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||| COGNITVE POETICS - COGNITVE NARRATOLOGY | VIENNA CONFERENCE : IMAGIING MINDS - COGNITIVE APPROACHES | PROGRAM | CONCEPT & CONTACT | KLANGAPPARAT | LINKS | FURTHER READING

COGNITVE POETICS | COGNITVE NARRATOLOGY

The fields of cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics aim to ground literary reception processes in general human psychology and everyday knowledge without losing out of sight what is special about literary aesthetics . Innovative empirical methods are used to explore how readers make sense of stories and literary tropes .

Abstract of the Keynote- Speech by David S. Miall ( Univ. of Alberta ) :

Recent thinking among psychologists and neuropsychologists has witnessed a significant shift in understanding of the relationship of cognition and emotion, with the primacy of emotion now being widely accepted. Whereas it used to be considered that a prior cognitive appraisal was required for an emotion to occur, a cognitive process without emotion is now understood to be deficient, lacking direction, as has been demonstrated in cases of patients with frontal lesions that sever cognition from the emotion centres. Moreover, we often deliberately set out to cultivate emotional experience through reading: we use literature to raise our levels of engagement and interest through empathy with a protagonist or through pleasure in the stylistic aspects of a text.

However, the implications of this new perspective on emotions has as yet made little difference to our psychological understanding of literary reading. In this paper I consider evidence for the role of feeling, including some of the salient empirical studies in literary reading, and show how they raise significant implications for our cognitive accounts of the process of reading. The aspects touched on include the early processing of literary features such as foregrounding (i.e., the first 500 msec of processing), the anticipatory power of feelings, their analogical power, and their evocation of action imagery. |||

VIENNA CONFERENCE : IMAGIING MINDS - COGNITIVE APPROACHES

Imagining Minds – Cognitive Approaches to Narrative , Embodied Simulation , Metaphor and Complex Tropes ( pdf )

May 21 st - 24 th 2008, University Campus AAKH - hosted by the Dept. of English and American Studies and the Dept. of German Studies of Vienna University

The conference brings together leading figures in the field with
junior scholars for a cross-fertilizing dialog. |||

PROGRAM

Wednesday , May 21st

18.00 - KEYNOTE SPEECH - David S. Miall - Narrative feelings and their cognitive implications

20.00 - Drinks and food will be served at Universitätsbräu nearby

Thursday , May 22nd

9.30 - 11.00

• Brigitte Rath ( Ludwig-Maximilians-University , Munich ) - Schema theory and Narratology : Modelling narrative understanding
• Thomas Eder ( University of Vienna , Dept. of German Studies ) - Self Attribution , Introspection , and Narratology

Cognitive Approaches to Narratology often invoke the psychological activity of inferring what other people are thinking, perceiving or feeling. This process is generally considered in cognitive science to be facilitated by the possession of a Theory of Mind (ToM). ToM may be one of the things that makes literature - the writing and reading of literature, as well as the social relationships among characters in works of literature - possible.
My talk has two general aims: I) The concept of ToM within cognitive literary studies often seems to be used slightly different from the way cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind use it. So I will try to critically review some state-of-the-art literature on ToM (Goldman 2006, Nichols and Stich 2003, Carruthers 2006, Currie and Ravenscroft 2002) and compare it to the use of literary scholars (e.g. Zunshine 2006).

11.45 - 13.15

• Michael Sinding ( Justus-Liebig University Giessen ) - Conceptual Blending in Genre Transformation : The Evolution of Epistolarity
• Matthias Springer ( University of Munich ) - Humor and Narratives : Beyond narrative schematizing or a well-defined exception to it ?

My approach characterizes the constructivistic conceptualization of narrated humor and proposes a formalized description of mental models for representing it in events and episodes.

