I think there is an interesting vein of research in this regard in neurology's search to find the key that allows understanding what they call the embodied cognition of language. That is, the way the body organizes the human conceptual system. I recommend starting with the text by Pilar Casado (2016). From metaphor to action. Embodied cognition of language.

https://metode.org/issues/monographs/from-metaphor-to-action.html

I hope this information can help you with your research.

On the other hand, some of my papers and Ph.D. thesis are related to the way in which, based on the psychophysiological theories of the late nineteenth century, the fiction writers introduced metaphors, discursive styles, and concepts related to the studies of the mind to their works. I don't know if they are of interest to you.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321779081_La_obsesion_por_el_movimiento_De_nocion_cientifica_a_elemento_estructurador_del_arte

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342988302_La_resurreccion_del_being_humano_metafisico_a_traves_de_la_naturaleza_psicoofisiologica

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308520642_Metaforas_para_un_depofundamente_desconocido_-_El_cerebro

Thank you very much for the reference.

Kind regards.

if cognition is dealing the object of this open reflection, it's needed, first of all, a classification of what's cognitive literature and mental worlds of fiction and imagination stories to form our backbones of thinking...

Thank you jaume baldiri Alavedra. Perhaps these two references could be of interest for you.

Keith Frankish & William Ramsey, (Eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012.

Lawrence Shapiro (Ed.). Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition. New York: Routledge. 2017. 

thanks a lot your carefully answer, thanks again the two references above, first one is topic, and second one, I don't know, but Routledge have several items about

them... this is a very huge field to deepen our understanding on a mere cognitive world under a historical manner, at least for myself working on Baroque's emblems of Saavedra Fajardo and cognitive colossal, very large to easily manage it, from the ancient Egyptians and Hermetism so as to be renewed Baroque definite and not clear or hazy, after the very much or like ancient classical involved activity of Renaissance and Humanism...

You should have a look at https://www.aesthetics.mpg.de/forschung/abteilung-sprache-und-literatur.html. They are pursuing a more general approach, say, beyond national-philologies and trying to establish experimental designs that contribute to answers valid and valuable for any language family.

Thank you for your reply Benno Schirrmeister. I do know the MPG and I had the opportunity to be there twice, and discuss with researchers on methodologies and results. I work, however, in a Humanities Faculty, in which we don't develop empirical research, and therefore our approach is based on text-analysis, responding to the specificities of each literary and linguistic system. Nevertheless, we do collaborate with neuroscientists for specific purposes and foster interdisciplinary research within the literary studies.

Thanks again for your reference.

Kind regards.

Victor:

You may already be aware of our Cogniion and Poetics series published by Oxford University Press. Our first book in the series was Isabel Jaén and Julien Simon's Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature (2016).

Margaret

Dear Margaret H. Freeman,

Thank you for your message. I am aware of the series as I am indeed preparing a proposal for the it. Alexander Bergs has kindly replied my questions in that regard. In fact, this bibliography is for that purpose. I am also in contact with Isabel Jaén and Julien Simon, we are collaborating, I hope to meet them again, either in Osnabrück or Girona. Fingers crossed.

Kind regards,

Víctor

Glad you have it and to learn of your proposed submission and bibliography!

are you only taken actions either to preserve the set of written documents or a list for understanding them as dealing with cultural semiotics about Lotman and literary written cognitive signs?...

if hermeneutical approach to writings could be understood as a method and truth, obviously second one is a thorny question and avoided, then the method cognitively implies its message, its definition, the raw materials and tools used, and finally, in another sphere of thinking the author's style, that it means "autho rizing"...

Jaume, if I understand you correctly, are you saying that the method and message of an hermeneutical approach is tautological? I am working with a group, some of whom take a literary approach, some linguistic, and some cognitive. Literary readers tend to follow their intuitions about a poem; linguists explore the way the language is working; cognitive readers show how and why the two arrive at their conclusions. In other words, a cognitive approach is exploring the ways in which readers, whether expert in linguistics or in literary contexts are automatically applying their cognitive resources to the question. I used to tell my beginning linguistics students who were initially overwhelmed with the methodology that they already know the garmmar of their native language (if they didn't they could communicate and undertstand), it's just that they don't know what it is they know. So what linguistics is doing is showing them the underlying proinciples of their language. So it's the same for cognitive abilities: you are using them whether you realise it or not.

