Cognitive Poetics

Cognitive Poetics ( cognitive poetics ) is the collective term for contemporary, cognitive-empirical research approaches in literary theory , and literature , in which the study of the effect of narrative and linguistic- stylistic artifice is at the reader in the foreground.

Cognitive poetics tries to make the reception of literature understandable on the basis of general processes of human information processing (i.e. cognition). The name of the research field is made up of cognition , i. H. those mechanisms that structure human knowledge , and poetics , d. H. Theory for understanding literature, together. In its methodological orientation, cognitive poetics is a subsidiary discipline of the young field of social neuroscience , which is dedicated to the investigation of cognitive correlates of social processes in the human brain .

Within the research paradigm mentioned, thematic fields of specialization can currently be identified (mostly linked to individual research personalities), although an integrative programmatic approach has not yet been formulated. The dominant approaches here are a (cognitive) psychological, a linguistic and evolutionary-biological approach. Nevertheless, the various approaches or orientations are based on certain common basic assumptions.

Historical development

Research into linguistic peculiarities with regard to their effects on the recipient was already a topic of classical rhetoric and poetics , but was taken up again by the Russian formalists in the 1920s. Above all, Šklovskij ( The Art as a Procedure , 1917) pointed out the connections between the deviations from linguistic or narrative conventions and the effects of alienation and deautomatization. The ideas of formalism were further developed by the structuralists after it was banned by Stalin in 1930 and passed on to other countries by the exiles. In his seminal essay Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics (1960), Jakobson traces the poetic effect of language back to structures of equivalence, which draw the recipient's attention to the language or the linguistic medium itself. The principles of deautomatization and alienation were pursued in the Anglo-Saxon area, for example in the context of the analysis of found poems, also under the term foregrounding .

In the approaches to structural poetics, the reader's concepts and reception analysis are mostly included or at least taken into account, albeit not always in an explicit form. For example, J. Culler sees a linguistic analogy on the part of the reader in the sense of a "literary competence" (J. Cullers, Structuralist Poetics , 1975, chapter 6).

In the course of the 1970s, constructs and models from cognitive science that deal with the mental processes of perception, understanding and learning in the social and information science disciplines increasingly became trend-setting. The term cognitive poetics was analogous to term cognitive linguistics ( cognitive linguistics introduced). R. Tsur used the term in connection with the analysis and interpretation of poetic texts (R. Tsur, What is Cognitive Poetics , 1983). On the one hand, he developed assumptions about mental processes in the reader from observations on the text, but on the other hand also included considerations and assumptions about representations of human cognition and experience in the texts.

Basic assumptions

General validity of human cognition

Schematic representation of cognitive poetics

A central principle of cognitive linguistics is the generalizability of the basic cognitive performance of humans, i. H. the mechanisms structuring human cognition on all types of information to be processed, and thus also on the processing of literary works.

Thus, in the course of a text analysis , concepts of cognitive research are applied to literary works. Cognitive literature analysis tries to explain the special effect of literary stylistic devices or text forms on the recipient with recourse to cognitive basic mechanisms of human understanding (i.e. information processing).

Cognitive psychological concepts that receive special attention are:

Illustration of the general validity of human cognition

The ability of cognitive framing, for example - the understanding of new environmental information by embedding it in a cognitive frame of interpretation - can be observed in diverse human sensory performances; so notes, for example, interpreted (auditory frame) in relation to a certain key and atonal rated as tonal /, optical illusions usually subject to frame conflict between competing interpretive framework (see. picture puzzle ), and human utterances in conversation flow are generally under the former Conversation interpreted (cf. “Meet me here, today in a week, with a stick that is this size” - without adequate framing, the sentence cannot be given any meaning). With regard to literary texts, for example, Emmot suggests viewing sudden plot changes at the end of a short story as cognitive re-framing, in the light of which previous plot elements are given a completely new (and coherent) meaning.

Physical anchoring of cognition

Cognitive poetics particularly takes into account the fundamental anchoring of human cognition in the species-specific physicality . According to this approach, humans have developed specific mechanisms in the course of their evolutionary development in order to structure their perception of reality , which mainly depend on their physical experience. Such physically determined cognitive concepts can subsequently also be demonstrated in the literary reception process.

Illustration of physical anchorage and cognitive performance

In this sense, for example, the figure-ground distinction can be seen as a central cognitive skill that humans have developed in the course of their physical phylogenesis (undoubtedly at an early evolutionary point in time, as they share this ability with countless sister species). The specific physicality of Homo sapiens , his situated in a physical environment full of moving and rigid objects that have to be successfully manipulated, led to the formation of the (primarily visual) distinction between foreground objects (figure) and a rigid background (ground). In the course of evolution, this skill has reached a special stage of development in humans (see moths engaged in camouflaging mimicry , which highly specialized birds of prey cannot identify as separate objects, while humans succeed in making this distinction without difficulty). With regard to the reception of literature, this cognitive ability enables people, for example, to identify protagonists in larger parts of the text as separate characters, to distinguish a main from a background action, or to isolate certain semantic fields.