15.15 - 16.45

• Rebecca M. Gordon ( Reed College, Portland ) - Remakes , Genre , and Affect : The Thriller-Chiller-Comedy as Case Study
• Michael Kimmel ( Dept. of English and American Studies , ~ of Cultural Anthropology , University of Vienna ) - Embodied simulation in the reader and the cognitive linguistic toolbox

With this contribution I aim to discuss the import of the cognitive linguistic approaches to “embodiment” and “simulation” for narratology. Understanding how readers empathize with protagonist affect or otherwise simulate storyworld actions and events crucially benefits from converging recent approaches that emphasize the imagistic, kinaesthetically grounded and affective nature of representations ( … ) . Cognitive theory here dovetails nicely with the emerging narratological interest in readers’ mental and embodied imagery ( … ) .

Friday , May 23rd

9.30 - 10.15

• Yanna Popova ( Dpt. of Cognitive Science , Case Western Reserve University ) - Metaphor and Text Cohesion : What Holds a Narrative Together ?

Narratives, in both oral and written form, constitute a fundamental aspect of human experience. They are an ubiquitous instrument of thought that we use all the time to infer causality, attribute agency and make sense of our own lives and the lives of others. The ability to organize events in meaningful coherent wholes guides our understanding of what is happening (story, narrative) and forms the basis of our later recollection of what took place (memory).

10.30 - 11.15

• Thomas Gasser ( Vienna ) - “… And handsome is as handsome did it too ! ” - retracing ambiguity or advanced analysis of metaphor patterns based on cognitive linguistic theory

“Billy Budd , sailor“, Herman Melville’s last written and posthumously published work, “has generated a body of critical responses so rich and varied that they may be read as a chronicle of modern intellectual life.” The deep ambiguity of this work of art has led to such opposing interpretations reading it as a religious pean or a jaded satire. - This paper undertakes the decent attempt of retracing the way this ambiguity is produced by taking a close look at the conceptual imagery of the novel .

11.30 - 12.15

• Ronald Kemsies ( University of Vienna, Dept. of English and American Studies ) - From detailed coding of metaphors to authorial metaphorizing strategies

Virtually all studies of metaphor in cognitive poetics still suffer from major deficiencies, notably (a) that the analysis is not done encompassingly for whole texts using recent developments in empirical metaphor identification and (b) that textual trends in how an author uses metaphor are therefore not accessible to closer inspection. This is regrettable because a comparative perspective of a sample of different texts with regard to their stylistic trends can lead to a much improved understanding of both the basic literary functions and the ways of literary enrichment of everyday metaphor (e.g., by elaboration, combination, scenario-building, blending,…) To resolve this issue, a paradigm is needed that combines systematic qualitative coding of text that can be later used for both qualitative and quantitative measures.

14.15 - 15.00

• Yeshayahu Shen ( Tel Aviv University ) - Heard melodies are sweet : cognitive and linguistic aspects of synaesthetic metaphors

15.15 - 16.00

• Rachel Giora ( Tel Aviv University ) - Is it really the metaphoric that is pleasing ? On the aesthetic effects of optimal innovation

16.15 - 17.00

• Jan Auracher ( Ludwig-Maximilians-University , Munich ) - How to measure attention : Bio-psychological approaches to literature

The research focused on possibilities to operationalize the two variables - i.e. linguistic deviation and attention - formally by means of bio-psychological measurements and computational text analysis. An algorithm was developed to compute statistical ‘deviation’ by counting the relative occurrence of bi-grams (two word phrases). Readers listen to text with high or low degree of deviation and while their EEG (electroencephalogram) was recorded. By means of analyzing average Alpha wave power the attention of the subjects while listening was assessed. Results show that texts with high level of deviation bear a higher potential to draw the attention of the recipient.

17.30 - 19.00

• Discussion

Saturday , May 24th

10.00 - 10.45

• Margarete Rubik ( University of Vienna; Dept. of English and American Studies ) - Feeling by proxy : descriptions of pain and love in English literature

The paper will investigate the question in how far literature can make the reader feel pain and love by proxy, as it were, i.e., by what stylistic means empathy can be evoked or prevented in such descriptions.

