Applying cognitive metaphor theory to a reading of Franz Kafka's first great story "The Judgment" fills a lacuna in the long tradition of scholarship on the role of metaphor in Kafka's work. Cognitive analysis of the text reveals a liberal and effective use of everyday basic linguistic metaphor on the part of the narrator alongside a striking discrepancy in metaphorical facility between the story's two protagonists, findings with important implications. Further, each critical juncture of the narrative - the turning point, the climax, and the denouement - foregrounds metaphor in unique and fascinating ways. In light of the text's genesis - composed over the course of eight hours one night in September 1912 - these findings indicate, contra received wisdom that the author had an "aversion" to metaphor, an intuitive appreciation of the power and truth of metaphor as elucidated by contemporary cognitive science.
This article challenges the current discourse on the personal and social benefits of reading fiction by analyzing the representation and use of social mind reading in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Though the novel is closely associated with literary criticism on improved Theory of Mind, and contains a clear moral message about the importance of careful interpretation of others' behavior, the style of character description in the early part of the novel reinforces biases in readers' social cognition that have the potential for negative social impact. The article uses research from social psychology and social neuroscience to support this argument, concluding that literary critics need to take seriously the possibility that reading fiction may have negative effects on readers' social cognition.
This essay sketches a historical poetics of the elegy by tracking its formal metamorphoses from its archaic Greek and Roman origins to the German philosophical elegy and its modern Anglophone afterlives. Against dominant interpretations that define elegy exclusively by its content as a poetry of death, the essay emphasizes the dialectical tension between the elegy's particular poetic form and that content. Through readings of Mimnermus, Catullus, Goethe, and H & ouml;lderlin alongside more recent poets such as Mary Jo Bang, Larry Levis, and T. R. Hummer, the essay argues that elegy's asymmetrical meter and monodic voice figure the irresolution between mourning and the elliptical persistence of its presentation. Ultimately, by reading the broader history of the elegy, the essay suggests that rather than solely commemorating a private loss, the elegiac mode can be seen as a form of history itself.
After the global onset of the COVID- 19 pandemic in 2020, stories about virus outbreaks have enjoyed newfound popularity. Meanwhile, the lived experience of a pandemic has profoundly altered how pandemic stories are told in postCOVID- 19 fiction, as well as assumptions and expectations about what makes such stories tellable. While pandemic narratives written before 2020 usually explore speculative "what if?" scenarios, more recent ones tend to lean toward more grounded reflections, or "what now?" propositions. This essay explores this shift via a compar(2022). The former involves a speculative scenario about an apocalyptic pandemic, whereas the latter appeals heavily to the reader's experience of COVID- 19 to make its depiction of a fictional pandemic feel authentic and compelling. Comparison of these two pandemic novels enables a timely amendment to the theory of narrative experientiality, influentially advanced by Marco Caracciolo. This essay introduces a distinction between speculative and grounded narratives, integrating the notion of experientiality with rhetorical narrative theory to reveal how fiction can appeal to both readers' lived experiences and genuine novelty for its tellability and relevance.
The inability to describe traumatic events is a central aspect of the expe-rience of trauma itself, a breakdown in the link between experience and words that eats away at the rhythm of everyday life. Reading contemporary poetry written by war veterans can offer a possible way out of the traumatic paradox via a new poetic category, an indexical poetics that highlights the traumatic event not through the frustrating attempt to depict it but through the indexical function of pointing-to . In charging seemingly benign indexical words - it , me , then, and so on - with the force of an unspoken personal catastrophe, these poems manage to point to a traumatic event as well as mark the way it had undermined the meaning of words. The poetic result charts a diagram of a new way of speaking and writing, a new economy of meaning that, like any diagram, creates a world of expression that is inextricably tied to the pull of a very real painful past.
