Cognitive Poetics and Avant-Garde Writing
SCMLA, New Orleans
Conference dates: 10/28-10/30, 2004
CFP | Abstracts: Bazargan, Klobucar, Miller,
Rice
Epiphany as Scene of Performance
For many scholars, Joyce’s epiphany is largely a
notion borrowed from the Romantics and their emphasis on “experience as
a
series of independent moments.” In my paper, I argue against this
perception of
the epiphany as a moment of “spiritual manifestation” and instead
discuss
it as a “blended space” which integrates a number of cognitive spaces
and by
extension ways of seeing and knowing. I use primarily the work of Giles
Fauconnier and Mark Turner (“Conceptual Integration Networks”) on the
blending of cognitive spaces. They describe “conceptual integration” as
“a general
cognitive operation on a par with analogy, recursion, mental modeling,
conceptual
categorization, and framing.” I find their notions of integration and
framing especially useful in discussing the dramatic and performative
elements of Joyce’s epiphanies. Far from being a single moment of
revelation, I
argue, the epiphany is a highly nuanced, integrated, blended scene of
linguistic performance in which the work of language and gesture
demands the kind
of intense cognitive participation from the reader that other scenes do
not. To further elaborate my argument, I consider Stephen’s famous
epiphany in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
as well as scenes from “Araby” and “Eveline.” I also focus on passages
that have not been called epiphanic to show how new theories on the
reader’s understanding of literary texts, as discussed in cognitive
poetics, can
recast our definition of this well-known concept.
He Do the Policeman’s Beard in Different Voices: AI and Digital Poetics
While print culture still awaits concrete proof of its notorious contention that, given sufficient time and motor skills, a set number of monkeys trapped together with an equal quantity of typewriters could potentially replicate Shakespeare’s complete works, the year 1984 does mark the fruition of one particularly auspicious myth in the history of modern book production. After 500 years of continuous advancement in “mechanical reproduction,” modern print technology finally discharged the last vestiges of human input, producing the first book composed entirely by machine. William Chamberlain’s “The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed” claims that, save for its introduction, “the writing . . . was all done by computer,” specifically by a program called “Ractor” able to generate grammatically consistent sentences with the help of a pre-coded grammar template. Although certainly readable in the sense that each sentence displayed a competent semantics, any public anxiety over the final redundancy of human authorship seems misplaced after a single glance at the actual narrative.
At all events my own essays and dissertations about love and its endless pain and
perpetual pleasure will be known and understood by all of you who read this and talk or
sing or chant about it to your worried friends or nervous enemies. Love is the question
and the subject of this essay. We will commence with a question: does steak love lettuce?
This question is implacably hard and inevitably difficult to answer. Here is a question:
does an electron love a proton, or does it love a neutron? Here is a question: does a man
love a woman or, to be specific and to be precise, does Bill love Diane? The interesting
and critical response to this question is: no! He is obsessed and infatuated with her. He
is loony and crazy about her. That is not the love of steak and lettuce, of electron and
proton and neutron. This dissertation will show that the love of a man and a woman is not
the love of steak and lettuce. Love is interesting to me and fascinating to you but it is
painful to Bill and Diane. That is love!
Chamberlain promoted the book, along with its originating software, as a prototype of Artificial Intelligence, that Holy Grail of the contemporary computer sciences; yet the template shows even more clearly the very limitations of language structure in the determination of complex cultural meanings and the modes of reasoning associated with them. As computer technology continues to advance in processor speeds and storage capacity, progress in linguistic analysis has developed accordingly. Twenty years on, the clumsy, repetitive grammar of Ractor has been superseded by better, highly resilient language generating programs able to simulate a more convincing authorship of actual texts. Many of Ractor’s specific restrictions in meaning derive inherently from its template-based approach to writing. In Chamberlain’s text, the template may have prevented random syntax and grammar errors, but has restrained content just as effectively. Newer, more recent “model” and “algorithmic” based generators allow for greater flexibility in sentence construction, thus producing more sophisticated narrative logic. Despite these advances, however, the primary semantic objectives within such technologies remain problematically dependent upon the conventional structures of verbal meaning. As a result, the very definition of Artificial Intelligence seems increasingly determined or set by the limits of language itself.
At the risk of also appearing somewhat template-derived, this paper will investigate current developments and dilemmas in digital writing with a unique focus on technology’s consistent drive to realise the logic of verbal meaning through its concrete signification, while disregarding other inferred or relational signs of cognition, such as those commonly represented in poetry.
As the relatively new field of study known as
cognitive poetics shows, verbal semantics, while the source of all
grammatical
and syntactic structure, does not control the construction of cultural
meaning. Similarly, investigations into Artificial Intelligence suggest
also how
language, understood here as a rationalised signifying system, does not
appear to be well suited to convey the variety of moods, intuitions and
diffuse emotions common to human experience. Verbal
communication, itself, regardless of how broadly or loosely attached it
might by to its concrete
signification, appears to represent only a fraction of normal cognitive
activity.