Interdisciplinarity

By definition, cognitive poetics is interdisciplinary . The humanities literary research is in exchange with numerous sister disciplines from the natural sciences:

Fields of specialization

Evolutionary approach

The first reflections on the biology of literature can already be found in Wilhelm Scherer's lecture on poetics in the section “The Origin of Poetry”. In the 20th century, literary studies were largely characterized by a culturalist image of man, and even research on literary universals got by without explicitly biological argumentation. It was not until the nineties that there were isolated reflections on the “biology of poetry” and attempts to systematically incorporate the biological theory of evolution. In the German-speaking world, the biological perspective was mainly represented by the Germanist Karl Eibl , who tried to shed light on the fundamentals of human artistic behavior with evolutionary and ethological arguments in his book The Origin of Poetry as early as 1995 . In Animal poeta (2004), Kultur als Zwischenwelt (2009) and numerous articles, Eibl expanded his approach with arguments from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology . Also in 1995, the American literary scholar Joseph Carroll initiated a line of research with his book Evolution and Literary Theory , which established itself under the name of 'Literary Darwinism'. The now quite numerous approaches to such an anthropology of literature are particularly dedicated to the emotional effects of literature, evolutionary-biologically derived design expectations of the reader, narration as human behavior and the phenomenon of fictionality .

Cognitive Linguistic Approach

In this field there are mainly works that transfer the concepts and approaches of cognitive linguistics to cognitive poetics. Particular importance is attached to what is known as “conceptual blending ” (according to Fauconnier and Turner), which, however, has not yet been substantiated by neurocognitive evidence. Another focus was pursued at the FU Berlin. The gestalt psychological interaction of foregrounding and backgrounding theorized by Peter Stockwell was explained neurocognitively with reference to the theory of the “fringe”. According to this, this interplay of figure and ground can be explained by the concept of the fringe, which goes back to William James , of focal consciousness contents (kernels or nuclei) by context information that is only vaguely remembered and thus also applied to literary texts - such as poetry.

Production aesthetic approach

In German literature, the poet Durs Grünbein in particular has dealt with the relationship between the brain and creative and literary activity. In the volumes of poetry Skull Base Lessons (1991), Brain and Thinking (2000) or in Der Cartesische Taucher. Drei Meditations (2008), but also in conversations with neuroscientists, Grünbein reflects on the relationship between cognition and art.

criticism

Methodologically, cognitive poetics is at the present time a pure science of correlation. Then certain narratological- poetological phenomena are connected with cognitive-neural patterns; a simple correlation of two data sets, however, provides neither an explanation of the observed phenomena nor more far-reaching or transferable findings. The argument that the neuronal functioning and functioning of the brain is being investigated in this way shifts the question of functional explanatory patterns for these phenomena to other research fields, especially neurosciences .

From the point of view of narrative theory, the narratologist Sternberg criticizes that the models and procedures of cognitive poetics, with the help of which texts and mental processes are broken down into details, are "too rigid and reductionist to do justice to the mobility and changeability of the reading mind."

Likewise, the empirical literary scholars criticized the lack of evidential value of the statements of the cognitively oriented narratologists and poetologists.

swell

^ Els Andringa: Cognitive Poetics . In: Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , pp. 50–53, here p. 50.
^ Els Andringa: Cognitive Poetics . In: Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , p. 50f.
^ Els Andringa: Cognitive Poetics . In: Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , p. 51
↑ Emmott, Catherine (2003) A cognitive poetic analysis of 'twists in the tale' and other plot reversals in narrative texts. Ed. Steen, Gerard: Cognitive Poetics in Practice . London: Routledge.
↑ Cf. “If we had gone through completely different neuronal adaptation processes - such as the octopus - we would also have a different worldview.” Ernst Pöppel, neuroscientist, in: Katja Thimm, Gerald Traufetter: Schauder des Schaffens . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 , 2000, pp. 220 ( online - December 18, 2000 , interview with the poet Durs Grünbein and the neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel about the processes in the human brain that lead to creativity.).
↑ See Katja Mellmann: Literature. In: Benjamin P. Lange, Sascha Schwarz (ed.): The human psyche between nature and culture. Pabst Publishing, Lengerich 2015, ISBN 978-3-95853-023-2 , pp. 105-113, here pp. 105f.
↑ Cf. Katja Mellmann: Mimetistic tendencies in 'Literary Darwinism'. About sense and nonsense in current attempts at an evolutionary biological literature review. In: literaturkritik.de 02/2009, http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=12715 ; Karl Eibl: literary studies. In: Philipp Sarasin , Marianne Sommer, Thomas P. Weber (eds.): Evolution. An interdisciplinary manual. Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 2010, pp. 257–267, here pp. 258f .; Katja Mellmann: On the status of Literary Darwinism. Collected essays by Joseph Carroll. In: JLTonline.de, http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/reviews/article/view/601/1432 , October 31, 2013.
↑ See Katja Mellmann: Literature. In: Benjamin P. Lange, Sascha Schwarz (ed.): The human psyche between nature and culture. Pabst Publishing, Lengerich 2015, ISBN 978-3-95853-023-2 , pp. 105–113, here pp. 107–110.
↑ Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek , Arthur Jacobs and Jana Lüdtke: Building blocks of a neurocognitive poetics: Foregrounding / backgrounding, lyrical mood and aesthetic pleasure , in: Mood and Method , ed. v. Friederike Reents and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2013, pp. 63–94.
↑ Katja Thimm, Gerald Traufetter: Schauder des Schaffens . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 , 2000, pp. 214–220 ( online - December 18, 2000 , interview with the poet Durs Grünbein and the neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel about the processes in the human brain that lead to creativity). See also "On Durs Grünbein's Poetics" (PDF; 692 kB)
↑ Sternberg: Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes , Parts 1 and 2, in: Poetics Today , 24.2 and 3, 2003. See also Els Andringa: Cognitive Poetics . In: Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , p. 53.
↑ See Els Andringa: Cognitive Poetics . In: Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , p. 53.