Poetics Today, vol. 26, n° 3, Fall 2005

Poetics Today brings together scholars from throughout the world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. Poetics Today presents a remarkable diversity of methodologies and examines a wide range of literary and critical topics.

Volume 26, Number 3, Fall 2005:

Contents:

APRIL LONDON - Isaac D'Israeli and Literary History: Opinion, Anecdote, and Secret History in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Isaac D'Israeli's contributions to the formation of literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries remain unexplored, his voluminous writings mined for apt quotations rather than considered as significant in their own right. This article argues that his questioning of genre hierarchies and period distinctions grewout of an attempt to correctwhat he sawas the limitations of contemporary historiographic and literary critical representations. Following his renunciation of revolutionary ideals, these inquiries were framed by a "conservative iconoclasm" that was fostered by the need to adjust loyalist sympathies to fit his own peripheral status. Committed both professionally and temperamentally to a pluralist understanding of history writing, D'Israeli integrated into his work from the 1790s through to the 1840s biographical, political, social, and psychological elements that led him ultimately to a distinctively literary historical mode of thought. Drawing on the resources of opinion, anecdote, and secret history, he articulates possibilities for historicist inquiry that continue to stand as powerful alternatives to the romantic ideology.

MARK J. BRUHN - Place Deixis and the Schematics of Imagined Space: Milton to Keats

Abstract: The infrequent, indefinite, and cumulatively incoherent use of place deixis in the representation even of conceptually unified space is characteristic of the greater English lyric from Milton through the eighteenth century. In these poems, as Balz Engler has suggested, such deixis typically operates for the rhetorical sequencing of entities conceived as themes, rather than for the grounding and interrelation of entities conceived as objects within a represented scene.With the advent of romanticism, however, place deixis begins to appear with greater frequency, density, and variety, to trifold effect. It consolidates the represented scene, collapses that scene with the situation-of-discourse, and thereby reorients lyric attention to the local, relative, and embodied. Adapting recent arguments in spatial cognition and cognitive grammar, this study first describes the general functions of place-deictic schemata in literary cognition and then analyzes their poetic fortunes in relation to the concept of lyric sublimity from Milton to Keats.

PRADEEP SOPORY - Metaphor and Affect

Abstract: Metaphors are both cognitive and affective in their meaning. However, a discussion of affect has been absent from recent theories of metaphor comprehension. This article looks at how affect, broadly conceptualized as positive and negative valence, may interact with cognition during the metaphor comprehension process to provide the full import of metaphorical meaning. Four major metaphor processing theories,which enjoy the most support frompsychological studies, are discussed: conceptual structure, salience imbalance, class inclusion, and structure mapping. Given the comprehension mechanisms proposed by these theories, valence can contribute to the affective meaning of a metaphor as part of an experiential gestalt, as a pattern, or in a more componential fashion, as an attribute of an attribute of an object or category and as an attribute of an object or category itself.

MING DONG GU - Is Mimetic Theory in Literature and Art Universal?

Abstract: Mimesis is one of the most fundamental ideas in Western poetics. Mimetic theories constitute a mainstream in Western aesthetics. In comparative studies of Chinese and Western poetics, however, there exists a widely accepted opinion that mimetic theory is a cultural invention unique to the Western tradition. And on this scholarly consensus has been constructed a fundamental dichotomy, ramifying into a series of binary oppositions: the metaphorical, figurative, transcendental nature of Western art, as against the metonymic, literal, immanentist nature of Chinese art. Critically reviewing the comparative studies of mimetic theory, this article argues against the accepted opinion. By examining various ontological and epistemological aspects of mimesis in the Chinese tradition in relation to the West, this article reestablishes imitation as a transcultural human instinct and mimetic theory in art as a universal idea across cultural traditions. It also examines how the artistic ideal is conceived of in Chinese and Western representation, how Chinese mimetic theory differs from its Western counterpart, and what implications an understanding of the differences may have for the comparative study of Western and non-Western literatures.

DORRIT COHN - Early Discussions of Free Indirect Style

Review article:

TONY E. JACKSON - Explanation, Interpretation, and Close Reading: The Progress of Cognitive Poetics (Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction; Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen, eds., Cognitive Poetics in Practice)

MARGARET H. FREEMAN - The Nature of Poetic Texts (Reuven Tsur, On the Shore of Nothingness: A Study in Cognitive Poetics)