Journal of Literary Theory最新文献

{"title":"Cognitive Literary Studies: On Persistent Problems and Plausible Solutions","authors":"Anja Müller-Wood","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The present article addresses the question whether the wide and disparate field of Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) has met the goal set by its representatives: to provide more authentic, intelligible and meaningful work than the traditional literary scholarship against which it positions itself. When »cognition« entered literary studies in around the 1990s, this was seen to announce the dawning of a new era, characterised by a rejuvenation of the field with the aid of interdisciplinary input, which simultaneously promised a return to its fundamental interest in literary texts. These objectives were accompanied by a growing disaffection with dominant theoretical paradigms (e.g. post-structuralism) and a forthright commitment to bridging the Cartesian dualism purportedly dominating the humanities. From the outset, however, CLS was greeted with criticism both regarding the reliability of its methodological basis and the usefulness of its results. These weaknesses have on the whole not been remedied and their continuing presence is highlighted by the field’s location at the margins of literary scholarship a quarter of a century after the »cognitive turn«. My taking up the longstanding debate surrounding CLS and returning to issues that may appear dated to some is not only indicated per se, but especially with view to its projected revitalisation of the fields on which it has had a bearing, which – all ambitious self-promotion by representatives of CLS notwithstanding – has not taken place. I begin by considering the methodological flaws that critics of CLS identified already at its inception, focusing on the one hand on the unsubstantiated foundations of its claims and on the other on its resistance to providing a precise definition of its key concept »embodiment«. As many other critics have already pointed out, the field’s most problematic assertion is that the products of the human mind, be they mental schemata or figurative language (especially metaphors), are indicative of how human cognition works generally. While this naturalisation of literary form as the structuring principle of human cognition may entail a reassuring revaluation of literary scholarship, it is based on rather simplistic and often unsupported assumptions about the nature of cognitive processes. At the same time, this conflation of literary language and cognitive structure has prevented scholars from asking questions of genuinely literary import. Instead, CLS tends to take literature as a repository of natural language to be scanned for evidence of whatever cognitive phenomena are at stake. Furthermore, CLS’s attention to the text is also indicative of insufficient attention within the field to all that literature does not say in so many words and, by implication, of a general indifference to readers’ cognitive and affective contribution to the construction of textual meaning – something of a paradox given that reader reception and emotion are avowed areas of interest","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"223 - 239"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49059006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reading Experience: William James and Robert Browning","authors":"Philipp Erchinger","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The topic of this essay is the concept of experience which, in the field of literary studies, is often used as if it were divided into an objective and a subjective aspect. Advocates of so-called ›empirical‹ approaches to the study of texts and minds tend to proceed from experience only to abstract impersonal (or objective) ›data‹ from it. By contrast, phenomenological and hermeneutic methods are frequently said to work through more immediately personal (or subjective) responses to, and engagements with, literary works. Thus experience, it seems, must either be read in terms of statistical diagrams and brain images, or else remain caught up in an activity of reading that, being characterised as singular and eventful, is believed to resist most attempts to convert it into such allegedly objective forms. Drawing on the radical empiricism of William James, this essay seeks to reintegrate the experience of reading and the reading of experience, both of which are ambiguously condensed in my title. The main argument of the piece therefore hinges on James’s and John Dewey’s claim that experience is »double-barrelled« (James 1977, 172), which is to say that it refers to »the entire process of phenomena«, to quote James’s own definition, »before reflective thought has analysed them into subjective and objective aspects or ingredients« (James 1978, 95). Made up of both perceptions and conceptions, experience, as James views it, is the medium through which everything must have passed before it can be named, and without (or outside of) which nothing, therefore, can be said to exist. With this radical account of empiricism in mind, I revisit some of the assumptions underpinning cognitive literary criticism, before turning to an interpretation of the dramatic poetry of Robert Browning, which has been described as a version of »empiricism in literature« because it is concerned with »the pursuit of experience in all its remotest extensions« (Langbaum 1963, 96). More specifically, my article engages with »Fra Lippo Lippi« and »An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician« in order to show that Browning’s dramatic monologues make experience legible as an activity by means of which perceptions come to be turned into conceptions while conceptions, conversely, are continuously reaffirmed, altered, or enriched by whatever perceptions are added to them as life goes on. As I argue, Browning’s personae speak from the inside of an experience in the making, rather than about a series of events that has already been brought to an end. Readers of these poems are therefore invited to read along with, as well as to reflect upon, the creative activity through which characters and circumstances come into existence and through which they are sustained and transformed. It follows that Browning’s writings offer their readers nothing to be processed from a mental vantage point above, or outside of, them. Instead, they involve the act ","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"162 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42763694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cognitive Literary Studies, Historicism, and the History of the Imagination","authors":"R. Haekel","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract For the past two decades, the scholarly discussion about