Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (review)

This clearly written and well-organized introductory textbook provides an overview of the fledgling discipline or interdiscipline referred to by Stockwell as Cognitive Poetics and by other researchers as cognitive stylistics or (when the focus is on narrative in particular) cognitive narratology. Drawing on a range of cognitively oriented theories of language structure and use, the book brings those theoretical models to bear on literary texts, prompting students to discover ways of reconnecting literary study with the study of language and mind. Thus, though it does demonstrate methods for generating interpretations of particular texts, the main focus of the book lies elsewhere: namely, on the way cognitive frameworks for language study can be used to establish greater reciprocity in the relation between theories of language and theories of literature. In this way, S builds on the traditions of literary linguistics that have burgeoned in Europe and especially the UK over the past several decades. Whereas their North American counterparts unfortunately tend to segregate the study of literary texts from the analysis of other linguistic practices, S follows precedents set by M. A. K. Halliday, Geoffrey Leech, Michael Short, and others in using tools from linguistic theory to situate literary discourse in the context of broader meaning-making processes.

But S updates this research tradition by drawing on a variety of developments in cognitive language theory in particular. Ch. 2 shows how ideas from Ronald Langacker’s cognitive grammar (in particular, his account of figure and ground as core primitives of the language system) can recontextualize key concepts in the study of literary style, including the notions of dominance, stylistic deviance, and foregrounding. Ch. 3 suggests the relevance for literary study of categorization theory and the idea of prototypicality; these notions throw new light on a range of phenomena, from generic classifications of texts to poets’ use of sentence structures that are more or less nonprototypical in English. Ch. 4 uses deictic-shift theory to redescribe mechanisms for establishing, maintaining, and shifting perspectives in narrative discourse.

Ch. 5 extends S’s initial account of the figure/ ground distinction and of prototypicality effects, while Ch. 6 provides a compact overview of artificial-intelligence research on scripts and schemata and argues that making sense of literary texts commonly requires not only the activation but also the disruption and refreshment of schemata. Ch. 7 explores discourse-level applications of Gilles Fauconnier’s theory of mental spaces; that discussion is continued, in different terms, in Ch. 10’s account of Paul Werth’s text-world theory. Ch. 8 discusses how cognitive-linguistic theories of conceptual metaphor bear on the notions of theme and gist in literary interpretation. Ch. 9 explores a similar idea, namely, that of parable, or the projection of a source story onto a target story. Ch. 11 tests Catherine Emmott’s theory of contextual frames, originally developed to explain the process of narrative comprehension, against the interpretive challenges posed by a dramatic performance in real time. The book’s final chapter singles out five watchwords for future work in cognitive poetics: texture, discourse, ideology, emotion, and imagination.

Each chapter contains a helpful preview of the topic under discussion, a list of literary critical concepts that can be reconsidered from the cognitive-poetic standpoint, an illustrative analysis of a sample text, discussion questions and exercises, and suggestions for further reading.