Sorry about the typo and negation. I meant "grammar" and "they couldn't communicate and understand"

Margaret, when it is a question to go down to the axioms o basic elements of human communication and this is never tautological "à la Wittgenstein", nevertheless grammar is completely appropriate to the foundation of understanding the other, where there's a purpose or an intention of communication sentence don't express all its contents, thus mental intention could be transphered in written words which contains grammmar negation, tenses, moods, and so on; in other words, we always have a grammar, but pragmatics of Austin's illocutionary acts or "implicatures " of Grice summarize another type of acts understood beyond that is just been mentioned before...

Margaret, thanks a lot, my wife has worked for social services in Barcelona more than 30 years and she dealt with cases of extreme frustrations of the poverty or Asperger, Alzheimer, suicides, severe depression, where very commonly attested, even with Southamericans exilles and where there were alcoholism that negate its inferiority destroying its self-confidence .. many times pacients used to be lying almost the time, they were dishonest and even with nurses and social workers trying to help them, acompanying and giving charm to their shabby and unfair life; now she works as a clinical social worker at a men Monastery, that is dogma an belief, and also negation is a defined character for the symbolic Catholic Institution...on...d the e¡¡¡¡¡¡i

Hi, Margaret. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "cognitive." Can you explain what this includes and excludes? That would help. What aspects of our response to literature is cognitive? What is NOT cognitive?

Hi Richard! Good to hear you again after so long. And good question. In my recently published book, The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition (OUP 2020), I argue that cognition does not simply refer to conceptual reasoning, but to our subliminal sensory-motor-emotive processes that underlie and motivate our perceptions and understanding. So that our cognition is embodied; there is no split between body and soul; that minding is a process involving all our cognitive faculties. Hope that helps.

Congratulations on the new book!

Yes, I have been following what you have been arguing on THAT issue.

What about the OTHER half of my question? What does cognition NOT include? This is crucial, because if saying that you are doing "cognitive poetics" doesn't exclude anything, then the "cognitive" is redundant and can be omitted. "Cognitive poetics" becomes just another name for "poetics."

Margaret: For instance, do you consider my work on rhythm and form "cognitive" and so a part of "cognitive poetics"?

Thanks, Richard for noticing my omission. I had almost added a comment about cognitive poetics, but decided not to. I have stopped using the term for the very reason you cite. Here's an excerpt of what I wrote in the introduction to my book:

The need for redefining terminology becomes clear when one considers the use of the term cognitive as an adjective to describe certain contemporary disciplines. In its broadest sense, “cognitive” applies to all activities of human minding, so that it is redundant: all such research is cognitive. Using it as an adjective is understandable in cognitive science, since it distinguishes the sciences of the mind from the natural sciences. Cognitive linguistics was developed in reaction to early formulations of Chomskian linguistics that predicated a separate syntactic module in the brain specified for language, whereas cognitive linguists understand language function as distributed. However, both claim the label cognitive. By reversing adjective-noun phraseology, the various cognitive disciplines may be seen more correctly as different modes of viewing the same cognitive faculty, whether they are linguistic, psychological, social, neurological, scientific, aesthetic, and so on. For this reason, the use of cognitive poetics is similarly problematic, and I therefore now adopt poetic cognition as a more accurate description.

As a subcategory of aesthetic cognition, poetic cognition has the potential to provide a theory and methodology in establishing the nature of poetic effects and relating them to human cognitive processes.

So yes, absolutely your work on rhythm is an important and crucial aspect of poetic cognition.

Margaret--

Good to hear.

I think you have done us all a great service by clarifying this point.

You mention my work on rhythm. What about my work on form? Would you claim that this work on form is cognitive, too? My claim is that poetry is the FORMAL use of rhythm, language, rhetoric, and meaning. And so, sure, I claim that we cognize poetry, both text and context, FORMALLY. In my temporal poetics, form is not rhythmic. It is only DERIVED from rhythm, by way of the qualities of the four rhythmic components: meter, grouping, prolongation, and theme. My many (30 or so?) published full analyses of poems (Cummings, Bishop, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Williams, Stevens, Lawrence, etc.) BOTH scan the poem for rhythm (in all of the four rhythmic components) and then comment, extensively, on the poem's forms (linguistic, rhetorical, symbolic), using my theory of form.

Margaret--

That we need to recognize forms as distinct from meanings is clear. For instance, as everyone has realized for eons now, in language, definitionally, and so essentially, noun and verbs, phrases and clauses, tense and aspect, gender and number, clitic phrases and intonational units, sounds and syllables, etc., are not meanings, but forms. A noun is not a thing, etc. My claim is that a poetic symbol is also a form, a formalized meaning. This realization has been a major problem, though, given that both science and the humanities have lacked a theory of form. And if poetry is indeed formal, this explains why literary theory to this point has lacked a theory of poetry.