Are literary characters as real as human beings? The mimetic quality of fictional characters has been debated in literary studies for decades, but theories in favor of their reality-imitating nature and those arguing that they are mere textual signs have never reconciled their differences. Using cognitive narratology as its theoretical framework, this article reevaluates both positions and proposes that whether readers perceive literary characters as real or artificial entities depends on their state of mind. It further argues that fictional characters can share, for at least some of the time, a cognitive space with real-world entities. This position elevates them, cognitively speaking, to the same level of existence in the readers' mind. Through the exploration of these arguments, this article finds common ground between traditionally opposed mimetic and analytical theories, allowing both positions to coexist while also opening up the field for new lines of inquiry.
A recent outgrowth in the burgeoning area of cognitive studies in the arts is the sub-field of empirical aesthetics. Leading research in this area tracks physical responses to the mechanisms of art and the emotions such devices elicit. In so doing, an empirical aesthetics seeks a genuinely situated psychology of artistic experience. This essay tests the design, terms, and verdicts of key studies in empirical aesthetics. It suggests that they veer into parascience by conceiving the arts primarily as sensuous stimuli and by excluding intention and subjectivity from their trials, instead of recognizing them as integral components of artistic creation and aesthetic judgment.
This article explores Virginia Woolf's and Clarice Lispector's bold modernist challenge to the twentieth- century assumption that sustained attention is the sole legitimate mode of reading. In scenes of reading from To the Lighthouse and Near to the Wild Heart, and in their essays, Woolf and Lispector expose and contest the gendered assumptions underpinning hierarchies of readerly value. Their male characters project onto women forms of textual engagement marked by sensory perception, fluidity, and dream- like reverie, while claiming for themselves an "attentive" reading mode associated with intellectual mastery and militaristic control. Yet these fictional worlds dramatize how such so- called distracted modes can yield intellectual force, embodied ways of knowing, and subtle means of resistance to gendered systems of power. The article situates these literary strategies within broader twentieth- century debates on attention, productivity, and the methods of literary studies. Against this backdrop, Woolf and Lispector stage an incisive critique of the presumed neutrality of close or attentive reading, showing how value hierarchies around readerly cognitive modes are structured by social and gendered power. Rather than reinforcing the attention- distraction binary, Woolf's and Lispector's works foreground the capacity to move between readerly modes and experiment with embodied distraction as generative sites of aesthetic and political possibility.
Anna Burns's 2018 Man Booker prize winner, Milkman, depicts a young woman whose community labels her "beyond the pale" because of her predilection for reading-while-walking. She asks a friend: "Are you saying it's okay for [Milkman] to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?" Her friend replies, "Semtex isn't unusual. . . . It fits in - more than your dangerous reading-while-walking fits in." The retort suggests that, within the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, inattention is more offensive to local sensibilities than bomb making. The passage offers two insights that will be central to this article. First, the attention of human subjects is always under scrutiny; it is policed and regulated by the communities and groups with which individuals are affiliated. Second, attention is often the tool that allows the subject to escape the limitations and punishments that such communities enforce. This article addresses the literary, social, and psychological expressions of attention and the ways in which they are dynamically interconnected in the representation of the tensions between national and personal trauma.
The article proposes a theory of what it calls "emersivity," or the permanence of fictional characters in readers' lives once they have finished reading books. Reflecting on empirical data from a study of four hundred readers of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the article provides a model and a theoretical framework to account for readers' reporting how fictional characters "stay with them" after readerly immersion (i.e., "experiential crossing"). To date, cognitive literary theories of immersion have focused exclusively on the other direction of transit: namely, how our real past experiences can sustain or enhance our experience of a literary narrative. By contrast, how fictional elements from a storyworld can surface or transmigrate into real- life cognition has been basically ignored. The emersivity of fictional characters is intriguing and complex because it raises important issues regarding the possibility of entertaining in the real world intersubjective relations with non- actual beings, or what the article calls phantasmal intersubjectivity. The article concludes by claiming that the emersivity of literary characters can provide further empirical and theoretical ground to support claims about the impact of literary narratives in everyday life. It also argues for the relevance of emersivity to the broader study of permeability between imaginative and real worlds in human consciousness.
