It is about how one thing relates to or connects with other things. Meaning 10 As he later surmises, [a]n embodied view of meaning looks for the origins and structures of meaning in the organic activities of embodied creatures in interaction with their changing environments. Meaning 11 The notion of embodiment assists us in examining language, since it gives an epistemological basis on which to ground more abstract meanings, thereby assuming that abstractions are constructed from, or motivated by, concrete, bodily perceptions and conceptions.
In an embodied mind, it is conceivable that the same neural system engaged in perception or in bodily movement plays a central role in conception. That is, it is possible that the very mechanisms responsible for perception, movements, and object manipulation could be responsible for conceptualization and reasoning. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy This assertion is essential to much research in cognitive linguistics and other language- focused fields in Cognitive Science, and holds that the environment-organism coupling is not just important but essential for most levels of conceptualization.
We cannot say what the embodied influence will look like, but we can see when embodied concepts motivate particular language and other communicative forms. In Cognitive Science, many aspects of language use are explained as motivated by embodiment for example, grammar, iconicity, metaphorical and metonymic mappings, polysemy, and so on and can play out on any level of usage from words to gestures to complex narratives.
These basal knowledge structures are commonly considered prelinguistic, since they are employed by children long before language development Zlatev. As such, it will reveal itself in the contours of our basic sensorimotor experience. Consequently, one way to begin to survey the range of image schemas is via a phenomenological description of the most basic structural features of all human bodily experience.
Image schemas are important for this study for two reasons. Thus, the embodied view of language, through image schemas, helps focus the critical reader on key aspects of conceptualizations at the heart of the poetic experience. Because of their clear link to proprioception, exteroception, and perception and arguably, at least in part to interoception , image schemas provide the level of cross-mappings between visual and verbal cues in the poems because they are expressed conceptually in either modality. Thus, image schemas facilitate or motivate the conceptual blending and mappings that occur at many levels within the visual poems and are thereby essential components of the poetic meaning.
While there is fairly strong consensus around the existence and pervasiveness of image schemas, the way in which they are expressed and understood is still debated. There are two views as to how they come to be experienced and interpreted and these spring from different cognitive theories of mind. A different possibility is that image schemas might be characterized as emergent properties of our ordinary conceptual systems and therefore are not explicitly represented in any specific part of the mind.
Simulation functions on many levels of human activity, from linguistic interpretation to mental imagery to fictive constructions. More importantly to concrete poetry, simulation is also essentially tied to the interpretation of perceived experiences i. In linguistics, Leonard Talmy has extensively documented cases and types of fictive motion. This occurs in cases when something that is experientially known as stationary is conceived of in terms of movement.
For example, the phrase the fence ran across the field attributes motion to a factively rooted entity. Talmy posits that these types of description reflect our embodied experience, in this case scanning across the field to encompass the fence. This experiential process is then reflected in our conceptualization and presentation of it in language through fictive motion.
That this fictive attribute does not confuse readers is due to simulation, wherein we accept the embodied aspects of scanning the fence, or whatever the requisite experientially-rooted cue is, to understand the words. In her study, a fence that is perceived to run rather than just be, such as in the phrase the fence is across the field, is considered longer.
Thus, simulation prompts a different meaning for the two sentences that are otherwise considered factively identical. In this way, the drawings betrayed the simulative process underneath conception. Importantly, Matlock also points out that drawings themselves also present fictive motion through various line usages and shape changes. In concrete poetry, this means that some lines, action verbs, and perceived movements of letters can help construct various interpretations through simulative language and visual processing. By connecting perception and conception, movement and meaning, and the simulative essence of fiction and fact, these notions offer a means of connecting the visual and verbal cues at the heart of the synthetic experience of concrete poetry.
The theory of mental spaces was developed by Gilles Fauconnier to help articulate how various meanings, in linguistic terms constructions, can arise out of simple re-combinations of words Mental Spaces. Fauconnier expands on this definition to emphasize that mental spaces contain elements and are structured by frames and cognitive models. Mental spaces are connected to long-term schematic knowledge such as the frame of walking along a path, and to long-term specific knowledge, such as a memory of the time you climbed Mount Rainier in The mental space that includes you, Mount Rainier, the year , and your climbing the mountain can be activated in many different ways and for many different purposes.
