Cognitive Poetics

Overview

The discipline of Cognitive Poetics was pioneered by Reuven Tsur, who also coined the term. According to Peter Stockwell, "the fundamental principles of cognitive poetics are:

• There is a continuity of language. Literary language is not in itself special or unique, though it is used in particular ways. The science of language must have common frameworks for all instances of language use.
• There is a continuity of mind. There is no special module in the brain for doing language, and no special module for literature. Understanding how we cognise our entire experience is the same understanding that allows us to account for literary reading.
• The mind is embodied. There is an integral relationship between sense and sensation, and our cognitive faculties arise from our physical condition. This is the basis for abstract thought and engaging in fictional or displaced worlds.
• The embodied mind is extended. The edges of embodied cognition often encompass other people’s bodies, thinking, and experience. So the cognitive poetic study of literature is both psychological and social.
• Cognitive poetics is a descriptive discipline. The primary objective is to describe actual usage in the wild, when people read literature.
• Cognition includes feeling and experience as well as the interpretation of meaning and significance.
• Subliminal effects are describable. Most effects of creativity or reading are unconscious at first, but are nevertheless real, and can be brought to recognition by a clear and precise cognitive poetic analysis.
• Texts and readings are inseparable. The object of study of cognitive poetics is not textuality (that is for linguistics) nor interpretative readings (that is critical opinion), but texture: the experience of reading a text.
• Cognitive poetics is a method rather than a critical theory."

Application to Biblical Poetry

• Emmylou Grosser is the first to apply the insights of Cognitive Poetics to the study of Biblical Hebrew poetry in her book, Unparalleled Poetry.