Article

Name: Reflections on Linguistic Poetics

Authors: O. G. Revzina

Lomonosov Moscow State University

Abstract: Cognitive poetics is a part of cognitive science. Cognitive science is a scholarly paradigm of the second half of the 20th – first decades of 21st cent. Cognitive science shares all traits of scholarly paradigm: critics of predecessors, new understanding of investigation object and new conceptual apparatus, new tasks and effective methods of its solution, and its indraft, in the capacity of obligatory, into material of scholarly of fiction. It’s always written about discourse of fiction, that it is at the interface of literary criticism and linguistics. It is exactly literary texts that form the “figure” of modern cognitive poetics, whereas its “background” is religious, humorous texts and also mass-media products. Cognitive poetics devotes itself to the exploration of mental processes, accompanied by communication of reader and text. Notions of prototype and uniformity, conceptual metaphor and metaphorical blending are treated, resting on works of M. Freeman, G. Lakoff, K. Hautley, P. Stockwell. Special attention is payed to incompatibility of cognitive poetics, that proclaims deligitimation of fiction, with philological and structural-semiotic approaches, with ideas of aesthetic function of language and aesthetic value of verbal work of fiction, with concepts of mimesis and catharsis by Aristoteles. In the last part analysis by M. L. Gasparov of the verse by A. Fet (Чудная картина, Как ты мне родна: Белая равнина, Полная луна, свет небес высоких и блестящий снег И саней далеких Одинокий бег) and the verse by Percy Bysshe Shelley «Ozymandias» are discussed. M. L. Gasparov is far from cognitive poetics, but he builds his analysis, resting on the major human cognitive capacity – visual perception and tridimensional text space, reconstructed by him, which implicitly refers to cognitive deixis. Holistic perception is superposed with strong emotional experience and unselfish satisfaction. P. Stockwell, on the contrary, starts from the notion of cognitive deixis and describes its kinds, but, analyzing “Ozymandias”, he applies to well-known figures of different senders and receivers. The parallel is made between sculpture and poet and then – between destroyed statue and text as an archetype. The verse is also concentrated on the production process of creation and on the act of reading: traveler reads inscription and then reads it to narrator, which in its turn reads it to us in the form of verse. Finally Stockwell reaches that explanation of the impact on the reader, made by this verse. Thus, incompatible in theory turns to be pretty compatible in practice.

Keywords: cognitive poetics, prototype, uniformity, conceptual metaphor, metaphorical blending, aesthetic value, aesthetic function, scholarly paradigm

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