Also, importantly, mental spaces are online partial constructs, meaning that they are activated while engaging in the process of meaning-making i. As such, mental spaces are not fixed but are malleable within the communicative context, and in the end are only as complex as they need to be to suit the occasion i. These spaces make up the basic building blocks of language use and are highly flexible and generative. However, to be generative, mental spaces require a broader framework to help construct them. In the case of concrete poetry, where the prompts are so minimal for constructing meaning, the associated experiential and conceptual knowledge for various words and objects is crucial for constructing more complex mental spaces.
To understand this process—something keenly relevant to linguists interested in semantics and constructions—the cognitivist view of frames and framing is needed. However, for concrete poetry, where access to as much information as possible through very limited means is essential to understanding, where whole mental spaces can be invoked through very limited allusions, references, or associations either visually or verbally , the notion of framing is crucial and something Fauconnier and Turner spend more time discussing in Way, especially in relation to simplex networks [].
Fillmore first developed the understanding of frames that I will be using here and what Fauconnier means when he uses the term under the study of Frame Semantics. Thus, framing is any system of concepts related in such a way that to understand any one of them you have to understand the whole structure in which it fits; when one of the things in such a structure is introduced into a text, or into a conversation, all of the other things are automatically made available.
Since frames create connections between various smaller units within a larger system, the concept of framing ties closely to, and is at times coterminous with, metonymy since these smaller units of meaning invoke larger frames when they are used via frame evocation or frame metonymy [Fauconnier and Sweetser]: The nature of these cues can vary from image schematic connections that invoke a particular conceptual metaphor and its associated knowledge: More importantly, the visual cues come in the form of rich images, which can be propositional Johnson Body 23 , and, as mental imagery, can activate all related knowledge as well.
Thus, the schema activates a particular embodied gestalt which may be related to abstract, conceptual frames while rich imagery can activate particular frames of more concrete information. The poem proceeds to visually and verbally explore the attempts at this answer, assumedly provided by a doctor to a patient, using our knowledge of key roles within this frame.
Interestingly, this poem never says sick while always visually and occasionally phonically alluding to the answer. Without the frame of medicinal knowledge, the angst of mis-diagnosis central to the poem would not be as pronounced or even recognizable. Thus, frame metonymy tied to one simple word creates a mental space that can be mapped onto the visual experience of the poem and allows for the construction of more complex meanings.
More broadly for concrete poems, imagistic information can function as easily as words to cue a frame by presenting a simple aspect that draws in related information. Thus, the image forces a richer mapping between the word which, interestingly, is always secondarily observed by readers of the poem 22 and the referent than would otherwise not occur if the word was, say, printed across the page. Furthermore, the image of water tied to the cursive script lends itself to a metaphorical reading of language as charting the surface of a dark abyss with unknown creatures, and so forth.
In either case, visually or verbally, frames are essential for interpreting the poem, and metonymy helps facilitate this process by evoking and highlighting this knowledge. Thus, this cognitive process is very frugal yet evocative in its use of prompts to construct meaning. Note that this poem originally appears on two separate pages, so it should be read as a single path, not two facing columns. Even the qualification of attempted to diagnoses in the title of the previously mentioned poem forces a change in the mental space of diagnoses, highlighting particular aspects of its associated frame.
The finality of a diagnosis is rejected by the fact that by attempting diagnosis the physician has yet to find an answer for the sickness. It should be noted that the PATH schema is seen in two key ways in this poem. First, the PATH schema is employed in the notions of both attempted and diagnoses as linear concepts.
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The attempt places the subject in process, with an assumed goal ahead. These image-schematic cues prompt further meaning construction, but to explain it, we require a framework from cognitive linguistics, Conceptual Integration Theory also called blending , which allows us to compile these various cues into a meaningful whole. These two or more input spaces project relevant information into the blended space which produces an emergent structure. This structure can then project back into the original input spaces to offer insight, or it can then contribute to a larger constructed meaning in a text.
This model dictates that the two inputs contribute salient information to the blend, but they are not wholly subsumed in it.
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This new mental space can be the final product of a blend, or it can go on to be blended, extended, compressed, altered or negated as the context dictates be it in conversation, a novelic structure, etc. However, the questions of which cues construct which mental space, whether there are multiple blends that contribute to the overall meaning, and how best to relate the visual and verbal cues, are still somewhat vague.
Arguably, this could be seen as the primary blend that constrains the mappings and emergent meanings of subsequent blends. If the present model of blending is followed, then non-words would be mapped to non-words, which clearly yields nothing more in terms of emergent meanings. The list requires a different approach to the blend, since it must blend the pseudo-linguistic and the visual information together to construct meaning, rather than focusing primarily on the linguistic information.
