LINGUIST List 26.1172
Mon Mar 02 2015
Review: Cog Sci; Ling & Lit: Harrison, Nuttall, Stockwell, Yuan (2014)
Editor for this issue: Sara Couture <saralinguistlist.org>
Date: 28-Sep-2014
From: Isabelle van der Bom <i.vanderbom
sheffield.ac.uk>
Subject: Cognitive Grammar in Literature
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EDITOR: Chloe Harrison
EDITOR: Louise Nuttall
EDITOR: Peter Stockwell
EDITOR: Wenjuan Yuan
TITLE: Cognitive Grammar in Literature
SERIES TITLE: Linguistic Approaches to Literature 17
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2014
REVIEWER: Isabelle van der Bom, University of Sheffield
Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
This edited collection brings together a range of textual analyses that draw on Cognitive Grammar (henceforth CG) in their study of literature. The aim of the book is firstly to demonstrate the valuable insights CG can generate into the workings of literary creativity, text patterning and readerly effects, and to inspire stylisticians and literary critics with its usefulness in doing so. A secondary aim, which develops out of the application of CG to literature, is for the volume to also make a valuable contribution to the development of CG.
“Cognitive Grammar in Literature” is edited by Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell and Wenjuan Yuan. The volume contains 14 chapters of analysis written by researchers in stylistics, literature, linguistics and translation studies. It also features a foreword by cognitive grammarian Ronald Langacker, and an afterword by cognitive scientist Todd Oakley. The chapters of analysis engage with prose, poetry and multimodal literature across language, time, genre, canonical status and popularity.
The first chapter of this collection, written by the editors, sets out the aims of the volume and provides an overview of some key notions in cognitive grammar, such as construal, specificity, prominence, action chains, dynamicity, perspective and CG’s notion of discourse. This chapter also contains literary adaptations from CG, such as the notion of fictive simulation, ambience, point of view and consciousness, de- and re-familiarisation, and ethical position in literary experience.
In Chapter 2, Peter Stockwell analyses two very different passages from H.G. Wells’ novel “The War of the Worlds”. The first passage establishes foreboding and anxiety, whilst simultaneously capturing readers’ attention through combination of deflected agency, balanced action chain structure, and rich forms of modalisation. Events described in the second passage analysed are direct, active, and violent. This passage lacks in modalisation, but focuses heavily on perception. Constructed through the narrator’s eye-witness accounts of events, created mostly by the prominence of subjective construal across the whole passage, the narrator resorts to ‘metaphorical deflection’ (Stockwell 2014: 27). Readers’ attention in this passage is directed by the abundant presence of adjectival modification, which serves to construct the thrilling state-of-affairs. The tone of this passage is furthermore established by reference points of fire and battle imagery, which creates a set of particular targets evoking death, fear, and the unknown. In summary, through close CG analysis, Stockwell shows the tonal or atmospheric differences between the two passage, and how they affect readerly interpretation.
In Chapter 3, Michael Pleyer and Christian W. Schneider analyse the graphic novel “Fun Home” (Alison Bechdel 2006) by drawing on CG’s notions of construal, profiling and viewing arrangement. They focus on the different ways in which conceptualisations can be structured or construed. More specifically, they use the notions of profiling, viewing arrangement, and the current discourse space model in explicating the dynamic, multimodal processes of meaning construal in “Fun Home”. They conclude by suggesting that multimodal analyses should be integrated with Langacker’s current discourse space model because of its ability to model multiple overlapping layers of discourse sequences dynamically.
In Chapter 4, Chloe Harrison examines CG notions attentional windowing (Talmy 2000) and profiling (Langacker 2008) in David Foster Wallace’s (2004) short story ‘The Soul is Not a Smithy’, in which the narrator recounts a traumatic event from his childhood. Whilst the reader is presumably interested in finding out the details of this traumatic event, the narrator keeps focussing on the daydream he was having at the time rather than on the event itself. Harrison shows how the different event frames in the story, such as the daydream and the traumatic experience, are spliced between locations as well as temporal bases, which is why it is difficult for the reader to find out more about the traumatic event itself. Her CG analysis of the story interweaves critical literary insight into plot and characterisation.
