In this third instalment of an interview with Peter Stockwell, he discusses the payoff of using a cognitive approach to literature, and what a cognitive approach “do” for us in relation to other approaches. ...
In this second instalment of the interview with Peter Stockwell, he defines ‘cognitive poetics’ and explains how cognitive science has changed the landscape of inquiry into the study of language and literature. ...
June special! This is the first of four weekly instalments of an interview with Peter Stockwell, Professor of English at the University of Nottingham and author of Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (2d ed.; Routledge, 2019). Here, Peter describes how he began to use of cognitive science to study literature, and simultaneously gives us a window into how cognitive science entered literary studies altogether. ...
The cognitive structuring of language points, furthermore, to the importance of metaphors. Cognitive models, populated by encyclopedic knowledge, provide the patterns through which we apprehend our experiences. Thus, experience is never unmediated. Language, therefore, is ultimately metaphorical since our apprehensions of reality are always representational. ...
We hear from Rina Talgram (Professor of Art History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) on the benefit of using cognitive linguistics to explore the interactive nature of visual images of the Middle East from the Hellenistic period (4th c. BCE) to the Umayyad period (end of the 8th c. BCE). ...
Listen to Michal Bar-Asher Siegal (Prof of Rabbinic Judaism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Diegesis in Mind board member) discuss how cognitive linguistics helps her to read rabbinic literature. ...
Missed the conference? Here's the recap of Characters in Mind: The Migration of Characters in Ancient Jewish, Ancient Christian & Greco-Roman Literature and Art, an International and Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of Bonn, 8-10 February 2023 ...
Public lecture by Laura Suzanne Lieber (Duke University) during the conference "Characters in Mind: The Migration of Characters in Ancient Jewish, Ancient Christian & Greco-Roman Literature and Art" at the University of Bonn (Germany), 8–10 February, 2023. ...
Rachel and Mike Aubrey, with SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) International, talk about their translation work and research on prepositions and point of view in cognitive perspective. ...
From a cognitive viewpoint, emotions are, at least in their basic design, a pan-human, universal phenomenon, and narrative in particular is intimately bound up with emotion. If basal embodied mechanisms play a central role in readers’ processing and experiencing of narrative texts, it cannot be denied that reader responses must always be similar in certain respects, even if the readers come from very different times and cultural backgrounds. ...
Binge-watching became a habit for my kids and me long before the Covid pandemic. It has already been a few years since the four of us devoured all Shrek movies together in a single weekend, but I remember being amazed that our children, without giving it much thought, recognized among the cast Cinderella, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, and a bunch of other characters they knew from our bedtime readings. What really got ...
Stephen E. Runge, author of Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament: A Practical Introduction for Teaching and Exegesis (Hendrickson, 2010), talks about how cognitive linguistics as applied to grammar can help explain how humans process ancient narratives. ...
Linguist Eve Sweetser (University of California, Berkeley) gives key points from her Society of Biblical Literature (2022) presentation about how cognitive science aids our understanding of point of view in ancient narrative texts. ...
A conversation with Koen De Temmerman (Ghent) and Evert van Emde Boas (Aarhus) discussing cognition and ancient characters and their 2018 volume, Characterization in Ancient Greek Literature (Brill). ...
A criticism of CMT that I regularly encounter is that its universalizing tendencies efface the cultural specificity of the phenomena it purports to explain. But this is not, I think, a criticism that stands up to scrutiny.A case in point would be the ancient Greek use of various kinds of garment metaphor for a wide range of emotions, but especially shame and grief. ...
The quintessentially dense ancient Greek texts of the lyric poet Pindar (ca. 518-437 BCE) cannot be conceived, performed, studied, and taught without the basic human ability to create and understand networks of blends. Blending happens whenever we unconsciously connect conceptual counterparts and integrate them, so that new meanings emerge. Identifying blends not only helps us make sense of Pindar (‘Pindar’ metonymically stands for ‘Pindar’s poems’), but also of our blending-based ...
