Cognitive Spaces and Perspective in Literature
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Beschreibung
This book brings an original perspective to literary theory and criticism by using insights drawn from visual cognition and neuroscience. Employing recent findings in neuroscience to explain consistent patterns in the representation of space in literature, Finnigan explores how these patterns exploit readers’ power to imagine themselves in different times and places and identifies the literary power of deviating from these patterns. While focusing on Victorian, Modernist and Postmodernist texts, Finnigan brings a new critical framework that can applied in other literary contexts through neuroscience and psychological theory.
Liz Finnigan is Course Director for the English and History Undergraduate Program at Southern Regional College, Northern Ireland. Previously, she taught at Strathclyde University, UK, where she was also the convener of the Advanced Literary Linguistics Research, Editor of the International Journal of Literary Linguistics: Cognitive Edition at Mainz and General Editor of Ecloga. Her research interests are: Literary Linguistics, Cognition, Neuropsychology, Visual Perception, Stylistics and Narrative Theory. However, she has also worked on Irish writing and postcolonial theory. She is currently researching the relationship of narratives to episodic memory.
This book brings an original perspective to literary theory and criticism by using insights drawn from visual cognition and neuroscience. Employing recent findings in neuroscience to explain consistent patterns in the representation of space in literature, Finnigan explores how these patterns exploit readers’ power to imagine themselves in different times and places and identifies the literary power of deviating from these patterns. While focusing on Victorian, Modernist and Postmodernist texts, Finnigan brings a new critical framework that can applied in other literary contexts through neuroscience and psychological theory.
Explores the role of vision, memory and language on spatial representation in literature Discusses patterns of visual cognition and neuroscience and how they exploit readers' self-projection and identification Focuses on British and Irish Literature but introduces a framework that can be applied to other literary locations
Autor*in
Liz Finnigan
Themen in »Cognitive Spaces and Perspective in Literature«
Neuro-aesthetics Visual Perception Spatial Patterning Neuroscience British Literature Victorian Literature Samuel Beckett Episodic Memory Episodic Future Thinking Self-projection Gestalt Psychology James J. Gibson Stephen M. Kosslyn Lin Chen John Branville
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“Cognitive Spaces and Perspective in Literature is a major contribution to cognitive literary studies, carefully argued while asking completely new questions and answering them. Drawing on the narratological tradition, cognitive poetics, and theories of visual perception, the book balances cognitive universals with historical specificities. Starting from Jane Eyre, and demonstrating that the same general principles hold, we are offered new perspectives in particular on Beckett and Banville, via realist fiction and modernism. We see the city in a new way, as a kind of externalized interior space. The account of Beckett’s prose ‘impressionism’ as the ‘tuning out of saliency’ is worth the entrance price alone. The book presents a new theory of narrative production and explores the gap between fast thinking and slow writing, to formulate a theory of syntactic deceleration.” (Nigel Fabb, Emeritus Professor of Literary Linguistics, University of Strathclyde, UK)
“Spatiality studies in literature have grown increasingly important in recent years. Unfortunately, work in that area has rarely addressed the empirically-grounded, cognitive scientific research which has so greatly increased our understanding of the psychology of space. In this context, a literary study that draws on the data and theories of current neuroscience—and Liz Finnigan’s is just such a study—constitutes a particularly welcome addition to the ongoing dialogue on this important topic.” (Patrick Colm Hogan, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Connecticut, USA)
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