Article

Poetic Conventions As Cognitive Fossils

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Abstract

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.

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When we think of the cognitive sciences and literature, we usually think of bringing expertise from neuroscience to literary texts. However, interdisciplinary projects of this nature usually focus on semantic fields or narrative patterns, marginalizing the literary quality of the texts that are examined. More recently, the opportunities that come with a focus on aesthetics and poetic form have been discussed following Stockwell (2009), who has argued that we need to go beyond semantics in the field of cognitive poetics. Experiments using fMRI scanners have shown that readers’ brains ›fire up‹ holistically but that engaging with poetry and prose activates different regions of the brain (cf. Jacobs 2015). So one task of cognitive poetics is to look more closely at the aesthetic experience of literary texts. The sonnet is arguably a suitable test case for a cognitive poetics that is interested in form. After all, received wisdom has it that the sonnet abides by a rigid formal pattern: »it is a fourteen-line poem with a particular rhyme scheme and a particular mode of organizing and amplifying patterns of image and thought […] usually [rendered in] iambic pentameter« (Levin 2001, xxxvii). Accordingly, matters of form should play a crucial part when sonnets are read. At the same time, due to its »particular mode« of organisation, the sonnet is often thought to be a poetic form that is prone to cognitive processes. Helen Vendler (1997, 168) claims, for example, that Shakespeare’s Following Vendler and Lyne in their focus on cognitive processes when discussing the sonnet, I will challenge simplistic notions of poetic form that – in the case of the sonnet – are limited to structural features like the fourteen-line rule. Aberrations like the If we accept that poetic form is not given but evolves while stimuli for cognitive processes and emotional responses are provided, research in cognitive poetics must take aspects of form more seriously. In her comprehensive study of poetic form, Scrutinizing poetic form more systematically with the help of cognitive sciences thus also promises to help us redefine our concept of knowing. Exciting experiments with a focus on affect and emotional responses have brought to the fore the notion that aesthetics plays an important part in the process of reading poetry (cf. Lüdtke 2014). These experiments suggest that schema theory, with its reliance on pre-existing meaningful structures, falls short of grasping the process of reading poetry as an aesthetic process. So while pattern recognition, be it on a narrative plane or a semantic plane, is certainly one facet of the cognitive process of reading poetry, the process involves other facets, too, that CLS has only begun to address. Vaughan-Evans et al. (2016, 6) have perhaps provided »the first tangible evidence that this link [between an aesthetic appreciation of poetry and implicit responses] is permeable«. They argue that the »spontaneous recognition of poetic harmony is a fast, sublexical process« (ibid.) opening up a playing field for CLS at a sublexical level that still warrants investigation. Equally, a recent eye-tracking study of how English haiku are being read, conducted by Hermann J. Müller et al. (2017), has revealed that readers’ individual engagement with poetry becomes more diverse with a second or third round of engaging with the text. This may sound trivial, but it does challenge the notion that CLS will help establish universal patterns of cognition. On the contrary, CLS may corroborate a hermeneutical stance: with every reading of a poem, new questions arise; poems are never fully understood. CLS can thus help to heed Bruhn’s and Wolf’s interjection that »we should pay more attention to the responses of the individual qua individual than averaging individuals into groups« (Bruhn/Wolf 2003, 85).
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This essay integrates what I have written on the contribution of meter and rhythm to emotional qualities in poetry, opposing them to emotional contents. I distinguish between “meaning-oriented” approaches and “perceived effects” approaches, adopting the latter; and adopt a qualitative (rather than quantitative) method of research. Providing a simplified list of structural elements of emotion, I explore structural resemblances between rhythmic patterns and emotions. I investigate such issues as convergent and divergent poetic styles, convergent and divergent delivery styles, hypnotic poetry, the contribution of meter and rhythm to a “dignified quality”; and the rhythmic performance and emotional effect of stress maxima in weak positions. Finally, I locate my work between impressionist criticism on the one hand, and meaning-oriented criticism on the other. NOTE. The pdf version of this paper contains sound files, which may not work if you open the pdf in the browser. If this is the case, please download the pdf and open it from your computer.
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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.