Richard -

We are definitely on the same page. In fact, I go further and say that the form-content ontological division is misleading. You can focus on one or the other but you can't have one without the other. Susanne Langer has a good example of this with a shell that is both concave and convex but neither exist without the shell. So its like cognition itself, looking at different aspects of the same phenomenon. And you are right about form and meaning I make a point (emphasized at our first Myrifield symposium by its participants in a manifesto they drew up) that literature, especially poetry, is badly taught in schools. with interpretation of meaning emphasized over experience. I prefer to think primarily of how we experience the poem through its images and primarily its formal patterning (including all the items you mention beyond rhythm and meter) in order to understand its significance - what a poem is doing, not simply what it is saying. That gives us a better cognitive understanding of the poem.

Margaret--

While I respect and agree with the advance you are suggesting of disposing of the form-content dichotomy in poetry, I suppose I take an even more radical position. For me, ALL meanings in poems are symbolic, and so formalized. So, really, poems don't have any LITERAL meanings, or "content," at all. Because poems are formal, poetic interpretation must be formal, too, including the interpretation of meaning. And this is not impossible at all, if we have a general theory of form, as I do, that includes BOTH text and context. The major advance in what I am claiming is that it gives us BOTH (1) a theory of poetic symbolism, or formalized meaning, which we lack as well, and (2) a theory of how to interpret poetic forms that are not essentially semantic, such as sound, stress, intonation, syntax, discourse organization, rhetorical tropes and schemes, and speech acts. The final advance that I am suggesting is that this theory of form is derived from the qualities of rhythm, and so can be related productively to rhythm, which is something else entirely, without any change in first principles. The claim I am making is that poems are BOTH rhythmic and formal, and productively, in tandem, and in principle, so.

I don't disagree at all.

Margaret--

Good to hear.

So, perhaps this is not the place to ask, but I will go ahead and ask anyway. Would TWO books, one on my theory of poetic rhythm and one on my theory of poetic form, be the kind of thing that you and your co-editors at Oxford University Press are looking for to include in OUP's Poetics and Cognition series? I have had these books ready to go for at least a decade, but have been looking for an appropriate place to publish them. OUP would be great. The book proposals for the two volumes were written long ago and so can be ready to be submitted immediately, in a week or so. Each book has been been preceded by THOUSANDS of pages of published essays on the two issues. I have been working on the first issue (rhythm) for 40 years. I have been working on the second issue (form) for 30 years.

Margaret--

Couched in your new terminology (not "cognitive poetics" but "poetic cognition"), what I am claiming in that "poetic cognition" is FORMAL cognition--perceptual, emotional, actional, semiotic, etc.--rather than rhythmic, functional/rhetorical, or systematic/semantic cognition. These OTHER aspect of cognition are used when we read and write the OTHER literary genres--song, prose fiction, and drama. Cognitively, song is rhythmic; prose fiction is functional; and drama is systematic. This FORMAL aspect of cognition that we use when we read and write poetry is not at all limited to our reading and writing of poetry. We also use it all the time in our daily lives, because aspects of EVERYTHING we experience--the world, ourselves, society, and culture--are ALSO formal. As Helen Vendler likes to say, poetry is not what happens. It's the "music" (the form) of what happens.

Just curious, I guess, given that I have worked on this issue for 30 years now but haven't read your new book yet (I just ordered it), but in your book, do you suggest a theory of form (or formal cognition), and so a theory of poetry (and things like form in language)? If so, kudos. I will be fascinated to see what you suggest, given that my temporal poetics is exactly that, a theory of form. As I mentioned above, to this point, neither the humanities nor the sciences, including linguistics and poetics, has ever known what to say about form--what it is, what it isn't, where it comes from and why, what it does for us, and so forth. As a result, we have never had a workable theory of poetry.

Margaret--

BTW, as you are aware, what I suggest in my temporal poetics is that form is emblematic and paradigmatic, and so exactly NOT iconic. What is an adverb (which is a linguistic form) iconic of? In poetry, adverbs are VERY important and are related to things like the moon, cats, trees, the sky, oceans, black/blue, winter, snow, fire, generic person, the perfect aspect, non-finite verbs, compound-complex sentences, pararhyme, rising intonation, and so on and so forth. How can this collection of poetically related things be represented/expressed with an icon?

Dear Richard Cureton ,

I thank you very much for your contributions to this discussion. I myself have been interested in rhythm and form in poetry, and have take into consideration in both my work, courses, and conducted research the work by Reuven Tsur, Derek Attridge, and Eva Lilja, among others. I wonder if you have theoretical references analysing also Spanish, French, or Italian literatures that could enrich the current bibliography that I am elaborating.

