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Anta Abdellah. 8-The Literary mind. Introduction. Introduction Where Chapter 8 is different is that it uses cognitive theory to model the processes involved in reading literature.
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Anta Abdellah 8-The Literary mind
Introduction • Introduction Where Chapter 8 is different is that it uses cognitive theory to model the processes involved in reading literature. • The branch of linguistics which deals with such modelling is known as cognitive poetics (see Stockwell, 2002; Gavins and Steen, 2003), and the cognitive theories that I draw on here are relevance theory and schema theory.
Within the perspective of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, a piece of language has an in-built guarantee that it is relevant. • It comes with a presumption that it is the most relevant way for the author or speaker to communicate a set of assumptions.
For Sperber and Wilson (1995), a text has optimal relevance if for minimu, effort in reading it, its processing leads to maximum cognitive effects. • In this section, we will look at how relevance theory might help to illuminate the nature of literary reading and whether or not this is different from non-literary reading.
Relevance and Literature (Reading A) • In Reading A, Relevance and literature’, Tony Bex draws on relevance theory in an attempt to show how literary texts are different to non-literary texts, such as the AA advert, because of how they are read. • Part of his case involves arguing that literary texts have no necessary practical consequences for the reader.
Mim and max effort • On the principle of relevance, minimum effort is invested for maximum cognitive effects. • Any additional processing effort in a reader’s search for optimal relevance needs to be balanced by a suitable set of effects. • So, for Bex, readers assume that the additional processing involved in finding relevance in the text world they create will lead to the following: cognitive effects of enjoyment, stimulation, mental enactment in being apt to use an imaginary world to reflect on, judge or escape from the actual world, etc.
3 Schema theory • The concept of schema was first used by the German philosopher, Kant, in the eighteenth century but in the twentieth century was initially associated with the work of the psychologist, Bartlett (1932). • Attempts to generate computer models of human text processing led to the realisation that this involves not only knowledge of language but also organised knowledge of the world. • Guy Cook, in Reading B, derives his schema framework from Schank and Abselson (1977), who put forward one of the most complete and influential models in the artificial intelligence revival of schema theory in the 1970s.
Activating schemata to make sense of a text • Example: Consider this text: • “John put his foot down on the accelerator and was now hurtling along the roads. He was way out of the city and the country roads were empty. Such a beautiful pastoral scene.. But in being so absorbed in the pastoral scene, John soon became lost”. • CommentThat John is lost is not made explicit above. So if you understood readily what was happening here, it is because you have a set of schemata for what happens when people get lost while out driving.
What's Schemata? • One that you most probably activated is called a script. A script refers to knowledge of a stereotypical situation or activity. • A second schema that was likely generated is known as a goaland this relates to stereotypical purposes. • To understand the goal, you would need to have activated another schema. This other type of stereotypical schema is known as a planand is often activated in advance of a goal schema, A plan is something that needs to happen so that a goal can be achieved. • There are schemata which are less tied to specific situations but derive from our evaluations of our experience. They are known as themes. Themes thus carry much more of an element of subjectivity in contrast to scripts, plans and goals, which are more stereotypical.
Schema theory and literariness (Reading B) • The advert analysed by Cook has much formal patterning and deviation. • The advert then results in schema reinforcement. The poem, on the other hand, is not as dense with linguistic patterning and deviation, yet could still be regarded as literary. This is. for Cook, because the poem leads to schema refreshment, in leading to cognitive change.
More on Cook’s theory • [.literariness.. as a dynamic interaction between linguistic and text-structural form on the one hand, and schematic representations of the world on the other, whose overall result is to bring about a change in the schemata of the reader. (Cook, 1994, p. 182) • He uses the term ‘discourse deviation’ for the phenomenon where linguistic or text-structural deviation ‘interacts with the reader’s existing schemata to cause schema refreshment’. • In other words, literature works in the way it does because of the interaction between formal deviation in the text and what the reader brings to the text.
