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On Sun, 2 Dec 2001 02:44:16 -0000, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >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 All this perspective started from Barthes' reflections in Camera Lucida. And the enphasis puut on the eye perspectives (therefore the visual texts of the mind). No?