Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice, Harri Veivo, Bo Pettersson and Merja Polvinen (eds.)

Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice

Harri Veivo, Bo Pettersson and Merja Polvinen (eds.),
Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2005.

ISBN 951-570-598-3, 339 pp.

Any literary scholar interested in contemporary poetics or theory soon encounters the word cognition'. Cognitive studies has spawned a large corpus of work during the last twenty years, and this body is constantly growing, challenging more and more readers to reflect on the mind's workings and to adjust their understanding of literary phenomena accordingly. It is too early to say whether this is a major change of paradigm; the number of publications indicates that this might be the case. Hence, all aspects of the new approach have to be analysed. Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice focuses on interpretation: In what ways does cognitive study revise the principles and practices used in the interpretation of literary texts? This question should be addressed in numerous ways. Not only does each literary work propose a unique task for the interpreter, but cognitive studies also are heterogeneous, defined by a common focus rather than by shared axioms.

The volume is based on a selection of papers presented at the Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice' conference arranged at University of Helsinki in August 2004. According to David S. Miall, Professor of English at University of Alberta, this conference was the hallmark of a new way of thinking about literature. It represented, for the first time in some years, a substantially new mode of understanding based on detailed models of cognitive processes'.

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Table of Contents



Preface

1. Introduction: Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice, Harri Veivo

I Cognition and Interpretation

2. Poetry as Power: The Dynamics of Cognitive Poetics as a Scientific and Literary Paradigm, Margaret H. Freeman

3. The Many Faces of Unreliable Narration: A Cognitive Narratological Reorientatio, Bo Pettersson

4. Text World Theory in Literary Practice, Joanna Gavins

5. Models of Reading: Diagrammatic Aspects of Literary Texts, Christina Ljungberg

II Practices of Reading

6. Beyond Interpretation: The Cognitive Significance of Reading, David S. Miall

7. Believable Fictions: The Moral Implications of Story-Based Emotions, Howard Sklar

8. Navigating Through Fantasy Worlds: Cognition and the Intricacies of Reader Response to Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, Margarete Rubik

9. The Mark on the Wall' and Literary Fancy: A Cognitive Sketch, Olga Vorobyova

10. From Hard Poetics to Situated Reading: A Cognitive-Empirical Study of Imagery and Graded Figurative Language, Liza Das and Braj Bhushan

III Cognition and Literary Theory

11. Theory and/vs. Interpretation in Literary Studies; or, Why Theory Is Always Letting down Interpretation, and Why Interpretation Is Always Impure and Patchy, Jørgen Dines Johansen

12. On Cognitive Poetics and Stylistics, Peter Stockwell

13. Modelling, Theorising and Interpretation in Cognitive Literary Studies, Harri Veivo and Tarja Knuuttila

14. Afterword
Cognitive Literary Studies: Where to Go from Here, Bo Pettersson

Contributors
Index