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Cognitive Grammar in Literature
This is the first book to present an account of literary meaning and effects drawing on our best understanding of mind and language in the form of a Cognitive Grammar. The contributors provide exemplary analyses of a range of literature from science fiction, dystopia, absurdism and graphic novels to the poetry of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Sassoon, Balassi, and Dylan Thomas, as well as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Barrett Browning, Whitman, Owen and others. The application of Cognitive Grammar allows the discussion of meaning, translation, ambience, action, reflection, multimodality, empathy, experience and literariness itself to be conducted in newly valid ways. With a Foreword by the creator of Cognitive Grammar, Ronald Langacker, and an Afterword by the cognitive scientist Todd Oakley, the book represents the latest advance in literary linguistics, cognitive poetics and literary critical practice.
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 17] 2014. xiv, 255 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 28 March 2014
Published online on 28 March 2014
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- List of contributors | pp. vii–x
- Acknowledgements | pp. xi–xii
- ForewordRonald W. Langacker | pp. xiii–xiv
- Chapter 1. Introduction: Cognitive Grammar in literatureChloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell and Wenjuan Yuan | pp. 1–16
- Chapter 2. War, worlds and Cognitive GrammarPeter Stockwell | pp. 17–34
- Chapter 3. Construal and comics: The multimodal autobiography of Alison Bechdel’s Fun HomeMichael Pleyer and Christian W. Schneider | pp. 35–52
- Chapter 4. Attentional windowing in David Foster Wallace’s ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’Chloe Harrison | pp. 53–68
- Chapter 5. Resonant metaphor in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me GoSam Browse | pp. 69–82
- Chapter 6. Constructing a text world for The Handmaid’s TaleLouise Nuttall | pp. 83–100
- Chapter 7. Point of view in translation: Lewis Carroll’s Alice in grammatical wonderlandsElżbieta Tabakowska | pp. 101–116
- Chapter 8. Profiling the flight of ‘The Windhover’Clara Neary | pp. 117–132
- Chapter 9. Foregrounding the foregrounded: The literariness of Dylan Thomas’s ‘After the funeral’Anne Päivärinta | pp. 133–144
- Chapter 10. Conceptual proximity and the experience of war in Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘A Working Party’Marcello Giovanelli | pp. 145–160
- Chapter 11. Most and now: Tense and aspect in Bálint Balassi’s ‘Áldott szép pünkösdnek’Mike Pincombe | pp. 161–176
- Chapter 12. Fictive motion in Wordsworthian natureWenjuan Yuan | pp. 177–194
- Chapter 13. The cognitive poetics of ifCraig A. Hamilton | pp. 195–212
- Chapter 14. Representing the represented: Verbal variations on Vincent’s Bedroom in ArlesAlina Kwiatkowska | pp. 213–230
- Afterword: From Cognitive Grammar to systems rhetoricTodd Oakley | pp. 231–236
- References
- Index | pp. 253–255
“This stimulating collection of essays on narrative fiction and poetry, embracing multi-modality and translation, takes stylistics in a new direction. Cognitive grammar places meaning construction at its heart: and the applications here bravely test and probe the theory, whilst enriching our understanding of the texts themselves.”
Katie Wales, author of The Dictionary of Stylistics
“An inspiring demonstration of the great reach of Cognitive Grammar to analyze complex communication.”
Mark Turner, Case Western Reserve University
“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.[...]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.”
Isabelle van der Bom, University of Sheffield, on Linguist List 26.1172, 2015
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