Cognitive poetics

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Cognitive poetics is a relatively new school of literary criticism that applies the principles of cognitive science, particularly cognitive psychology, to the interpretation of literary texts. It has ties to reader-response criticism, and is also closely related to stylistics, whose application to literary study has been most popular in continental Europe. Like the New Critics, cognitive poetics engages in close analysis of the text, but it recognises that context has an important role to play in the creation of meaning. A cognitive poetic theory which reconciles the importance of both text and context is Paul Werth's theory of 'Text Worlds' [1]

Due to its focus on how readers process the language of texts, cognitive poetics represents simultaneously a turn back in time, to the ancient study of rhetoric; but it also has a grounding in modern principles of cognitive linguistics.

Topics addressed by cognitive poetics include deixis; text world theory (the feeling of immersion within texts); schema, script, and their role in reading; attention; foregrounding; and genre.

One of the main focal points of cognitive literary analysis is conceptual metaphor, an idea pioneered and popularized by the works of Lakoff, as a tool for examining texts. Rather than regarding metaphors as ornamental figures of speech, cognitive poetics examines how the conceptual bases of such metaphors interact with the text as a whole.

Some of the prominent figures in cognitive poetics include Reuven Tsur, who is credited for originating the term; Langacker, Mark Turner and Peter Stockwell, to name a few.

  1. ^ Werth, Paul. (1999). Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Ed. Michael Short. Harlow: Longman.
  • Semino, Elena and Jonathan Culpeper (2002).Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  • Stockwell, Peter (2002).Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
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