Cognitive Grammar in Literature Edited by Chloe Harrison, Louise
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Cognitive Grammar in Literature edited by Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell and Wenjuan Yuan Contents Foreword Ronald W. Langacker 1. Introduction: Cognitive Grammar in literature Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell and Wenjuan Yuan PART I Studies of Narrative Fiction 2. War, worlds and Cognitive Grammar Peter Stockwell 3. Construal and comics: the multimodal autobiography of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home Michael Pleyer and Christian W. Schneider 4. Attentional windowing in David Foster Wallace’s ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’ Chloe Harrison 5. Resonant metaphor in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go Sam Browse 6. Constructing a text world for The Handmaid’s Tale Louise Nuttall 7. Point of view in translation: Lewis Carroll's Alice in grammatical wonderlands Elzbieta Tabakowska PART II Studies of Poetry 8. Profiling the flight of ‘The Windhover’ Clara Neary 2 9. Foregrounding and literariness in Dylan Thomas's ‘After the funeral’ Anne Päivärinta 10. Conceptual proximity and the experience of war in Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘A working party’ Marcello Giovanelli 11. Most and now: tense and aspect in Bálint Balassi’s ‘Áldott szép pünkösdnek’ Mike Pincombe 12. Fictive motion in Wordsworthian nature Wenjuan Yuan 13. The cognitive poetics of ‘If’ Craig Hamilton 14. Representing the represented: verbal variations on Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles Alina Kwiatowska Afterword: From Cognitive Grammar to Systems Rhetoric Todd Oakley 3 List of Contributors Sam Browse is a researcher in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. His work focuses on developing a text-driven approach to metaphor in discourse, and his interests encompass literary, political, economic and journalistic forms of public discourse. He teaches stylistics, discourse analysis and critical theory. Marcello Giovanelli is a Lecturer in English Education at the University of Nottingham. He has a background as an English teacher and manager, and as a senior examiner and consultant for the UK examinations system. He has written two English language textbooks and has recently published a monograph on Text World Theory and Keats’ Poetry (Bloomsbury 2013). Craig Hamilton is Associate Professor of English Cognitive Linguistics at the Université de Haute Alsace. He has held previous positions at the University of California-Irvine, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Paris. He published the first major article applying Cognitive Grammar to a literary work in 2003, and has since published widely on cognitive linguistic approaches to modern literature. Chloe Harrison is Lecturer in Stylistics in the Department of English and Languages at Coventry University, where she teaches applied linguistics, literary stylistics and cognitive poetics. Her research work develops a Cognitive Discourse Grammar of contemporary literature, drawing primarily on Cognitive Grammar and cognitive linguistics in general. Alina Kwiatowska is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Łódź. Her research focuses on aspects of cognitive linguistics, stylistics, and visual semiotics. During her term as President of the Polish Cognitive Linguistics Association, she organized a conference on cognitive poetics (2010), and edited the volume Texts and Minds. Papers in Cognitive Poetics and Rhetoric (Peter Lang 2012). Her most recent publications explore the interfaces of the visual and the verbal. Ronald W. Langacker is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He devised and developed Cognitive Grammar, and has published over 20 books and around 200 articles, including the seminal and definitive volumes in CG. He has also worked on and published extensively on the linguistics of Uzo-Aztecan languages. His work has been translated into several languages and he has served as President of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association. 4 Clara Neary is Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Chester, where she teaches both literary and non-literary stylistics, cognitive poetics, media discourse and the linguistics of creativity. Her research publications include articles on Indian literature in English, life writing, and the stylistics of global literatures. Louise Nuttall is a researcher in the School of English at the University of Nottingham, where she holds an Arts and Humanities Research Council award. Her work investigates the presentation and effects of mind-style and characterisation in 20th century literary prose fiction, drawing on a set of related approaches within cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. Todd Oakley is Professor and Chair of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he