Specific experiments and critical work in digital poetics successfully
re-introduce a more comprehensive understanding of cognition, inclusive
of those
processes (for example, perception, memory, emotion, imagery, etc.)
that refute
simple, straightforward verbal renderings within language. While
relying on
several key concepts in cognitive poetics, this paper will also
demonstrate the
important origins of specific digital poetry practices in prior
modernist
experiments in typography and multimedia. As I hope to show, many of
the most
important developments in modernist and postmodernist poetics derive
from very
similar questions concerning language, representation and cultural
meaning
posed in the field of cognitive poetics.
Dead Metaphors of the Avant-Garde: the Case of Gisèle Prassinos
In the famous photograph taken by Man Ray, in a Paris apartment Gisèle Prassinos appears on the right-hand edge reading her automatic verses to the men who comprised the corps of Surrealism and who look in wonder and admiration at this virgin oracle of Truth. For André Breton and company, the surrealists who prized the perverse juxtaposition of images to create unexpected truths, the young girl speaking and writing poetry was the embodiment of the surreal: a female poet for them was an oxymoron, but the woman-child-seer was a well known cliché. They discouraged her from continuing her education and predicted she would write nothing more of value as she grew up.
Gisèle Prassinos, however, did not give up. She pursued her
quest for
literature because she did understood as well as question its images.
She did not
stumble onto poetry by accident. She knew her cognitive metaphors, the
milestones of literary comprehension, and indeed, she exploited them
adroitly in ways
that kept her, quite naturally, at the van of the avant-garde. She
became a
leader in the movement that is still seen as one of the major
experimental
periods in the advancement of consciousness about language and
literature of the
Twentieth Century.
In this paper, after a brief
summary of the scope and progression of Prassinos’ work, I propose to
examine the cognitive metaphors in “Venda and the Parasite” and “The
Psyche,” short stories from the
beginning and the end of her career that illustrate the stages of human
cognitive development in identity construction and in which the
progression of her career are already and still present. This analysis
will show how the avant-garde is deeply embedded
in such cognitive images as people
are
animals,
the mind is a body moving in
space, and the double
is the other of the self.
What is new in the avant-garde is not the images themselves, but their
inversion, their exploitation of a kind of photographic negativity that
affirms the life of the literary mind.
Dr. Claiborne Rice
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
email: crice at louisiana dot edu
White-breading S*PeRM**K*T?
A Cognitive Poetics Approach to Experimental Poetry
One persistent characteristic of much experimental poetry is that the more one reads it, the less experimental it seems. Like the earlier experimental poetry of Donne or Hopkins, giving a good contemporary experimental poem a single pass will not do it justice. But the more one reads it, trying out the puzzling words for their combinatoric possibilities, the more convinced one becomes that whatever meaning one has gleaned is indeed apparent and perhaps even clear.
This “naturalizing” of experimental poetry might be explained by sheer determination on the part of the reader, but the sense of apparentness that accompanies the experience of naturalizing an experimental poem suggests that this form of poetry can do what we want all poetry to do: draw us into new, unfamiliar thoughts or feelings, the unavoidably ethical but also, finally, the defining dimension of any poetic encounter.
In the final line of S*PeRM**K*T, Harryette Mullen observes that “Speed / readers skim the white space of this galaxy.” This sentence describes the type of reading that her poetry demands and invokes the ethical element inextricably tied up with that act of reading. An ethics is not something that a writer can necessarily encode into the reader position of a text; rather, the text, as it is usually said, rewards a particular approach. Quick reading, or white-bread writing that only demands a low level of attention, is yoked here to a particular racial politics, one that effaces difference, homogenizes experience while extracting the flavorful excess from it. “Redundancy is syntactical overkill”: in our low-fat supermarket world, “Clean meat” is “trimmed, not bloody”.
A cognitive approach to this kind of poetry is interested in how “naturalization” occurs. In this paper I will examine several characteristics of S*PeRM**K*T's language that inhibit conventional parsing just enough to stimulate naturalization:
References
Harryette Mullen, S*PeRM**K*T. Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1992.
Tsur, Reuven. “Rhyme and Cognitive Poetics.” <http://www.tau.ac.il/~tsurxx/RhymeGestalt_2.html>
The burgeoning interdisciplinary field of cognitive poetics
engages discoveries in cognitive science to elucidate works
of literature. This panel will investigate ways in which
cognitive science and the growing literature on cognitive
poetics can offer new perspectives in the discussion of
avant-garde or experimental writing practices.
Topics may include but are not limited to the construction
of self, memory processes, cognitive blending, attention,
cognitive evolution, the conceptualization of time,
conceptual metaphors, the cognitive unconscious, and the
emotions, in relation to any twentieth- or
twenty-first-century avant-garde writing.
Please send 350-word abstract by January 31, 2004, to Dr.
Camille Martin, City College, Loyola University, 6363 St.
Charles Ave., New Orleans, LA 70118, or email to
<cmartin at loyno dot edu>.
Camille Martin, Ph.D.
City College
Loyola University
6363 St. Charles Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70118