No abstract

When we think of the cognitive sciences and literature, we usually think of bringing expertise from neuroscience to literary texts. However, interdisciplinary projects of this nature usually focus on semantic fields or narrative patterns, marginalizing the literary quality of the texts that are examined. More recently, the opportunities that come with a focus on aesthetics and poetic form have been discussed following Stockwell (2009), who has argued that we need to go beyond semantics in the field of cognitive poetics. Experiments using fMRI scanners have shown that readers’ brains ›fire up‹ holistically but that engaging with poetry and prose activates different regions of the brain (cf. Jacobs 2015). So one task of cognitive poetics is to look more closely at the aesthetic experience of literary texts. The sonnet is arguably a suitable test case for a cognitive poetics that is interested in form. After all, received wisdom has it that the sonnet abides by a rigid formal pattern: »it is a fourteen-line poem with a particular rhyme scheme and a particular mode of organizing and amplifying patterns of image and thought […] usually [rendered in] iambic pentameter« (Levin 2001, xxxvii). Accordingly, matters of form should play a crucial part when sonnets are read. At the same time, due to its »particular mode« of organisation, the sonnet is often thought to be a poetic form that is prone to cognitive processes. Helen Vendler (1997, 168) claims, for example, that Shakespeare’sFollowing Vendler and Lyne in their focus on cognitive processes when discussing the sonnet, I will challenge simplistic notions of poetic form that – in the case of the sonnet – are limited to structural features like the fourteen-line rule. Aberrations like theIf we accept that poetic form is not given but evolves while stimuli for cognitive processes and emotional responses are provided, research in cognitive poetics must take aspects of form more seriously. In her comprehensive study of poetic form,Scrutinizing poetic form more systematically with the help of cognitive sciences thus also promises to help us redefine our concept of knowing. Exciting experiments with a focus on affect and emotional responses have brought to the fore the notion that aesthetics plays an important part in the process of reading poetry (cf. Lüdtke 2014). These experiments suggest that schema theory, with its reliance on pre-existing meaningful structures, falls short of grasping the process of reading poetry as an aesthetic process. So while pattern recognition, be it on a narrative plane or a semantic plane, is certainly one facet of the cognitive process of reading poetry, the process involves other facets, too, that CLS has only begun to address. Vaughan-Evans et al. (2016, 6) have perhaps provided »the first tangible evidence that this link [between an aesthetic appreciation of poetry and implicit responses] is permeable«. They argue that the »spontaneous recognition of poetic harmony is a fast, sublexical process« (ibid.) opening up a playing field for CLS at a sublexical level that still warrants investigation. Equally, a recent eye-tracking study of how English haiku are being read, conducted by Hermann J. Müller et al. (2017), has revealed that readers’ individual engagement with poetry becomes more diverse with a second or third round of engaging with the text. This may sound trivial, but it does challenge the notion that CLS will help establish universal patterns of cognition. On the contrary, CLS may corroborate a hermeneutical stance: with every reading of a poem, new questions arise; poems are never fully understood. CLS can thus help to heed Bruhn’s and Wolf’s interjection that »we should pay more attention to the responses of the individual qua individual than averaging individuals into groups« (Bruhn/Wolf 2003, 85).

The rise of vernacular science writing in early modern England coincided with the negotiation of a national identity. It reflects the appropriation of "matters scientifical" at a time when England emerged as a nation proud of its cultural achievements. Only by resorting to the vernacular was it possible to turn the matters discussed into a truly national affair. However, vernacular science writing was not merely a medium to appropriate and disseminate knowledge. As a genre it narrowed the gap between oral and literate culture, enabled virtuosi and practitioners to engage with the scientific debates and thus substantially supported a gradual move towards experimental and practical science. Thus vernacular writing conceptualized a social and intellectual space for the engagement with natural philosophy. In comparing textbooks covering the mathematical sciences, foremost Blundeville's Exercises (1594), with proto-encyclopedic texts in the field of knowledge about plants and animals, Turner's Herbal (1568) and Topsell's The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes (1607), the creation of such a conceptual space is shown to be a decisive generic feature of vernacular science writing.Recent re-evaluations of nationhood as an early modern phenomenon have scrutinized the role that the vernacular played in conceptualizing the nation 1 -particularly in the process of establishing forms of "postdynastic nationalism". 2 However, there still 1 Cf. Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England: 1530-1580 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004); Christian Schmitt-Kilb, "Never was the Albion Nation without Poetrie". Poetik, Rhetorik und Nation im England der Frühen Neuzeit, Zeitsprünge. Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004); Writing the Early Modern English Nation: the transformation of national identity in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England, ed. Herbert Grabes (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). 2 The term "postdynastic nationalism" is used by Helgerson to describe evolving forms of nationhood that are not centred on the concept of a Brought to you by | University of Hawaii Main Library Authenticated Download Date | 6/10/15 7:28 AMremains a topical and generic field to be discussed that has arguably advanced both English as a respected national language and Englishness as a venerated national concept: vernacular science writing. The lack of attention to this topical and generic field is owed to the fact that vernacular science writing falls between disciplinary boundaries: it is treated neither as literature nor as proper scientific writing. As a hybrid genre it remained largely unnoticed by scholars investigating the history of science, the history of English or the history of literature. In the influential study The Triumph of the English Language, for example, Richard Foster Jones examined the use of English as the language of popular instruction but he failed to comment on the emergence of vernacular science writing. Instead, he identified three principle reasons for the advancement of English in the...

No abstract