In other words, we have slipped into an iconic reading of the poem, a space where visual form and linguistic meaning interweave. While imagic iconicity can occur without input from a blended space through structural or mimetic mappings to the inputs, diagrammatic iconicity relies on metaphorical constructions within the emergent structure to exist. These observations illustrate the salience of iconicity in meaning construction, as a doorway from simplicity into complexity. Moreover, this division is particularly problematic for dealing with concrete poetry, since in this genre form and meaning are often difficult dare I say near impossible to fully excise from each other.
Here, the letters look otherwise than they seem to look.
Thus, meaning and form are interwoven in the concrete poem through the allegorical treatment of the materiality of language. Its tone, its tempo, its logical structure, its physical size, all determine the possibilities of its typographic form. Thus, typography constructs, interprets, and illustrates meanings. To ignore this is to ignore the importance of studies of media ecology, aesthetics, materiality, and so on, which seek to acknowledge the complex interplay between images and language.
Recognizing this interplay, W. Mitchell proposes the need or push for a pictorial turn away from the linguistic turn discussed by Richard Rorty. Underneath this argument is the assumption that pictures—forms—communicate, thereby disrupting the lingua-centric definition of meaning and, by extension, disrupting the traditional model dating back to Plato of iconicity as mimesis.
It is here that a cognitive poetic perspective can offer a way of reconciling image and text in the critical discourse, through an engagement with iconicity through the key assumptions of embodiment. In light of this tradition in research into iconicity, it is easy to see how Masako Hiraga maintains the form-meaning dualism in her analysis, but it indicates a need for adjustment of her framework. While her framework offers a clear picture of aspects of iconicity, it ignores the understanding that image-schematic concepts construct meanings independent of linguistic input via embodied perceptions.
In this way Hiraga maintains a lingua-centric view of meaning like other theorists have when dealing with concrete poetry, as I discuss in Chapter 1 , without nurturing the new cognitive linguistic information that dispels this myth. I have argued that separating form from meaning disrupts the embodied, holistic model by ignoring the meaningfulness of other perceptual cues and the online, simulative process that reading and viewing employs.
Iconicity, therefore, must be redefined with the understanding that visual and verbal forms both communicate and blend during the online process of reading a poem and are, thereby, influential in the construction of mental spaces. Iconicity is a mapping between two languages, formal and linguistic. As such it does not have to be unidirectional, since iconicity and the blending model both allow for constructive fluidity. In this diagram, a cognitive linguist would quickly recognize the image-schematic information in many of the categories.
For imagic iconicity they offer the various modes of linguistic exchange: Since every entry in their diagram reflects an image-schematic basis, it can be concluded that image schemas are important in defining iconicity, and I would posit, for producing iconic mappings in the first place. Because many linguistic expressions and visual cues both have image-schematic conceptual aspects, I suggest that it is this common, embodied variable that facilitates mappings between these two languages. It is reasonable to assume that in this sense image schemas, due to their embodied pervasiveness in the simulating processes of online meaning construction, allow for us to seamlessly correlate these two modes of communication into one whole, the concrete poem.
Furthermore, imagic iconicity can be seen in the cross-mappings still between visual and verbal inputs, but they are mutually constitutive, rather than governed solely by language. Visual poetry shows that iconicity is more extensive, infusive, and generative than originally thought. Iconicity, within the cognitive understanding of perception and conception, facilitates a more comprehensive and comprehensible critical engagement with this poetic genre. Moreover, with the blending model one can acknowledge the metaphorical extensions largely a product of iconic hybridity or fluidity within the poems as well.
Lakoff and Johnson note that one researcher estimates that this metaphor makes up 70 percent of descriptions of language Metaphors Metaphors like this, as I will show later, become reified in iconic ways in visual poetry and are essential in manifesting their meanings through visual and verbal cues. Furthermore, the connections between iconicity and metaphor can integrate into a broader blending network via frames, blends within the inputs, metaphorical entailments, and so on. It would seem that this model can side- step the theoretical shortfalls of previous methodologies, which led Johanna Drucker to despair that there is no theoretical framework available that could deal properly with this type of poetry As will be shown, using this cognitive poetic model as the basis for an interpretive methodology that incorporates the embodied mind into readings of texts allows for a more holistic engagement with the vast variety of visual poetry available, and is none-the-less compatible with aspects of many of the previous models but qualify or constrain their assertions in particular ways.
