Knut Hamsun

Terence Cave

Tore Rem

Pierre de Ronsard

Odes, Hymns and Other Poems

Literary artefacts--the stories people tell, the songs they sing, the scenes they enact--are neither a by-product nor a side-issue in human culture. They provide a model of everything that cognition does. They refuse to separate thought from emotion, bodily responses from ethical reflection, perception from imagination, logic from desire. Above all, they demonstrate the essential fluidity and mobility of human cognition, its adaptive inventiveness. If we are astonished by the art of Chauvet or Lascaux as an early model of human cognition, then we should be continually astonished by what literature is and does as it reaches beyond itself to reimagine the world. This book argues that literary artefacts are quasi-autonomous living entities, fashioned to animate captured environments, embodied people and other creatures, ways of being and living that remain virtual. They own a freely delegated agency that allows them to speak to listeners and readers present and distant, present and future, adapting themselves and their meanings to whatever cognitive environment they encounter. Such an approach offers a way of linking a close attention to the specific properties of literary artefacts with the insights of cognitive anthropology and archaeology, and thus of satisfying the conditions for a properly interdisciplinary understanding of literature. It aims both to defend literary study against utilitarian and reductive arguments of all kinds and to argue that literary artefacts may give us new insights into how the mind (and its indispensable substratum, the brain) functions in the human ecology.

Literature in a Cognitive Environment

Live Artefacts

To speak of 'thinking with literature' is to make the assumption that literature (in the broadest sense) is neither a side-show nor a side-issue in human cultures: it belongs to the spectrum of imaginative modes that includes both philosophical and scientific thought. Whether one regards it as a practice or as an archive, literature is highly pervasive, robust, enduring, and pregnant with values. Thinking with Literature argues that what it affords above all is a way of thinking, whether for writer, reader, or critic. Literature constitutes one of the prime instruments of cultural improvisation; it is the embodiment of a powerful, inventive, and ever-changing cognitive agency. As such, it invites a cognitive mode of criticism, one which asserts the priority of the individual literary work as a unique product of human cognition. In this book, discussions of topics, arguments, and hypotheses from the cognitive sciences, philosophy, and the theory of communication are woven into the fabric of a critical analysis which insists on the value of close reading: a poem by Yeats, a scene from Shakespeare, novels by Mme de Lafayette, Conrad, Frantzen, stories from Winnie-the-Pooh, and many others appear here on their own terms, with their own cognitive energies. Written in an accessible style, Thinking with Literature speaks both to mainstream readers of literature and to specialists in cognitive studies.

Towards a Cognitive Criticism

Thinking with Literature

This seminal book examines the interaction of literary practice and theory in 16th-century France in the context of the great Renaissance writers, Erasmus, Rabelais, Ronsard, and Montaigne.

Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance

The Cornucopian Text

Traces the history of the term anagnorisis and explores the ways in which it continues to be a valuable focus for theoretical reflection. Chapters analyze examples of recognition plots from English, French and German literature, and demonstrate how recognition must be viewed as an important topic

A Study in Poetics

Recognitions

Professor of French Literature Terence Cave

This is the first comprehensive study in any language of anagnorisis (recognition) - one of the least familiar terms in Aristotelian poetics, yet used to describe one of the most familiar features of drama and narrative fiction. The book traces the history of the term 'anagnorisis' and explores some of the ways in which it continues to be of value as a focus for theoretical reflection. Then, in a series of critical essays, the author analyses examples of recognition plots drawn from French, German, and English literature,including Corneille, Racine and Goethe, Shakespeare, James, and Conrad. Examined thus from many angles, recognition can at last been seen to deserve its place in the limelight, as a topic of the first importance, perhaps the most strictly literary of all topics in poetics. The book is aimed at a very wide readership, with English translations provided for quotations where necessary.