the merits of neuroscience and cognitive science for literary studies has been, in Germany at least, a rather heated affair. This debate, however, has been much less interdisciplinary than the subject matter would suggest and has mainly taken place within literary and cultural studies, often merely adapting scientific theories of the mind, the nervous system, and the brain, in order to make statements about either empathy within literary texts or the processes underlying their reception. The debate is, moreover, closely linked to a crisis of literary theory in general, especially regarding the demise of the postmodern deconstructionist paradigm and the call for a more scientific and factual approach to the object of study – literature. Since the 1990s at least, deconstruction has frequently been dismissed as a mere stance of scepticism and relativism verging on randomness. Ever since, Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) has promised to provide a way out of the impasse by offering a more objective approach to literary artefacts based on scientific knowledge and therefore on hard scientific facts. In this paper I will argue that it is necessary not only to rely on present-day cognitive science but to historicise the relationship between literature and science as well. The need to historicise this relationship is part of a more encompassing claim. I believe it is necessary to focus on theory not as something external to, but as a self-reflexive aspect of, literature itself. This implies the need to investigate the mind and cognition only if it is part of the literary work’s self-reflexive scope within a given historical context. Historically, this reflexion presupposes a network in which scientific theories of the mind play a key role. My main example is the imagination. In this context, I will also focus on the rejection of dualism, or rather: the way that René Descartes’s philosophy, especially his distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, has been treated. One key argument in favour of CLS has been the stern denunciation of Cartesian Dualism – most famously described as Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio in his influential 1994 book. Diametrically opposed to this traditional dualist approach is embodied cognition, which Gerhard Lauer describes as the bedrock of the new interdisciplinary approach: »To put it bluntly, cognitive literary studies are ›against Cartesian interpretation‹« (Lauer 2009, 150). CLS is therefore constructed in strict opposition to a mind-and-body dualism dominant in Western thought ever since the first half of the seventeenth century – a dualism first of soul and body, and then, since the middle of the nineteenth century, of mind or cognition, on the one hand, and the brain on the other. Taking these developments into account, this paper takes its cue from another stance, however: the need to historicise the scientific and philosophical approaches to cog","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"183 - 203"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42041562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"›I will solve my riddle to the music of the lyre‹ (Psalm 49:4). How ›Lyrical‹ is Hebrew Psalmody?","authors":"S. Gillingham","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper discusses biblical poetry in relation to the ancient Greek-Latin tradition of lyric poetry. Since the Greek word »lyric« and the Hebrew word »psalterion« each have musical connotations, there must be some connection between biblical psalmody and lyric poetry. Indeed, the liturgical superscriptions of many psalms and the numerous hints to musical instruments and singing within them suggest that many texts were originally used for accompaniment to music and so could be seen as ›lyric poetry‹ in the strictest sense. There are, of course, key differences between ancient and biblical lyric poetry. Hebrew poems are formally marked not so much by metre or rhyme as by more general conventions of sonority and word-play, perhaps to facilitate memorisation. Furthermore, Hebrew poetry is particularly recognizable by its balanced expression of thought, a ›parallelism‹ which includes repeated or contrasting ideas and figurative language. This feature is also evident in some Hebrew prose: this ›blurring of the boundaries‹ between prose and poetry is another feature which distinguishes biblical poetry from ancient Greek or Latin lyric poetry. One other distinctive feature of psalmody is that, although rooted in the liturgy of the first Temple (950–587 BCE), and developing in the liturgy of the second Temple period, it continued to thrive even after the fall of the Temple in 70 CE. The liturgical use of the psalms resulted in its continual prominence throughout Jewish and Christian history; and because the essence of Hebrew poetry is more dependent on sense than sound this has also enabled a rich tradition of translation. So Hebrew psalmody is ›re-invented‹ through the several Greek, Latin, and Aramaic versions, as well as through the many languages of the early modern period, right up to the contemporary vernacular. In this sense psalmody is unusual: unlike ancient classical poetry it provides an ongoing and living tradition for a community of faith.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"40 - 50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46023843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Discordia Concors. Immersion and Artifice in the Lyric","authors":"Eva Zettelmann","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Descriptions of the lyric have been stressing its artificial, self-referential character, constructing it as an intrinsically a-temporal, non-kinetic, non-mimetic and anti-illusionist mode. While the lyric certainly derives much of its effect from its horizontally superimposed patterns of formal equivalence, our pleasure as readers does not solely derive from the physical re-enactment of a poem’s sound patterns or the cognitive appreciation of its formal mastery. Many lyric texts are immersive; they project a fictional universe and prompt readers to emulate a speaker’s strongly perspectivized vision and subjective vantage point. This paper examines the lyric’s world building potential. It investigates the conditioning factors and referential components of lyric illusion, reviewing in particular the genre’s alleged inability to produce narrative sequence, embodiment and experientiality (Fludernik). Conceiving of the lyric speaker as an innovative cognitive blend (Turner/Fauconnier) provides a possible alternative to biographical constructions of the lyric self. Possible worlds theory (Ryan) is used as a way to approach the genre’s marked tendency towards cognitive mapping and conceptual innovation, towards foregrounding the human endeavour of mentally grasping and representing the world.