In this letter, Nichol notes how his experiments with sound, comic strip drawings and frames, the geography of the page and language, visual vocabulary, single letter signs, and so on, all contribute to his various writings, including The Martyrology, by sensitizing him to sound and the page. This comment reaffirms W. The individual focuses relate partially to the temporality of the scholars themselves in relation to the history of bpNichol and visual poetry nationally and internationally and partially to the theoretical models that were in vogue when they were writing, as would be expected.
These different approaches influence interpretations of the poems, largely by framing them in specific ways through assumptions about language and history. In a sense, the death of the author, quite literally in , resurrected him in the scholarly works through the integration of personal longing and biographical anecdotes into the readings of the texts to which the author is supposedly dead, if we accept Barthes. In this way, the critics have bought into a nostalgic and self-affirming rather than a critical view of the texts themselves. Furthermore, I seek to illustrate a framework for looking carefully at textual expressions of this movement, thereby positing a consistent space to enact this broader conceptual and perceptual comparative criticism.
This critical bifurcation illustrates a tension between the theory and the poetry, where the poetry, as experienced, prompts a different view of language, even if the theory of the time cannot accommodate it.
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In this light, I will briefly discuss the post-structuralist, Lacanian, and postmodern approaches to and conclusions about visual poetry, showing how a theory of embodiment, rather than theory that fetishizes the symbol, reflects and explores better the experience of the reader. However, his work steps quickly away from the meanings being constructed in the poems into theoretical and philosophical connections that represent the poetics behind the poetry.
While this may seem nit-picky, it is important for clarifying the complex cognitive work at play in concrete poetry. Henderson falls into the common trap of the unmotivated, arbitrary sign of objectivist semiotics, which ignores the motivated layering of meanings tied to form through iconicity. Here, letters become hollow because they no longer tie to symbolic constructions and thereby lack any meaning.
However, this reading sidesteps the overt materiality of these works, thus ignoring meanings prompted by the forms themselves. Rather, his focus on the materiality of letters as objects rather than conceptions moves to a view of signification that is not limited to symbolic conception but focuses on the perceptual and experiential aspects of language in typographical, spatial, and affective ways tied to their form. The alphabets that Jaeger discusses are complex designs often appealing to a visual balance, linking, and radiance not possible with the original forms of the letters.
Likewise, they focus on the multiplicity or excess of lettristic presentation, metonymically invoking the many uses for each letter. The research reveals experiences and thoughts largely congruent with a cognitive poetic reading of language, perception, and meaning, but which could be further refined using the cognitive information. This is a common problem throughout his analysis. Clearly there is a confusing crisis of definition around meaning revealed throughout this work.
What I want to emphasize at this point is that all of these approaches attempt to articulate how meaning in a broader sense than just language, usually is constructed in various ways throughout the texts. The conclusions, though somewhat disparate, confirm a shift towards an embodied perspective, emphasizing a broader view of how meaning is constructed. While these views seem uncompromisingly disparate, the scholars that derived them did so from assessments of various statements and poems by Nichol, as all good scholars do.
I would argue that these central views around which other, more inconsistent statements revolve, indicates a more intuitive rather than theoretically rigorous engagement with language and poetry. As I will highlight, these perspectives also reveal a strong sense of embodiment, especially in their connection to materiality and visuality. I know them all well. From the start to the close. So, on beyond Zebra! So, on beyond Z!
This is seen in his establishment and engagement with small presses discussed earlier , his mailing out of poems to anyone who wanted them, the occasional passing out of free copies of his magazines on street corners, the mentoring and teaching of other writers at York University, and importantly his work with Therafields, as a lay-therapist McCaffery Interview. Meanwhile 18 Here, early on in his career, Nichol already asserts a sense of communication in line with the cognitive poetic definition of meaning, which occurs through a broader range of communicative forms than just language.
The central interest of the poet is to draw readers on through a multiplicity of experiences and meanings, shifting the basis of communication under their feet in the process. David Introduction , thereby drawing the reader into or through generative states of mind about language and meaning. Here we can feel the undercurrent of embodied cognition at work. McCaffery notes that Nichol was aware of their work Interview 87 , and in fact Nichol had introduced him to other discussions of proprioception as well, especially in relation to a writing and movement therapy program Likewise, his analysis of the book and page evoke the image schematic, visually motivated cues, of containers, paths, proximity, and orientations.