Victor--

Nice that we have similar interests. But, no, I don't have any references for you in the Romance language. I know Lilja intimately, both in person and otherwise, because my best student, and now friend of 20 years, Jorgen Larsson, was her student. And as a product of that, many years ago, Jorgen invited me to speak, in multiple ways, at Gothenburg, Sweden, where I met both her and her colleagues, and addressed them, at length, face to face. Lilja was also a participant in the VERY good conference on verification in Estonia, in memory of Jurij Lotman, held about a decade ago, which I participated in, too. Lilja, thankfully, in recent years, after much resistance, has also come to embrace my theory of rhythm entirely. Lilja was Jorgen's dissertation advisor.

Best,

Rich

Victor--

I have been corresponding with Tsur and Attridge for 40 years. Attridge was one of the major readers and advisors for my book on rhythmic phrasing back in 1992. After that, Attridge also adopted, whole cloth, my approach to linear motion in poetry, what music theorists call prolongation, and built this theory of mine into his subsequent books. Attridge has also now recognized the importance, and validity, of my approach to rhythmic phrasing, although he doesn't do this work himself, perhaps because he can't. My work on meter over the years has also both critiqued and advanced what Attridge has done. And Attridge has always lacked any way of theorizing and scanning free verse, which has its own sort of rhythm, too, what I call THEME. So, really, Attridge's work is now outdated--entirely. My work on rhythm mhas surpassed him in every aspect--meter, grouping, prolongation, and theme. There is also the additional strength on my work on rhythm that, over the last 30 years, I have used this work to build a theory of poetic FORM as well, and so an entire poetics. Attridge has done nothing of the sort. I was also one of the participants in Tsur's retirement conference in Tel Aviv a decade or so ago. Attridge and I were both participants in the Cambridge, UK, conference, on versitification, at Magdalene College, about a decade ago. The talk I gave at Cambridge has now been published, just lately, in STYLE.

Best,

Rich

Victor--

Margaret, and her husband, Don, were also at Tsur's retirement conference in Tel Aviv. They were NOT at the Cambridge or Estonia conferences.

The other major venue when Margaret and I were co-participants was in one of Haj Ross's "languaging" conferences at Denton, TX, 15 years or so ago, which I enjoyed enormously. Margaret was the keynote speaker, but I was also, at the last minute, given a couple of HOURS to talk, one night, about how I treat syntax in my temporal poetics. The whole conference was wonderful. Haj is a great guy, a poetic and linguistic guru if there ever was one. He's one of the kind, a gift to all of us, forever. Haj is a SHAMAN. He's otherworldly (smart, intuitive, creative, dedicated, meticulous, rigorous, scientific, humanistic, etc.).

Best,

Rich

Victor--

Honestly, I don't think Tsur ever had much at all to add to how we experience, understand, formalize, and theorize poetic rhythm. His contribution has been VERY minor. Outside of his own intimate sphere of colleagues and devotee, no one even knows about his work on poetic rhythm, and legitimately so. What is there to know?

Best,

Rich

Victor--

Attridge, implicitly, at least, seem to agree with judgement of Tsur's work on poetic rhythm. In all of his VOLUMINOUS writing on poetic rhythm over the last 40 years, Attridge never even mentions Tsur, at all. NOTHING.

Best,

Rich

Victor--

In my work on poetic rhythm, in ALL of the rhythmic components, I recognize Tsur's work on poetic rhythm and discuss his contribution, but in the end, I don't use ANYTHING that he has contributed. Why? His work on this issue is minor, and even so, irrelevant.

Best,

Rich

Victor--

My work on poetic rhythm came, first 10 years (grouping and prolongation), then 20 years (meter and theme), and now in application and development 30 and 40 years (!!) after Attridge's. Over all of this time, Attridge has not advanced his work on poetic rhythm at all--nothing. He has just continued to claim what he claimed back in 1982 with The Rhythms of English Poetry. Too bad. If you don't/can't move forward with your work, something is seriously wrong. My guess in this case is that what Attridge had to say about meter, in the end, was just a summary of what had preceded him, largely, generative metrics and metrical phonology. He tried to clean this work up, explain it, and the like, but, really, never added anything of his own at all. And a lot of what he to had to say was tone deaf. For example, he suggests a "beat" metrics, but can't experience beats! He confuses them with stresses. This is a perceptual and intellectual disaster of the first orderThe only advance Attridge has made since 1982 is to incorporate MY work into what he has to say. This is also not original thinking, but just a kind of avuncular, pedagogical rumination about what others have accomplished--intellectually, empirically, theoretically, practically.

Best,

Rich