Poetics Today current issue

Shelley's Theory of Mind: From Radical Empiricism to Cognitive Romanticism

Bruhn, M. J. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:48:03 PDT

This essay reconstructs Percy Shelley's theory of mind from his letters and many unfinished essays as well as his Defence of Poetry (1821), emphasizing his radical insistence on the formal and teleological roles of analogy in human cognition, communication, and culture. Adopting the assumptions, method, and terminology he inherited from the vigorous associationist tradition in eighteenth-century British philosophy and psychology, Shelley sought to demonstrate the innate and thus indefeasible foundations of human morality, especially its master principle of social equity. His analysis took him at once to the heart of a range of psychosocial issues that are today studied under the cognitive scientific rubric of "theory of mind," including the developmental interrelations of, and motivations for, social imitation, language acquisition, and mental representation. Taking first a historical and then a theoretical view, I argue that Shelley's elegant solution to one of the major philosophical problems of the empirical age remains surprisingly relevant to central issues in contemporary science of mind.

The Visual Experience of Image Metaphor: Cognitive Insights into Imagist Figures

Gleason, D. W. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:48:03 PDT

In this essay I investigate how image metaphors—metaphors that link one concrete object to another, such as "her spread hand was a starfish"—promote visualization in the reader. Focusing on image metaphors in Imagist poetry, I assert that the two terms (e.g., the hand and the starfish) of many of these metaphors are similar in shape and that this "structural correspondence" encourages the reader to visualize those metaphors. Readers may spontaneously form a "visual template," a schematic middle ground that mediates between those similar shapes, in order to smoothly move between the two images within each metaphor. The structural correspondence and the mediating visual template allow readers to mentally shift back and forth between the two images, yet readers cannot fuse the two terms through visual imagery. Research supports these claims: reader reports have demonstrated that subjects understand image metaphors primarily through their physical features, and work on the visual interpretation of ambiguous figures suggests that though one cannot fuse images together, one may switch back and forth between multiple images of a figure, especially if the images share the same frame of reference. These findings indicate that readers may be particularly likely to understand image metaphor through visual imagery, especially when the terms of the metaphor correspond physically. This essay is drawn from a larger project on the "poetics of literary visualization"—a part-by-part investigation of the formal features of texts that elicit visual imagery. Such an account helps reveal the workings of the visual imagination and restore critical attention to this neglected aspect of the reading experience.

The (Neuro)-Aesthetics of Caricature: Representations of Reality in Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park

Baker, T. C. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:48:03 PDT

Recent research by V. S. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki has used neuroscientific methods to investigate the nature of aesthetic response. By situating their work in the context of post-Kantian aesthetic discourse, this essay demonstrates that such research provides an opportunity to bridge cognitive and artistic approaches to aesthetic experience and offers a provisional theory of art that incorporates both empirical and philosophical traditions. These theories will be considered in relation to Bret Easton Ellis's recent novel Lunar Park (2005), which focuses explicitly on questions of representation and reality. Through a juxtaposition of Ramachandran's emphasis on caricature as a central principle of art and Ellis's focus on distorted and questionable realities, this essay suggests new possibilities for the integration of cognitive science with literary and philosophical criticism.

The Languages of Art: How Representational and Abstract Painters Conceptualize Their Work in Terms of Language

Sullivan, K. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:48:03 PDT

Representational and nonrepresentational (abstract) artists exhibit different conceptual processes when they describe their work. Data from ekphrastic texts written by artists to accompany their artwork show that, although both kinds of painters refer metaphorically to their art using terms such as language, vocabulary, conversation, and narrative, the two use these words in different ways and with different meanings. For example, representational painters refer to "languages" that consist of the systems of represented objects, people, or landscapes that they depict, whereas nonrepresentational painters write about "languages" composed of sets of colors or shapes. Moreover, representational artists claim to engage in a "conversation" with the viewers of their works, whereas nonrepresentational artists prefer to "converse" with their materials or canvases. In general, representational painters use metaphorical terms such as language to describe their subject matter and their artwork's effect on potential viewers, whereas nonrepresentational painters use the same words to describe colors, shapes, and their own artistic process. Artists that combine representation and abstraction in the same artwork (here termed "partly representational" artists) use some of the metaphors preferred by the purely representational artists and some of the metaphors of the nonrepresentational artists, suggesting that the presence/absence of both representation and abstraction affect the metaphors that artists use to describe their work.

Narrative Structuring of Sympathetic Response: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Toni Cade Bambara's "The Hammer Man"

Sklar, H. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:48:03 PDT

This essay examines some of the ways that narratives produce sympathy in readers. First, I compare several models that have been proposed to explain how fictional texts structure readers' emotional responses. In this connection, I highlight some of the ways that narratological analyses of fictional narratives can complement approaches to the study of reader response that rely exclusively, or heavily, on psychological assumptions. I demonstrate some of the advantages of a narratologically based approach by analyzing in detail Toni Cade Bambara's short story "The Hammer Man." I contend that Bambara's story systematically moves readers from dislike to sympathy for the story's protagonist. In order to verify my claims about the story's effect on readers, I also review the results of tests that I conducted to measure subjects' levels of sympathy at the beginning and the end of the story. Finally, I discuss some of the implications of the test results for literary studies.

Notes on Contributors

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:48:03 PDT