David Bircumshaw wrote:
<snip>
To my mind, there is an enormous and potentially exciting area of work
'waiting to be done' in literary theory, rather comparable I think to
neurology, but as things are, it remains undone.
<snip>
I'm not sure where you wished to take that; but there is, of course,
neurolinguistics.
Besides which, the shift (since, say, the 1970s) away from treating language
as a cognitive special case towards treating it as an _aspect_ of perception
and cognition means that we are now some steps nearer to what you may have
in mind.
At their heart, cognitive theories of metaphor (Cf Lakoff, Turner,
Fauconnier et al) posit that metaphors are created by projecting one or more
characteristics of one domain onto another (to create 'a long time' or
whatever) and also by moving progressively from the physical, experienced,
to the abstract. Developments or elaborations of that basic proposition
(such as Conceptual Blending or Cognitive Integration) begin to offer the
possibility, if not more, that (consensually) good but apparently disparate
readings of the same text will be reconcilable at the level of their overall
conceptual structure but that (what are generally agreed to be) bad or
eccentric readings will not be. There may, in other words, be some
predictive power.
Others (Cf Robert Port at U Indiana) have been looking at rhythm and
phonetics and (interestingly, to my mind) at entrainment and self
entrainment. This seems likely both to alter our view of phonemes and to
increase and alter our understanding of how the sound of poetry is
constituted by the poet, by the reader and by the hearer.
There is also, I believe (though I can't think where, offhand) work being
done on such matters as eye saccades and how these affect our visual
apprehension of the text.
Literature being an open system, its *predicatibility* more than in a very
limited way, whatever the rigour of the theoretical model, is (I think)
somewhat moot.
Christopher Walker
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