11.00 - 11.45

• Makiko Mizuno ( Doctoral candidate , Vienna ) - Analysis of Experimental Poetry using the Methodology of Cognitive Poetics : A Case from Concrete Poetry

The purpose of this study is to investigate and understand the methods of experimental poetry, especially those of concrete poetry, using cognitive linguistic theory. Concrete poetry is a form of experimental poetry prevalent between the 1950s and 1970s, which uses a word not only in terms of its meaning but also of its physical quality, that is its visual gestalt. Analyzing a work of concrete poetry requires a synthetic method that can handle both the semantic and the visual aspect of the poem. One famous work by Gomringer [ wind ] illustrates how this poem realizes the semantic concept and diagrammatic iconicity.

12.00 - 12.45

• Sibylle Moser ( LOOP . Institute for Systemic Media Research , Vienna ) : DAYS GO BY , ENDLESSLY . Metaphors of Time in Laurie Anderson’s “White Lily”

I will demonstrate the complex nature of crossmodal representation through the analysis of Laurie Anderson’s piece “White Lily” ( 1986 ). In this short performance piece multimedia artist Anderson tells her audience a story about memory and time while her shadow and a computer animated figure, corresponding to this shadow, can be seen on a canvas behind her. I will analyze how Anderson enacts the abstract concept of time through the iconic use of syntax and rhythm in her lyrics as well as through music, gesture and computer animation. Focusing on selected lines of the text I will argue that in “White Lily” icons in different media work as metaphors for each other thereby realizing the crossmodal integration of experience .

14.45 - 18.30

Panel discussion with a focus on the junior contributions |||

CONCEPT & CONTACT

Michael Kimmel , Thomas Eder , Organisation : Ute Huber [ mailto ] ute.huber [ at ] univie [ dot ] ac [ dot ] at |||

KLANGAPPARAT

“Poesie und Musik” klingt grösser als das simple Wort von der “Vertonung” . Anyway , nach vorhergehenden Releases in den Benelux- Staaten sowie in Grossbritannien ist die CD “Recitement” im April 2008 auch im deutschsprachigen Raum lieferbar : Poetische Texte von Yoko Ono , Gerard Manley Hopkins , Charles Baudelaire und Vincent van Gogh gelesen von Grössen wie Lou Reed . Weiters O- Ton- Aufnahmen von Jorge Luis Borges , Allen Ginsberg , Hugo Claus und einige Partikel “Kurt Schwitters ” . - Das Ganze in Eazy Listening- Arrangements und eingebettet in einen überreich mit synthetischen Geigen “veredelten” Hochglanz- Sound .

Zweifellos verfügt der Amsterdamer Produzent Stephen Emmer ( pdf ) über ein passables Register an musikalischen Genres und wurde speziell für seine Zusammenarbeit mit Lou Reed hochgelobt : Zu überzeugen vermag diese Poesie à la Kuschelrock allerdings kaum . Den Stream mag man auf der Webseite des Projekts anhören ( rechts befindet sich der Player ) , sich das aufwändig gemachte YouTube- Video reinziehen und uns gerne heftig widersprechen . |||

LINKS

• Programm | Flyer ( pdf )
• Detailed Program - including indications on the rooms the conference will take place ( word )
• Illustration © www.medizin-forum.de |||

FURTHER READING

• Cognitive poetics ( Wiki )
• Peter Stockwell - Cognitive Poetics : An Introduction - London 2002
• Joanna Gavins , Gerard Steen ( Eds. ) : Cognitive Poetics in Practice ( e- book )
• Manfred Jahn - Foundational Issues in Teaching Cognitive Narratology - European Journal of English Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 1 April 2004 , pp. 105 - 127
• David Herman - Story Logic : Problems and Possibilities of Narrative ( Frontiers of Narrative ) - 2008 |||