Language and Literary Studies
Cognitive Rhetoric offers a new way of looking at properties of literature from the perspective of cognitive science. It is interdisciplinary in character and committed to data and methods that produce falsifiable theory. Rhetoric also offers a store of stylistic devices observed for their effect on audiences, providing a rich index with distinguished examples available to researchers in cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive science.
For Mark Turner (a prominent figure in Cognitive Rhetoric), narrative imaging is the fundamental instrument of everyday thought. Individuals organize experience in a constant narrative flow, starting with small spatial stories. Meaning is fundamentally parabolic (like a parable): two or more event shapes or conceptual spaces converge (blending) in the parabolic process, generating concepts with unique properties not found in either of the inputs. This process is everyday: anticipating that an object you are headed toward will make contact with you is a parable whereby you project a spatial viewpoint. Such narrative flow is a highly adaptive process, crucial for planning, evaluating, explaining, as well as recalling the past and imagining a future. Thus, literary processes have adaptive value prior to the emergence of linguistic capability (modular or continuous).
Read more about this topic: Cognitive Rhetoric
Famous quotes containing the words language and, language, literary and/or studies:
“Consensus is usually made possible by vague language and shallow commitments.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as “spectacles” to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions.... The learned are mere literary drudges.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“...Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)