One of many doors: sensing the literary sense through a cognitive poetics-inclusive reading approach

2014-04-02This dissertation makes a case that Cognitive Poetics research and methodologies are an important addition to a holistic literary analyses of poetic texts. The hypothesis is that integrating an analysis of readers' initial, pre‐lexical responses to the sound and visual information in a poem can yield interesting and instructive data that adds to a full understanding of the text while instructing writers on possible avenues for their craft. The dissertation uses recent scientific research into how people read, comprehend and make meaning of texts to support this thesis. The first chapter explains the foundations of Cognitive Poetic reading approaches, including new neuroscience, physiology and psycholinguistics research on textual processing now available due to scientific advancements. Then, I address and rebut some critical arguments against Cognitive Poetics, including the problems inherent with reader‐response criticism of all kinds as well as the challenges with humanities/science interdisciplinary research in general. In the second chapter, I enact a Cognitive Poetic‐inclusive reading of a singe text, William Carlos Williams' ""The Attic Which Is Desire."" I begin by explaining the methodology behind a Cognitive Poetics‐inclusive reading, stressing both the first‐person phenomenological nature of the reading and, consequently, the necessity of using Cognitive Poetics as only a single element in a multi‐faceted reading approach. From there, I juxtapose the first‐person phenomenological reading with traditional, scientific, linguistic and anecdotal responses to the poem (as a whole and in parts) in order to offer a full case study of the poem's possibilities. I also conducted and included a survey of 429 participants who responded to cognition‐based questions on the sound, visual structure and meaning of the poem. A roundup of that data is available in Appendix A, and the full survey data is available in Appendix C. This dissertation also includes my full‐length poetry collection, Interrobang (Red Hen Press, 2013), which I believe works as an example of how Cognitive Poetic knowledge and inquiry can inform a writer's craft. By working heavily with meter and rhyme, the poems in the collection contrast playful and frenetic sounds and rhythms with what are ostensibly dark and ominous subjects