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The human brain is divided into two hemispheres, right and left, that are joined by a thick ‘cable’ of neural fibres called the corpus callosum. It has long been observed that injury to the left hemisphere in the average adult damages speech, speech comprehension, and reading, and causes paralysis on the right side of the body. Injury to the right hemisphere, on the other hand, seems to leave linguistic capabilities intact, but causes paralysis on the left side of the body. These observations have given rise to the twin concepts of contralaterality of hemispheric control (i.e., that each hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body) and cognitive specialization of hemispheric function. As far back as the nineteenth century, it was recognized that the left hemisphere’s specialty was language. Pioneering British neurologist John Hughlings Jackson asserted in 1868 that the left hemisphere was the ‘leading side’ in most people, responsible for the control of speech and will. In the decade of the 1940s, French neurologist Henry Hecaen and British psychologist Oliver Zangwill demonstrated that the right hemisphere, far from being passive, controlled visuospatial processing (Benton, 1991).Particularly in the decade of the 1970s, mass market publications popularized the notion of the left brain as the processor of language and rational thought and the right brain as the processor of visuospatial images and holistic or intuitive awareness. Hippies and artists were believed to be ‘right brain’ in orientation, while engineers and businessmen were believed to be ‘left’. Indeed, the rather overly enthusiastic adoption of early laterality findings by western popular culture (exemplified by brain dominance quizzes on newspaper feature pages and the advertising of Saab automobiles as ‘a car for both sides of your brain’) made the whole subject seem rather oversimplified and absurd, and no doubt helped to blind the general public to an awareness of the implications of later research findings in the field of cerebral laterality.Today it is known that, in about 97 per cent of all right-handed adults, the left hemisphere is dominant for language (Pinker, 1994). Even among the left- handed population, the great majority, 69 per cent, process language in their left hemispheres, like right-handers (Pinker, 1994). Moreover, the sharply increased rates of neurological deficits such as mental retardation, autism, stuttering, dyslexia, and epilepsy among left-handed individuals (Iaccino, 1993) would make it seem even more apparent that left-hemispheric language is the ‘norm’ and right-hemispheric language a deviation from that norm. The isolated left hemisphere scores in the normal range on standardized tests of verbal intelligence (Gazzaniga and LeDoux, 1978). Only the left hemisphere possesses the complete lexicon and rules of syntax (Zaidel, 1983). Right- but not left-hemisphere-damaged patients, one group of researchers remarked, ‘seldom have difficulties with phonology, syntax, or semantics, and will carry on a conversation which at first glance seems normal’ (Benowitz et al., 1990). It would seem that the evidence for the left hemisphere as the ‘seat of language’ is indisputable. Or is it?Not at all. Because, over time, evidence has been mounting to show that the right hemisphere controls, or is capable of controlling on its own, a number of very subtle but intriguing ‘linguistic’ functions (Van Lancker, 1997) which, this paper will attempt to argue, are virtually synonymous with ‘poetry’ or ‘poetic’ speech. Indeed, one could assert that the degree of right-hemispheric involvement in language is what differentiates ‘poetic’ or ‘literary’ from ‘referential’ or ‘technical’ speech and texts.In the following pages, each of the major literary devices characteristic of ‘poetry’ will be shown to be either dependent upon the right hemisphere for comprehension/production, or capable of being processed by the right hemisphere as well as by the left. Definitions of the linguistic features characterizing ‘poetry’ and examples of their usage in actual poems will be drawn from John Frederick Nims’ lucid introduction to the subject for college students, Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (2000), now in its fourth edition, supplemented where appropriate by Alex PremingeRAnd T.V.F. Brogan’s more technical New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993). Following the presentation of neurological evidence for poetry as ‘right- hemispheric language’, the question of why poets, in particular, produce language so rich in right-hemispheric content will be addressed and possible answers proposed.
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Tests the hypothesis that pitch is not a determinant of rhythm on 25 Ss. Rhythmical sounds were produced by passing an electric current intermittently through a telephone receiver. Results revealed that with a constant ratio between the duration of the longer and shorter sounds, as their absolute duration increased, there was a decrease in the tendency of the longer sound to begin a group or an increase in its tendency to end the group. Concludes that pitch, intensity and duration could not be substituted for each other. The role of each in rhythm was radically different. Intensity had a group-beginning effect; duration a group-ending effect; while pitch had neither. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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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 poem’s 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