Chapter 5 by Sam Browse outlines the ways in which CG can enrich an analysis of conceptual mappings involved in metaphor and simile in Kazuo Ishiguro’s (2005) novel “Never Let Me go”. Browse focuses mainly on the texture and resonance of one particular simile. He employs an eclectic mix of CG notions to tease out why this simile is so vivid and yet so resonant, using CG notions of modality (Langacker 2008, also see Simpson 1993), force dynamics (Langacker 2008), grounding, construal, and dominion, and drawing on Cognitive Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).
In Chapter 6, Louise Nuttall proposes the further development of the cognitive poetic framework Text World Theory (Gavins 2007; Werth 1999) through Langacker’s CG. She does this by analysing “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. Through careful CG analysis, Nuttall derives the interpretation that Atwood enacts the novel’s thematic sense of a dystopian reality through her language use. The passage analysed promotes sequential scanning of the scene and invites the reader to follow the subjective thought processes of the narrator, rather than allowing readers to build up a holistic conception of the state of affairs of the world described. This fragmented construal of the world promotes readerly alignment with the narrator’s perspective but creates a sense of distance from the world represented itself.
In the seventh chapter, Elżbieta Tabakowska analyses how Langacker’s CG can be used to reveal the underpinnings of the process of constructing, maintaining or shifting the point of view in Polish translations of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland”. The oscillation between subjective and objective construal (or point of view) is integral to this novel’s essence. Because Polish has a very different linguistic structure than English, this oscillation can be difficult to capture effectively in Polish translations. Tabakowska’s focus on referents, processes, epistemic modality, and iconicity (see Langacker 2008) highlights how CG can be meaningful in unravelling the construction of point of view, and how point of view has been conveyed in translations.
Clara Neary, in Chapter 8, analyses the sonnet ‘The Windhover’ by the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. She notes in the poem that the relational profile of ‘seeing’ the bird in the sky has two direct objects: 1) the bird itself and 2) the bird’s flight. The nominal profiles in the poem create symbolic links between Christ and the falcon. The nominal opposition prevalent in the poem, coupled with the co-stimuli of the bird and the bird’s flight, cause the reader’s attention to shift from the experiencer (narrating voice) to the bird. These elements together give ground to the striking visual image profiled throughout the sonnet: that of the figure of the falcon in motion profiled against the background sky.
In Chapter 9, Anne Paivarinta examines Dylan Thomas’s 1936 poem ‘After the Funeral’. She argues that ‘the detached treatment of grief’ (2014: 134) is built through prominence, which she continues to analyse on three different levels: 1) in terms of figure/ground, 2) with reference to trajector/landmark and 3) by analysing the ways the poem foregrounds ‘isolated expressions’ (Paivarinta 2014: 135). What interests her particularly in the poem is the use of embodied metaphors which, together with the traditional traits of elegy, serve to thematise the inevitable distance between an experience (that of losing a loved one) and its expression in words.
Marcello Giovanello, in Chapter 10, explores how through paying close attention to the language and structure of the poem ‘A Working Party’, by Siegfried Sassoon, the sense of proximity the poem evokes can be explained. Based on the premise that trench poetry is indeed particularly experiential and immediate for readers, Giovanello examines distribution of –ing forms, pronouns, reference point relationships and action chains in determining how the poem’s strategy of inviting readerly observation gives rise to an emerging poetics of conceptual proximity.
In Chapter 11, ‘Most and now’, Mike Pincombe discusses the problems relating to tense and aspect one encounters when translating the famous Hungarian lyric poem ‘Áldott szép Pünkösdnek’, by Hungarian renaissance poet Bálint Balassi. Pincombe goes into the technicalities of the matter of tense and aspect, for example examining the effects of translating the poem into the simple present tense in English, compared to the progressive form. Throughout his analysis of these important considerations when translating the poem from Hungarian to English, Pincombe draws on the treatment of tense and aspect in CG, as well as in other grammars, such as the Greimas-Coutes (Greimas and Courtes 1993) model.
