, have begun to write back to this kind of empire. According to Frank, “Postcolonialism in its most generalized form is the demand to speak rather than to be spoken for . . . or, in the worst cases, rather than being effaced entirely” (13). The rhetoric of postcolonial studies thus helps us to think about the historical circumstances of the neurological other: the subaltern has not only learned to speak, it has also begun to organize, as the neurodiversity movement and organizations such as the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network make clear. Insisting on the right to self-determination and advancing a notion of autism as neurological difference, not pathology, ASAN has agitated for progress on a range of issues: from better education, employment, and housing opportunities to better, more respectful medical care and scientific research.
The difference between the privileged outsider view and the newly empowered insider one is, however, considerable, and because the scientific community often has trouble with what autistic writer Dawn Prince calls “the superior part of speaking” (“The Silence Between”)—namely, listening—it continues to cause damage. Think, for instance, of the common claim that autistics don’t experience empathy, which popular novels such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime have only further promulgated. This claim is prevalent in the many fields that make up cognitive aesthetics.1 If one actually listens to autistics, one hears a different story. Stephen Shore, for example, distinguishes between being able to feel the pain of another, which he does so well that he almost “fuses” with it, and being able to perform this venerated emotion in a conspicuously neurotypical manner.2 By moving too quickly from...
Journal of Narrative Theory 34.2 (2004) 133-145
In "Discourse in the Novel," Mikhail Bakhtin goes to some lengths to distinguish novelistic from poetic discourse. And yet, as noted by Neil Roberts (1), he uses a poetic text, Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, as one of his prime examples of novelistic discourse (Bakhtin 322-24, 329). Bakhtin's theory is that poetic genres are monologic, presupposing "the unity of the language system and . . . of the the poet's individuality," as opposed to the novel, which is dialogic, "heteroglot, multivoiced, multistyled and often multi-languaged" (264-65). This paper contends that, by Bakhtin's own criteria, some verse forms are especially well designed for novelistic discourse. The form chosen for particular scrutiny is ottava rima, a stanza that has been used for narrative purposes for many centuries, originating in the Italian oral tradition of the cantastorie (Wilkins 9-10; De Robertis 9-15).
Clearly, ottava rima could not have originated as an English oral form, for it requires too many rhymes for this rhyme-poor, relatively uninflected language. Using a heroic line—in Italian the hendecasyllabic, in English the iambic pentameter—the stanza's rhyme scheme is ABABABCC. Thus it resembles the English sonnet in a sense, for it begins with an alternating structure and concludes with a couplet that is alien to both the rhymes and the rhyme pattern that precede it. As with this type of sonnet, a potential appears for a rupture in the discourse between the alternating structure and the couplet. Alternating verse tends to lean forward not to the next line but to the line after that for the echo or completion of a rhyme, encouraging the discourse to proceed apace with narrative or description; but a couplet is a closed, circling structure, that faces inward rather than onward. Even the crudest improvised ottava rima narrative will display some fluctuation between telling the story and reflecting upon the story as its unfolding discourse pulsates between alternate and couplet rhyme.
By the time of the high Renaissance in Italy, ottava rima was well established as a written form, though it still persisted in the oral tradition of the improvvisatori—some of whom still use it today. The form had become so much the standard for poetic narrative that Dante's invention of terza rima for his epic, La Commedia, was little less than a revolution. Dante may well have had a Bakhtinian suspicion that epic poetry required more unity of voice than ottava rima would allow. Whereas ottava divides discourse into discrete little eight-line packets, terza rima is a continuous form, rhyming ABA BCB CDC DED . . . etc. It is a kind of unchecked alternating pattern, each tercet unclosed and forever hearkening forward towards as-yet-uncompleted rhymes in the next tercet. It thus permits long strophes and paragraphs of unbroken utterance, though not quite as freely as Milton's epic blank verse. In order to achieve formal closure at the end of a canto, Dante adds to the last tercet a single line that rhymes with the tercet's enclosed line. Thus this final structure is an alternating quatrain, a more symmetrical and complete verse form than a tercet: . . . VWV WXW XYX YZYZ.
The two most famous Renaissance ottava rima narratives are Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. Like their English successor, Spenser's Faerie Queene, these poems are long, magical, episodic and multifaceted, possessing a great many characters and strands of story. As early as 1876 the Italian critic, Pio Rajna, declared that they were not epics but novels—mainly because he saw ottava as the perfect medium for modern narrative (18). But, even earlier, and more explicitly than Dante, Tasso had expressed similarly Bakhtinian ideas about genre. Tasso desired to create an epic and believed, as he argues in his prose essays, that epic poetry possesses the virtue of unity—a unity that, since Homer, has not been simple but compound: "composta unità" (Prose, 390, 438). This crucial feature of unity Tasso must have felt that his Gerusalemme liberata was lacking, for he rewrote the poem in 1593 as the austere Gerusalemme conquistata, with many...
Foremost theorist of the New Criticism, W. K. Wimsatt, inherits from the Romantics the desire to differentiate poetry from prose on essentialist rather than formal grounds. In I. A. Richards, a new antithesis between the symbolic or referential use of language and its emotive use replaces the old one of prose and poetry. Wimsatt also recognizes two kingdoms of discourse, but for him, a formal or functional difference—the complementary distribution of the logical and counterlogical figures—confirms that poetry and prose really do differ: “the difference between prose and verse is the difference between homoeoteleuton and rhyme.” Neither prose nor poetry, however, observes the divide between logical and counterlogical figures with anything like the regularity claimed by Wimsatt. Examples of rhyme in prose and homoeoteleuton in verse weaken his case, as does the example of John Milton's enjambed blank verse, with the sense variously drawn out, which emulates the periodic syntax of Milton's own prose. The attempt to differentiate the logical language of prose from the emotive, counterlogical language of poetry, which the New Critics silently adopt from the Romantics, fails, and, historically, the project of finding the essential difference gives way to Roman Jakobson's notion of the poetic function, dominant in poetry but available to prose as well.
This article explores issues of versification as an epitome of cultural programs. It is devoted to the question of how cognitive processes shape and constrain cultural and literary forms. It assumes that the generation of culture is governed by adaptation devices exploited for cultural and aesthetic ends. The argument is propounded in four stages. The first stage deals with an issue of poetic prosody, foregrounding the conflict between the influence-hunting and the cognitive-constraint approaches to the same problem. The second stage adduces an instance of how, “in the process of repeated social transmission, cultural programs come to take forms which have a good fit to the natural capacities of the human brain” (D'Andrade 1980). The third stage treats the versification systems as cultural artifacts and attempts to account for the differences among them. The fourth stage examines what appears as a counterexample to one of the central generalizations in this article. The concluding section not only summarizes the article's argument but also widens its scope, briefly alluding to some further research, in which similar cognitive assumptions are applied to an instance of figurative language, the metaphysical conceit.
Metrical theories agree upon the fundamental function of time as the basis along which the organizing principles in the perception of poetic rhythm are articulated. The fact that it plays an inescapable role in music -and indeed all human activities, from the circadian rhythms of biology to its presence in metaphysics- raises complex and wide-ranging questions about its role in the arts, questions that deal with concepts beyond the insights and epistemological principles of the linguistic theories that are the basis of most current metrical studies. There is a gap between the linguistic approach and that of literary criticism, and although it is a matter of contention, there is a certain tendency in some scholars from either field to make brief incursions into the opposing side. The aims of this paper are to briefly explore and survey the limits of some of the approaches in relation to the temporal element and to provide some examples from either field which could lead to an outline of a few shared perspectives.
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