TOWARD A PRAGMATICS OF INTENT: COGNITIVE APPROACHES IN CREATIVE AND CRITICAL WRITING by Lois Wolfe A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 2008 ABSTRACT Author: Lois Wolfe Title: Toward a Pragmatics of Intent: Cognitive Approaches in Creative and Critical Writing Institution: Florida Atlantic University Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Andrew Furman Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Year: 2008 Locus of an author poses questions of intentionality, how intention is discovered, expressed, hidden, revealed and interpreted. The purpose of the study is to find and apply productive interdisciplinary concepts in intentionality detection, decoding and evaluation in fictional texts. The investigation integrates traditions in literature, linguistics, cognitive science and creative writing, posing a pragmatics of intent that complements and complicates precepts in reader reception-based constructivism. Basic to a vision of pragmatic strategies: 1) situating effect and affect in an embodied mind; 2) acknowledging mutual and/or oppositional intentionalities which an embodied author and embodied reader bring to the process of fictional communication; 3) accepting language as communication that requires cognitive translation of consensually-agreed upon iii symbols into private representations in an embodied mind; 4) assuming that an author’s fictionalizing consciousness is more discernible when it is navigating tensions of selection, proportion, intervention and perspective. Perceptual and close reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe yields descriptive problematics. Analytical readings in a neglected byway of I.A. Richards’ New Criticism provide pragmatic cues for detecting and evaluating intentionalities in prose. Three cross-disciplinary strategies emerge to enhance perceptual and close readings of fictional texts: 1) awareness of priming effects in form and content; 2) identification of markedness patterns; and 3) perception of tensible connections in prosaic language and artistic devices. The study concludes that: reading in tensible awareness of author intentionality adds productively to critical analysis and argument; acknowledging positioned voices in texts supports ethical criticism and multi- cultural aesthetics; reading to apprehend perceptual units (image structures sensed through story) supports and contextualizes close reading of propositional units (discourse/language). The formal element of perspective emerges as the most intensive locus of the reader’s sense of integrated consciousness and management of effect in fiction. Perspective can create the most ergative construction of authorial perspective, i.e., one in which transitive energy appears equalized and the subject and patient / writer and reader positions in syntax can pivot. iv Table of Contents Introduction .........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 ............................................................................................................................14 Conceptual Bridgework ..................................................................................................14 Writing As Cognitive Translation .................................................................................17 Disciplinary Negotiations ...............................................................................................23 Working Definitions .......................................................................................................29 Chapter 2 ............................................................................................................................39 Priming and Cognition ...................................................................................................39 Memory ..........................................................................................................................43 From Word to Image and Story ......................................................................................48 From Experience to Qualia and Judgment .....................................................................51 Initial Priming ................................................................................................................56 Priming Perspective .......................................................................................................58 Combinant Properties and Transitivity .........................................................................68 Chapter 3 ............................................................................................................................78 Markedness and Prototype Theory .................................................................................78 Markedness Values of Spatiality in Roth’s Call It Sleep ...............................................83 Markedness in Plot: Hamlet’s Imperatives ...................................................................93 v Chapter 4 ..........................................................................................................................108 Tensible Connections ...................................................................................................108 Tensible Connection in Imagery ..................................................................................118 Tensible Connection in Character and Incident ...........................................................119 Plot Intentions and Tensible Design .............................................................................125 Sickroom Space: Tensible Design in Sound and Fury ................................................131 Rupturing Tensibility: Dueling Design in King Lear ..................................................134 Chapter 5 ..........................................................................................................................145 Conceptual Infrastructure .............................................................................................145 Writing Subject Reading Subject .................................................................................157 New Criticism ..............................................................................................................166 Practical Criticism of I.A. Richards .............................................................................172 Close Reading and New Criticism ...............................................................................180 Negotiating Meanings ..................................................................................................187 Detecting Intentionality in Practical Criticism .............................................................188 Chapter 6 ..........................................................................................................................195 Positioned Perspectives ...............................................................................................195 Affective Fallacy and a “Cognitive Criticism” ............................................................210 Subjectivities ................................................................................................................219 Chapter 7 ..........................................................................................................................236 A Perceptual Reading of Coetzee’s Foe ......................................................................236 Creative Cognition .......................................................................................................243 A Moral Contour .........................................................................................................261 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................277 Work Cited .......................................................................................................................283 vi Introduction Faulkner was missing again. I was speaking to a class of high school juniors who had just finished reading Light in August. They were struggling with the elusiveness of the author, the quick shifts in time and consciousness which Faulkner uses to render the hard alienated life of young Joe Christmas and other characters in a Southern community of jagged realism and mixed mores. Which one’s the author? a student asked. He was asking which perspectives in a novel are an author’s and which are fictional. Literally speaking, all perspectives in a novel are fictional and all derive from an author, but when all is relative to all, there are no distinctions. Finding distinctive features – an edge, a gap, repetition, change – is basic to the human ability to distinguish patterns, identify objects, recognize subjects, detect likeness and difference, i.e., to perceive in natural and fictional space. If we take the question analytically as invitation to evaluate context, meaning and implication in communication, we may answer more contingently, dependently. Perspectives occur in context, and context is a construction of how and what we perceive. There may be no matter of perception more risky and interesting to interpret as deception, no more important knowledge to gain and weigh than when, under what 1 circumstances and