Wenjuan Yuan, in Chapter 12, connects the cognitive linguistic notion of ‘fictive motion’ (e.g. Matlock 2004, 2010; Matsumoto 1996; Talmy 2000) with spirituality in arriving at an interpretation of Wordsworth’s poetry. As a Romantic poet, Wordsworth was undoubtedly influenced by his predecessors from the picturesque movement, but his attitude towards the picturesque, or the ‘aesthetic of the static, the freeze-dried image’ (Miall 1998: 98), was complicated at best. Yuan focuses on the way Wordsworth represents nature in his poems, showing that he characterises nature as dynamic and unfolding along a temporal dimension, and how fictive movement in the poems might evoke the spiritual. Wordsworth’s view of nature as process instead of as object, and his treatment of nature as deeply imbued with dynamicity, fictivity and subjectivity, reveal aspects of his attitude towards the static snapshot quality of the picturesque.
In Chapter 13, Craig Hamilton traces the use of conditionals in English poetry through the centuries. Hamilton finds that certain patterns and types of conditionals are more common in poetry, that the poetic mind seems to prefer imagining what is possible or likely rather than what is counterfactual or impossible, and that some poems end with conditionals, which makes them part of the the rhetorical structure of poetry. Hamilton reaches various conclusions about his findings, one of them being that conditionals can mark epistemic stance without making constant distinctions between the epistemic stance of poets and personae (following Dancygier and Sweetser 2005). Another conclusion is that the contrastive function might explain why conditionals seem so important to poets. When talking about the real world, ‘if’ is used to talk about the mental space(s) or world(s) beside reality. This is also the case in poetry.
In Chapter 14, Alina Kwiatkowkska focuses on several poems inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s painting “Bedroom at Arles”. She is particularly interested in ekphrasis, and in the complex relationship between the viewer of the painting, the author of the poem, and the poem itself. She compares the relationship between the information included in the poem and the painting itself to reference-point and target, in the way that viewing the painting (reference-point), gives the viewer-poet mental access to the associated conceptual region (dominion) of the painter’s life, emotions and personality, which then become the new focus of the poet’s conception (target).
EVALUATION
This edited volume is commendable in numerous ways. Firstly, it is groundbreaking in that it does without doubt represent the richest resource which attempts to marry CG and literary analysis thus far in the field of cognitive poetics. Secondly, the scope of literary works analysed with the use of CG in this edited collection is truly impressive. The authors have certainly demonstrated that CG can provide valuable insights into the workings of all kinds of prose and poetry spanning the ages.
The analyses in this edited volume have furthermore convincingly demonstrated that CG can be applied to different levels of literary linguistic analysis, ranging from the suffix to discourse-level phenomena. In doing so, authors have sometimes ‘scaled up’ traditional CG notions. The notion of reference-point and target for example, as Kwiatkowska points out in Chapter 14, is used by Langacker at a much lower level of analysis than she applies it. This does not have to be a problem, but it is worth mentioning, as it does depart from how CG is typically used in cognitive linguistics.
It also strikes me that many authors use the same notions from CG in their analysis of literature. The notion of construal, for example, is adopted by almost every author. This is perhaps unsurprising given that construal, or ‘our multifaceted capacity for conceiving and portraying the same situation in alternate ways’ (Langacker 2014: xiv), is key to the process of the creation of meaning in which a writer/reader actively engages (see also Stockwell 2009). Nevertheless, it seems, perhaps unsurprisingly, that some notions from CG lend themselves better than others to literary analysis.
The prevalence of the same CG notions and the same explanation of the notions in each chapter can make the book seem a bit repetitive in some places. However, the editors point out that the repetition of theoretical explanation does allow for fairly independent reading, and it is probably most welcome to those not familiar with cognitive grammar.
I cannot help but wonder, though, whether the selection and adaption of CG notions in the stylistic analyses in this edited volume might not warrant further consideration in the fields of cognitive poetics and cognitive linguistics. I would be interested to see how cognitive linguists interpret this collection of essays. Would they agree with the manner in which cognitive linguistic concepts have been taken from CG and adapted for literary interpretation? Do they find the analyses illuminating in any way for the further development of Cognitive Grammar? Does the volume run into the danger of ‘cherry picking’ notions from CG?