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"136 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42753030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Some Prospects for the Theory of Lyric Poetry","authors":"Dieter Lamping","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Taking the definition of lyric poem as ›Einzelrede in Versen‹ for its basis, this article pursues two objectives: firstly, to advocate the concept of lyric poetry as an intertextual system of relationships against the background of world literature (a concept that can also constitute the theoretical foundation for the universal history of lyric poetry) and, secondly, to encourage a profound discussion with philosophy to locate lyric poetry within the ›life of the mind‹ as well as to grasp it in theoretical terms.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"83 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42743636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The I and the Others. Articulations of Personality and Communication Structures in the Lyric","authors":"Dieter Burdorf","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The paper discusses articulations of personality and communication structures in the lyric: who is speaking in a poem? What is the status of the person who speaks, or the one who is spoken about? Is it the author himself who is speaking, or is it someone else – an autonomous being, completely different and detached from the subject developed in the text? Who is addressed in and by a poem? It is made clear that conventional concepts of Stimmung (mood), Erlebnis (experience), and lyrisches Ich (the ›lyric I‹) should be set aside and the nature of lyric communication should be redetermined. For this purpose, a precise examination of the specific use of personal pronouns in poems is necessary, especially of the pronouns ›I‹, ›you‹ and ›we‹. The indistinct ›lyric I‹ should be substituted by the term ›articulated I‹. The poetic text as a whole is being structured by a superordinate entity, the Textsubjekt (›textual subject‹). Every speaking entity in a poem has a counterpart being addressed by it. Analyzing communication structures in poetry thus means first of all looking for an addressee who is constituted by the text. Only in a second step should we figure out if the address refers to the intended reader.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"22 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42475739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards a Historical Typology of the Subject in Lyric Poetry","authors":"H. Stahl","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Recent theory of lyric shows no interest in the subject, because it is no longer considered a basic generic parameter of lyric poetry. Nevertheless, the subject has resurfaced in contemporary practice in a wide range of new and complex forms specific to the lyric mode. This article suggests a multilevel model for both the formal and historical analysis of the subject in contemporary lyric poetry.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"125 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47714569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Lyrical Impulse","authors":"C. Altieri","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This statement does not challenge Jonathan Culler’s argument that lyric is not dramatic monologue but primarily »an event in the lyric present, a time of enunciation« (Culler 2014, 68; cf. Culler 2015). But it poses an alternative view of lyricism, at least for Modernist poetry. The essay asks, in other words, not what lyric is, but what poets seeking to participate in a genre are doing and why. In »The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock«, for example, T.S. Eliot deliberately creates a clash between expectations born of dramatic monologue and those sustained by the staging of a lyric ego whose modes of presence cannot be contained within ironic distance. Similarly, when Yeats and Auden write lullabies, they are not content with individual instances of lullaby but want to capture the essence of lullaby as one aspect of levels of feeling inseparable from ideas of genre, not just uses of the genre. Lyricism also emphasizes, more than do studies of lyric as a genre, that poetry has a distinctive relationship to musicality. The essay develops two extended examples – in the form of a contrast between two poems in the first Imagist anthology Des Imagistes, namely H.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle’s) »Sitalkas« and Ezra Pound’s »Doria« – as an example of what Pound called »patterned music«, which Pound opposed to the »emotional music cultivated by the spirit of Impressionism«. Finally it turns to the contemporary poet Lisa Robertson’s »Sunday« as an instance of cultivating the power of indexicals as an alternative to any kind of overt »speaking situation« with its inevitably damaged versions of subjectivity.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"12 - 21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46194186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lyric and Its ›Worlds‹","authors":"Rüdiger Zymner","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The article gives a metatheoretical definition of ›lyric‹. The definition pinpoints that lyric is either scriptural and visual or vocal and something that you can hear; it can be fictional or non-fictional, and it belongs to the social system, which modern ›westerners‹ call ›literature‹, but it can also be part of cultural practices, which are outside of any social system of ›literature‹. One can differentiate analytically with regard to the graphic type as well as to the vocal type of ›lyric‹ between the ›material How‹ and the ›semantical What‹. The ›How‹-side and the ›What‹-side provide each and together special signals for the hearer or for the seer or reader, which attract and bind his or her attention and which inform the hearer or the seer and the reader basically that language itself (which is understood as a cognitive system or tool) is something with which you can develop or create meaning; in doing this the signals of lyric constitute aesthetic evidence (the reader, seer or hearer will be ›convinced‹ or ›made sure‹ or emotionally satisfied in a way by the aesthetic qualities of the lyric: non-propositional, as if looking through the ›veils of poetry‹. In the next step the article discusses some types of lyrical ›worlds‹ and lyrical ›world-making‹ with regard to this definition. Finally, the article presents a couple of theses.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"149 - 160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47571710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}