Another key idea in Cook (1994) in the discussion of schema refreshment is that of novel linking of schemata. • For Cook, literary texts typically evoke conflicting and open-ended schemata and establish complex and novel relationships between them. In his reading of William Blake’s poem, ‘The Tyger’, the following script schemata are activated: TIGER, FORESTS, NIGHT, BLACKSMITH, ARTISTS, GOD, SPEAR, THROWER, TEARS.
Criticism of Cook’s theory • The first critic I mention is Lesley Jeifries. While Cook has a focus on the literary experience in the individual, Jeifries argues that literary experience is likely to be communal for readers if they do not have schemata ‘which are culturally dominant’ (Jeifries, 2001, p. 340). • Another critic is Elena Semino(1997, p. 154), who, drawing on Cook’s work, suggests that discourse deviation and thus schema refreshment may only be a property of prototypically literary texts. She argues that, in practice, texts that are regarded as literary range on a continuumfrom schema reinforcement at one end to schema refreshment at the other.
4- Relevance theory and schema theory • Relevance theory and schema theory are from different scholarly traditions. Relevance theory is part of a branch of linguistics known as ‘pragmatics’ which has its roots in philosophy. • Schema theory, on the other hand, derives from work in psychology and artificial intelligence. Despite this, for Semino (1997, p. 159) they are connected. • Sperber and Wilson claim that in comprehension we always aim to balance the effort involved in searching and activating background knowledge with the resulting cognitive effects. • In schema-theory terms, this is equivalent to saying that we activate a schema when its contribution to interpretation counter-balances the effort expended in activating it.
Narrative skill in Bilgewater’sproLogue (Reading C) • The narrative is able to achieve sympathy with the candidate and a degree of suspense at the end by invoking relevant schemata as well as through its careful shifts in narration, tense and co-text.
This narrative technique of getting us to construct a text world and then to refresh it is not just used in novels. Other narrative genres such as films also use such a device. This is not, though, to say that this is how all narratives work. • However, narratives through use of focaliser techniques are able to position readers to sympathise with or even identify with a character or set of characters. • That is, the genre of narrative fiction is well placed to ‘play with’ readers through refreshing text worlds.
5 Using a corpus to substantiate analysis of literary vagueness • Corpus phraseology evidence corroborates the intuition that it is common in language use to indicate purpose around ‘waiting’, i.e. to make linguistically explicit plan and goal schemata. • But the corpus search also tells that usage of loiteringتلكأis more complicated. • People can also loiter in the sense of just ‘hanging about’ with no clear and specific intention to act. • In analysing corpus evidence though we must be careful to distinguish quantitativefrequency evidence from qualitativeevidence about the salience of a phenomenon in a culture.
Literary vagueness • As we have seen in this chapter, Cook and Semino are mostly concerned with the outcome of our engagement with a literary work — schema refreshment or schema reinforcement. • It could be argued that the reason many poems work for a large number of readers is because they have the quality of ‘optimum literary vagueness’ which draws readers in to ‘fill the vacuum’, to project schemata into them in their generation of a text world.
Assessing literary vagueness via corpus analysis - The corpus evidence helps substantiate vagueness and ambiguity. • An advantage of using corpus evidence with ‘Street Song’ is that it assists explanation of why the poem is likely to be ‘dynamic and disturbing’ for readers more generally. It suggests that a reader might not always be sure whether to project plan schemata into the poem or not. • Finally, the tension about salience and frequency mentioned earlier always needs to be borne in mind when using corpus evidence. • Nevertheless, use of corpora in the way shown offers a method for developing constrained hypotheses, i.e. ones worth empirically –testing.
Conclusion • ConclusionThis chapter has gone beyond the idea that literariness only resides in the text, a perspective that was dealt with particularly in Chapters 2, 3 and 6. • It has done this by discussing the kinds of cognitive processes involved in literary reading and whether literariness can be defined in terms of cognitive effects. • Though this chapter has explored the relationship between literariness and the reader’s cognitive processes, the reader has been an idealised one. • Next chapter is on readers and writers.