An important indication that cognitive poetics is seen as providing valuable insight to cognitive linguistics comes from the foreword of this edited collection, which is written by Ronald Langacker, himself. Langacker writes that although he does not feel competent to evaluate the analyses in the volume from a literary point of view, he has been impressed by the inventiveness of the authors in adopting and applying CG notions to literary analysis.
Similarly impressed, cognitive scientist Todd Oakley writes in the epilogue that he finds that the contributions in the volume demonstrate ways in which literary meaning and linguistic form can successfully be integrated into one single approach, and he takes this one step further by setting out the preliminaries of a systems rhetoric that is based on a literary stylistic analysis founded upon cognitive grammar (see Oakley and Tobin, in press).
Cognitive Grammar in Literature certainly marks an important step towards a more holistic cognitive linguistics and literature approach, and the authors show an impressive amount of skill and creativity in their literary analyses.
In summary, this volume makes a compelling argument for the possibility and the usefulness of adopting the CG approach for the study of literature, and for extending CG to literary analysis. The authors provide groundbreaking, stimulating and creative analyses. It will be interesting to see how a cognitive grammar approach to literary analysis is further developed in future publications.
REFERENCES
Atwood, Margaret. 1996. The Handmaid’s Tale [original 1985]. London: Vintage.
Balassi, Bálint . 1986. Gyarmati Balassi Bálint Énekei [The songs of Bálint Balassi of Gyarmat] (eds P. Kőszeghy and G. Szabó). Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó.
Bechdel, Alice. 2006. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Dancygier, Barbara. and Sweetser, Eve. 2005 Mental Spaces in Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gavins, Joanna. 2007 Text World Theory: An Introduction . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Greimas, Algirdas Julien and Courtés, Joseph.1993. Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage [original 1979]. Paris: Hachette.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2005. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber.
Langacker, Ronald. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction . New York: Oxford University Press.
Langacker, Ronald. 2014. Foreword. In Harrison, Nuttall, Stockwell and Yuan (eds.) Cognitive Grammar in Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lakoff, George. and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Matlock, Teenie. 2004. Fictive motion as cognitive simulation. Memory and Cognition 32 (8). 1389–400.
Matlock, Teenie. 2010 Abstract motion is no longer abstract. Language and Cognition 2(2): 243–60.
Matsumoto, Yo. 1996. How abstract is subjective motion? A comparison of coverage path expressions and access path expressions. in A.E. Goldberg (ed.) Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 359–73.
Miall, David .S. 1998. The Alps deferred: Wordsworth at the Simplon Pass. European Romantic Review 9. 84–102.
Paivarinta, Anne. Foregrounding the foregrounded. In Harrison, Nuttall, Stockwell and Yuan (eds.) Cognitive Grammar in Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sassoon, Siegfried.1984. Collected Poems 1908–1956. London: Faber and Faber.
Simpson, Paul.1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge.
Stockwell, Peter. 2009. Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Stockwell, Peter. War, worlds and Cognitive Grammar. In Harrison, Nuttall, Stockwell and Yuan (eds.) Cognitive Grammar in Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Vol. 1: Concept Structuring Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Thomas, Dylan. 2000. Collected Poems 1934–1953 (eds W. Davies and R. Maud). London: Phoenix.
Tobin, Vera. and Oakley, Todd. in preparation. Shrinking poems and truncated authors: identity compressions and the ontology of the “Work”. Unpublished manuscript.
Wallace, David Foster. 2004. The Soul Is Not a Smithy. Oblivion. London: Little, Brown. 67–113.
Wells, Herbert George. 1898 The War of the Worlds. London: William Heinemann.
Werth, Paul. 1999 Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse . London: Longman.
Wordsworth, William. 1837. The Poetic Works of William Wordsworth. London: Edward Moxon.
Wordsworth, William. 2004 Guide to the Lakes. (ed. Selincourt). Berkeley: Publishers Group West.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Isabelle van der Bom is a PhD research student in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. She is also affiliated to Sheffield Hallam University as a research fellow for the Journal of Politeness Research and as Associate Lecturer. Her doctoral research offers a conceptual Text World-approach to the study of linguistic identity in discursive interaction. Her research interests include stylistics, politeness research, discourse analysis, research in language and gender and language and identity, cognitive poetics, and Text World Theory in particular.
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