Deirdre Wilson

This book explores the value for literary studies of the model of communication known as relevance theory. Drawing on a wide range of exampleslyric poems by Yeats, Herrick, Heaney, Dickinson, and Mary Oliver, novels by Cervantes, Flaubert, Mark Twain, and Edith Whartonnine of the ten essays are written by literary specialists and use relevance theory both as a broad framing perspective and as a resource for detailed analysis. The final essay, by Deirdre Wilson, co-founder (with Dan Sperber) of relevance theory, takes a retrospective view of the issues addressed by the volume and considers the implications of literary studies for cognitive approaches to communication. Relevance theory, described by Alastair Fowler as 'nothing less than the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle's', offers a comprehensive pragmatics of language and communication grounded in evidence about the ways humans think and behave. While designed to capture the everyday murmur of conversation, gossip, peace-making, hate speech, love speech, 'body-language', and the chatter of the internet, it covers the whole spectrum of human modes of communication, including literature in the broadest sense as a characteristically human activity. Reading Beyond the Code is unique in using relevance theory as a prime resource for literary study, and it is also the first to claim that the model works best for literature when understood in the light of a broader cognitive approach, focusing on a range of phenomena that support an 'embodied' conception of cognition and language. This broadened perspective serves to enhance the value for literary studies of the central claim of relevance theory, that the 'code model' is fundamentally inadequate to account for human communication, and in particular for the modes of communication that are proper to literature.

Literature and Relevance Theory

Reading Beyond the Code

"Thomas More's Utopia in Early Modern Europe provides the first complete account of all the editions of Utopia, whether vernacular or Latin, printed before 1650. The reception of the idea of Utopia in early modern Europe has been studied extensively before: what has been lacking is a composite picture of how Utopia moved by means of translation from culture to culture and of the ways in which particular versions offered themselves to their readers." "This book will be of interest to specialists in early modern cultural history and history of the book, to graduate students working in these fields, and to anyone for whom the extraordinary success of More's Utopia as a book published on the European market remains a perennial fascination."--BOOK JACKET.

Paratexts and Contexts

Thomas More's Utopia in Early Modern Europe

Malcolm Bowie

Sarah Kay

In this lucid and innovative volume, three distinguished scholars trace this history of French literature from its beginnings to the present day. From the oral, unstable anonymous works of the early Middle Ages via the emergence of a print culture in the Renaissance, through to the attempted codification of genres and styles in the nineteenth century and the resourceful experimentation of the twentieth, A Short History of French Literature demonstrates the world importance of French literature, and the extraordinary richness of its range. The three main parts of the volume cover the Middle Ages, the Early Modern period, and the Modern period, and offer wide-ranging, personal, and detailed coverage of major writers and movements. Writing for the interested general reader as much as for students, the authors range expertly between authors and their works, historical events, and literary movements, offering as a whole an authoritative and innovative account of the history of French literature.

A Short History of French Literature

This book explores the value for literary studies of the model of communication known as relevance theory. Drawing on a wide range of examples—lyric poems by Yeats, Herrick, Heaney, Dickinson, and Mary Oliver, novels by Cervantes, Flaubert, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton—nine of the ten essays are written by literary specialists and use relevance theory both as a broad framing perspective and as a resource for detailed analysis. The final essay, by Deirdre Wilson, co-founder (with Dan Sperber) of relevance theory, takes a retrospective view of the issues addressed by the volume and considers the implications of literary studies for cognitive approaches to communication. Relevance theory, described by Alastair Fowler as 'nothing less than the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle's', offers a comprehensive pragmatics of language and communication grounded in evidence about the ways humans think and behave. While designed to capture the everyday murmur of conversation, gossip, peace-making, hate speech, love speech, 'body-language', and the chatter of the internet, it covers the whole spectrum of human modes of communication, including literature in the broadest sense as a characteristically human activity. Reading Beyond the Code is unique in using relevance theory as a prime resource for literary study, and it is also the first to claim that the model works best for literature when understood in the light of a broader cognitive approach, focusing on a range of phenomena that support an 'embodied' conception of cognition and language. This broadened perspective serves to enhance the value for literary studies of the central claim of relevance theory, that the 'code model' is fundamentally inadequate to account for human communication, and in particular for the modes of communication that are proper to literature.

Montaigne (1533-92) is commonly regarded as an early modern sceptic, standing at the threshold of a new secular way of thinking. He is also known for his ground-breaking exploration of the 'subject' or the 'self'. Terence Cave discusses these and other key aspects of the Essais (Montaigne's major work) not as philosophical themes but as features in the mapping of a mental landscape: the project of the Essais is cognitive rather than philosophical. Similarly, he reads the Essais not as 'essays' in the literary sense but as 'trials' or 'soundings' in which the manner of writing - the shape of the sentences, the use of metaphors and other figures - is crucial. Taking passages from many different chapters of the Essais, this book guides the reader through Montaigne's investigation of the 'subtle shades and stirrings' of the mind.

Terence Cave

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