AntarAbdellah 9-Readers and writers
1- Expert readers • Key early writers who shifted their focus away from the formal properties of texts to a focus on how readers ‘received’ texts are Jauss (1982) and Iser (1974). • Jauss was interested in bringing the reader, rather to the centre of literary studies and in historicisingjudgments of aesthetic and literary quality. • Iser(1974) introduced the influential notion of the ‘implied reader’. • A range of terms have since been used to refer to the ‘reader’, some of these are listed and briefly explained below.
I continue with the empirical interest in the following sections where I discuss different ways in which researchers are setting out to explore how real readers engage with literary texts.
Source: literary criticism. • Expert Reading 1: Feminism: • Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar focus on the constraints under which Catherine, the female protagonist in the novel, has to live and act. They illustrate how the character is forced to act in accordance with the expectations surrounding what it means to be a woman in nineteenth-century England • This kind of commentary illustrates some key strands of feminist literary criticism: • (a) an interest in exploring the ways in which female characters are portrayed; • (b) an interest in exploring binary constructions of gender— male! female, masculine/feminine — and the values attached to these: • (c) a focus on patriarchy and of power relations.
Expert Reading 2: post colonialism: • The kind of commentary that Said makes here is part of a larger tradition, which Said himself helped to forge, often referred to as post colonialistcriticism, where the relationship between Britain and the empire, as played out in literary texts, is made the object of analysis and explored critically • Interestingly, neither Expert Reading I or 2 seeks to define the literary value of the texts by making close reference to their formal features. Rather they offer specific kinds of readings drawing on particular theoretical and critical frameworks.
Expert Reading 3: literary Value: • In contrast, Roger Simmonds focuses on a text whose literary value is under some dispute. His focus, and indeed his aim, in discussing these texts seems to be to claim a literariness for the texts and, in so doing, argue that they have literary value. • There are several points I wish to draw from this focus on experts’ readings. Reading from a sociocultural perspective is understood not (primarily) as an individual phenomenon but rather as a situated activity, that is, as taking place and being shaped by the context of a particular time and place, and as involving the following: • 1 Traditions of reading emerge from specific communities. 2 Readings are embedded in particular theoretical traditions. 3 Texts can be read and valued differently.
Traditions of reading emerge from specific communities • Together, the three expert readings here illustrate a particular way of engaging with literary texts which are associated with a particular community: the ‘academic’ or ‘intellectual’ community. • They seem to reflect Fish’s notion of the ‘informed reader’, reading from the position of a particular ‘interpretive community’ (Fish, 1980) that engages with texts in rather specialised ways.
Readings are embedded in particular theoretical traditions • In order to make sense of literary texts, readers draw (explicitly or implicitly) on theoretical traditions of reading. • This is particularly evident in expert readings of literature since the 1960s where theory itself became explicitly valued as a tool for making sense of literary texts. • The prominence of different theories in academic fields at specific historical moments influences experts’ interpretations of texts and assumptions about their value.
Texts can be read and valued differently • Whether familiar or not with the original texts discussed above, you may have found some of the experts’ comments unusual or surprising. • We each - whether expert or non-expert - bring our own specific history to the reading of texts.
The controversy of expert readers • 1 Such readings bear no relation to what other real or ‘ordinary’ readers do. • 2 Such approaches exert too powerful an influence over the discipline of literary studies itself.
4 Ordinary readers: a psycho-formalist approach • psycho-formalism. This approach includes a wide range of interests such as: the relationship between personality types and reading and writing; ‘processing’ patterns, such as the effect of the speed of reading on how people read; comprehension strategies. • A significant strand involves research into how ordinary readers respond to literary texts, and, in particular, how they recognise and respond to features typically viewed as ‘literary’, such as rhyme, alliteration, and different forms of linguistic deviation. • Psycho-formalism thus combines an inherency approach to literariness with a cognitive approach to readers’ engagement with literary texts.
The form of reading (Reading A) • The principal criticisms that Miall and Kuiken make against much literary theory are as follows: • Particular elite ways of talking about literature have developed which are very different from the way ordinary readers talk about and engage with real texts. • Claims made in expert readings are not based on any empirical (observable) evidence, but rather on theory and furthermore on experts’ use of a particular theory. • Literary theorists do not focus on real readers but rather only make claims about what real readers do, or in some instances, even dismiss the value of considering what real readers do. • In many expert readings, the text and its textual features have become largely irrelevant as part of a wider backlash against ‘Formalism’. • Literariness’ as a textual phenomenon is ignored. • Undue importance is often given to the social context of readings and the ways in which socially shaped reading conventions determine individual readers’ engagement with texts.