is also a Fellow of the Institute of Origins and Professor of English. He is the author of From Attention to Meaning: Explorations in Semiotics, Linguistics and Rhetoric (Peter Lang 2009) and co-editor (with Anders Hougaard) of Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction (John Benjamins 2008), as well as 30 research papers and chapters. Anne Päivärinta is a researcher in the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her work focuses on embodiment in Dylan Thomas’s writing, with particular interest in bringing together Conceptual Metaphor Theory and literary stylistics. Mike Pincombe is Professor of Tudor and Elizabethan Literature at Newcastle University. He teaches the literature and critical theory in this period, and also supervises doctoral work in creative writing. In his research he brings structural and semiotic analyses to bear on the literary texts and systems of Renaissance literature. He has published over 60 papers and 9 books and editions, including The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (with Cathy Shrank, Oxford University Press 2009) and Elizabethan Humanism (Longman-Pearson 2001). Michael Pleyer is a researcher in the Anglistisches Seminar at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg. His work centres on evolutionary linguistics, developmental psychology and cognitive science, with an interest also in multimodal and popular literary works. He has presented his research in over 20 talks and has published 11 research papers. Christian W. Schneider is a researcher in the Anglistisches Seminar at the Ruprecht-Karls- Universität in Heidelberg. He works in Gothic literature, particularly in an American context, and with a specific focus on popular culture, comic book studies and the cognitive literary theory of 5 multimodal and graphic texts. Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham. He is the author and editor of over 70 research papers and more than 20 books, including Cognitive Poetics (Routledge 2002), The Language and Literature Reader (with Ron Carter, Routledge 2008), Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading (Edinburgh University Press 2009) and The Handbook of Stylistics (with Sara Whiteley, Cambridge University Press 2014). Elżbieta Tabakowska is UNESCO Professor of Translation Studies and Intercultural Communication at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. She is the author of over 100 scholarly articles and her books include Cognitive Linguistics and Poetics of Translation (Gunter Narr 1993) and Language and Imagery: An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics (Kraków 1995). A collection of papers, Cognition in Language,was published in her honour (Tertium 2007) Wenjuan Yuan is Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Hunan University, China, where she teaches literary linguistics and cognitive poetics. She took her doctorate from the School of English at the University of Nottingham, with research in the exploration of cognition and kinetics in the poetry of William Wordsworth. Her current work develops this cognitive poetic reading of Romantic poetry and her wider research interests include a cognitive approach to comparative literature. Acknowledgements Craig Hamilton would like to thank colleagues at the Jagiellonian University Kraków, Freiburg University, and Nottingham University for feedback on earlier versions of his chapter. Michael Pleyer and Christian Schneider are very grateful for the financial support of the Soheyl Ghaemian Travel Fund for Scholars, courtesy of the Heidelberg Centre of American Studies; the contributors and editors are also pleased to acknowledge the permission of the author/illustrator Alison Bechdel and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishers for permission to reproduce copyright material from Fun Home in Chapter 3. The poem in Chapter 10 is copyright Siegfried Sassoon and is reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon. Mike Pincombe would like to acknowledge and thank Zsolt Almási, Agnes Ecsedy, and especially Kinga Földváry for their help with his translation and on points of Hungarian grammar in Chapter 11. Vincent van Gogh's (1888) De Slaapkamer ('The Bedroom at Arles'), which appears in Chapter 14, is held by the van Gogh Museum, 6 Amsterdam. The ‘Cognitive Grammar in Literature’ project was supported financially by the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), to whom we are very grateful. 7 Foreword Ronald W. Langacker A not uncommon criticism of Cognitive Grammar (CG) is that it lacks empirical support. It is an assessment that I strongly disagree with. Highly constrained in the kinds of structures it permits, CG has nonetheless been applied successfully to a wide array of phenomena in diverse languages, straightforwardly handling classic descriptive problems in a unified manner with reasonable claims to cognitive