Training white subjects to attend to their own microaggressions against people of color has become a programmatic part of US workplaces. But this program has also evolved into an aesthetics, in the work of the contemporary Black American artists Claudia Rankine and Arthur Jafa. This article examines how their aesthetics of microaggression responds to the form of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) workshops. The author argues that Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric and Jafa's White Album allude to DEI exercises in compiling multimedia archives of microaggressive behavior. Even as they affirm the urgency of DEI, however, Rankine and Jafa also reveal its limitations by offering a more intimate and demanding attentional "training" - one that centers Black subjectivity and redirects white audiences toward a longer, pessimist temporality that might better support lasting social change. While DEI often fetishizes the decoding of microaggressions, it neglects what the author calls perceptual uncertainty: the ongoing doubt and instability these acts produce in people of color. In their more radical training, Citizen and The White Album illuminate both perceptual uncertainty and the failure of white attention as a reparative tool. Yet this failure holds critical potential; it not only initiates white audiences into pessimist temporality but also instructs them in the kind of endurance necessary for change - in Rankine's case, by emphasizing how Black subjects have built up resilience.
The essay points to a profound affinity between Pierre Bonnard and Virginia Woolf, suggesting that these two modernists, while working in different media and probably unaware of each other, shared a similar perception of the dynamics of subjectivity and a common position on the relation of art and life. Woolf's immersion in and familiarity with contemporary visual arts has been well documented and extensively discussed, primarily in biographical contexts. The argument advanced by this essay, however, relates to Woolf's poetics, particularly as evidenced in To the Lighthouse, a text which - much like Bonnard's visual renderings of the everyday in his late interiors - is permeated by a self- conscious polarity between "attention" and "interpretation." Drawing on the psychoanalytic conceptualization of Wilfred Bion, the discussion engages with the way these two "slow" modernists invite and insist on a mode of attention, that is, the way we read, view art, or listen to others, that precedes and at times undermines the workings of interpretation.
This article draws attention to a curious paradox in the history of Russian Formalism: Yuri Tynianov, one of the most imaginative theorists of the early Soviet period, has been consistently marginalized, overlooked, and ignored in both Russophone and Anglophone scholarship. Despite numerous attempts to revive Tynianov's legacy, his works continue to alienate scholars of literary theory and history. By exploring early volumes of The Tynianov Collection, the conference proceedings of the biennial conference The Tynianov Readings, this article traces a series of engagements with Formalism in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. As it demonstrates, the active and sustained process of rereading Formalism resulted in an impressive archive of cosmogonic accounts. These accounts explained the genesis and development of history, culture, society, and the self; they offered a particular vision of time and space; they outlined crucial elements and relations that constitute the universe; and they pointed to the processes that are responsible for organizing these elements and relations in particular ways. More specifically, the article maps the epistemic kinship of various concepts and interpretations in order to reconstruct the analytical moves and explanatory frameworks through which a group of talented, informed, and unorthodox late-Soviet scholars who sought to reactivate, but inadvertently deactivated, the dynamic impulse of Tynianov's work.
This article attempts to place Russian Formalism in a perspective that actualizes the political and socio- critical potential of this literary theory. This reading is linked to an appeal to subaltern and postcolonial studies, which have turned to uncovering the interrelationships between political supremacy, economic domination, and symbolic hegemony, piercing authoritative models of cultural interpretation and historical narratives of its development. The analysis of the theoretical, historical- literary, and literary texts of OPOYAZ representatives (especially Shklovsky) allows one to reconstruct intuitions and arguments similar to the critique of cultural hierarchies and progressivist paradigms that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. This logic can be used to describe the commonality of theoretical emphases that characterized the work of Petrograd Formalists and Southeast Asian scholars, which emerged as a theoretical aftershock following revolutions, the collapse of empires, and anti- colonial wars.