5 Real readers: a social practices approach • Hall provides an overview of ethnographic research which seeks to document in different ways (survey, archive, observation or interview) how ordinary readers engage with literary texts in their everyday lives. • The key elements of ethnography are: • • It is concerned with analysis of empirical data that is systematically selected for the purpose. • Those data come from ‘real-world’ contexts, rather than being produced under experimental conditions created by the researcher. • Data is gathered from a range of sources including observation, interviews and documentation. • The focus is a single setting or group, of relatively small scale, or a small number of these. • Much ethnography seeks to explore participants’ perspectives. • The analysis of the data involves interpretation of the meanings and functions of human actions and mainly takes the form of verbal descriptions and explanations, with quantification and statistical analysis playing a subordinate role at most.
6 Expert writers • The focus is on three dimensions: 1 The social contexts in which creative writers develop their relationships with language; 2 The ways in which writers draw on specific linguistic and other semiotic resources in different linguistic and cultural contexts; 3 The significance of different kinds of readers for writers at different moments in time.
Writing and social background • McEwandescribes his journey as a developing creative writer from the close community of his childhood towards the rather more abstract and diffuse community of writers of literature. • In this journey, his first community — mother home, English working and lower middle class — powerfully shapes the particular kind of relationship he has with the resources of the creative writer- language. • McEwan’scomments suggest that the creative writer has to develop a sensitivity whereby language as a whole is made strange’, that is, it becomes visible as an object to be consciously forged by the writer
English as a global writing resource • Unlike McEwan who describes the extreme caution with which he approaches language and crafts his sentences, Roy says that she doesn’t think about language at all and gives an impression of writing freely and without effort, ‘I don’t rewrite’. • However she also indicates a more deliberate and conscious approach to the construction of her texts overall. In general, she emphasisespleasure as a central dimension to her creative writing, which contrasts with the struggle emphasised by McEwan. • Roy’s comments in the interview alongside her own writings reflect the nature of English as a global semiotic resource and three specific ways in which such a resource is being used by creative writers.
Firstly, English involves multiple varieties because of its use across many different geographical and linguistic contexts. • Secondly, a common feature of texts written out of multilingual contexts is the juxtaposition of English with other languages • Thirdly, Ter, writers — whether monolingual or multilingual users of English - do not simply use words from existing varieties of languages, but also invent their own usages. • As indicated by McEwan’s comments and in Joyce’s inventions above, in many ways the key issue faced by all creative writers (whatever their social, cultural and linguistic context) is the same: how to take control over the ‘stuff of writing — the range of linguistic and other semiotic resources — and to create these anew adopting a range of stylistic strategies.
A writer’s readers • Different readers react differently to the writer’s text. • Sometimes, readers even (mis)read the text. • One explanation is that the crystallization of themes is not suitable for a time or a region.
7 Ordinary readers and writers: creative relations around texts • A writer’s writing is always informed by readings, and in part re-writings of others words. • ‘Writing back’ and ‘talking back’, as mentioned in Reading B, are phrases which explicitly signal this in the context of feminist and postcolonial writing, and are used to describe a particular kind of response — challenging, responding, resisting — to traditionally conceived notions, products and practices of ‘English literature’.
Addresivity and meaning making • Addressivity is another term belonging to Bakhtin’s Sociolinguistic theory. • An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to someone, its addressivity. • Both the composition and, particularly, the style of the utterance depend on those to whom the utterance is addressed, how the speaker (or writer) senses and imagines his addressees, and the force of their effect on the utterance. • Bakhtin’semphasis on the powerfully interactive relationship between writers, readers and texts has increasingly been taken up in recent times in approaches to literature and literary activity.
Conclusion feminism Post colonialism Literary Value Psycho formalism Ethnography Writing Back / Addressivity