Arguably, this is caused through a deeper flow of meaning below the levels of propositionality through image-schematic mappings, and so on , constructing a sense of connection and motivation in the midst of apparent linguistic chaos. By shifting to a system of signification that starts below language, at the level of confluence between perception and conception, we can articulate more fully the mappings that connect some of the disparate interests and how meaning emerges out of them.
One central trope that is regularly referred to in many recent critical views is the paragram, and it serves as a clear connection point with the cognitive poetic model as well. A good example of paragrammatic play, and one McCaffery employs in his description, comes from The Martyrology: However, the paragrammatic aspect is enacted by the extension through another layer of imagic iconicity this time aural , which maps to the letters of the alphabet, l, m, and n.
The visual parallelism between the two sections reinforces this iconically as well. By simulating these structural and conceptual linkages, the natural and linguistic worlds draw together on the page and in the mind. True to form, the next passage continues to somersault through paragrammatic playfulness, moving visually and linguistically from the prompts to another series of meanings: And so the paragrammatic play continues, oscillating between world and letters, the sacred and the profane.
While McCaffery implies incredulity through his italics at this apparent distortion and meaning production, from the cognitive poetic view, these mappings are easily motivated through perception and conception in the creative and generative framework of blending and frame evocation and shifting, simulating to produce meaning through iconicity and metaphor.
Arguably, these conclusions while poetically written mis-represent the paragrammatic experience shown here, since we do see a visual grounding of meaning through iconic and frame mappings and motivated constraint on their decidability within this space. While arguably this process through the prevalence of iconicity is imagistic, just in a schematic manner, the point remains: In this sense, Nichol moves through language as a means of researching the possible permutations and connections motivated by it.
Here the multiplicity of meaning is constructed in conceptual and perceptual leaps and bounds, but is still traceable and motivated. In reading this poem the reader responds to the visual and verbal rhythms of the words the drum and cycles through the phrase the wheel , thereby visually and phonically performing the poem while developing different letter orders that correspond to the original drum and wheel.
This is an exercise in imagic and diagrammatic iconicity, constrained yet generative. More importantly, the collaborative air to the poems brings the reader into the writing process. With sensuality and cognition in mind, I want to turn briefly to the oft forgotten artistic contemporaries and anthologists of bpNichol, who stand more on the periphery of the critical commentary but seem in many ways to have the clearest intuitions. An emphasis on sensuality and blending of broader experiences of meaning, although not often taken seriously it seems within the criticism, is pervasive in the discourse surrounding concrete and visual poetry.
Likewise, the visual poet Judith Copithorne notes that Poem-drawings are an attempt to fuse visual and verbal perceptions. The eye sees, the ear hears, movement is felt kinesthetically throughout the body and all these sensations are perceived in heart, belly and brain. The aims are the same as in other forms of literature and art: Indeed artists deal in experiences, not directly with ideas or feelings, but experiences out of which ideas and feelings emerge.
So experience these poems! Perhaps this is wishful thinking on my part, but I see an intuition of embodiment in all of this. The attempt to discern the processes necessary to emerge at a comprehensive or comprehensible meaning of the texts—and, thus, the attempt to represent somewhat authentically the experience of the reader1—reveals the complexity at the heart of these seemingly simplistic poems.
This approach illustrates two things. Firstly, it shows that his earlier work, while often simpler, still engaged similar problems around meaning and materiality and employed similar techniques that he refined over the years. I will discuss both typewriter and handwritten poems, abstract and representational poems, lettristic and comic poems.
These diverse styles each offer different challenges and insights, but are all accessible through this framework. This grid, while seeming mechanistic and anaesthetic, nonetheless allows for artistic embellishments that construct richer meanings. This frame knowledge begins us down a path of meaning construction, since it primes us to engage the sounds, patterns, and affective registers of the letters and words of the poem in particular associative ways. These two inputs blend to produce the emergent structure of a more specific understanding progression.
However, there is clearly more going on here. The visual aspects of the poem f develop our experience of the blues. The schematic image produced in the geometric presentation of the words, in part prompted by the frame of blues music, appears as a guitar, the central instrument of that musical form. This reinforces and highlights the music frame.
Alan Beale's Core Vocabulary Compiled from 3 Small ESL Dictionaries (21877 Words)
These visual cues located specifically in t material space of the page blend with the linguistic prompts construct diagrammatic iconicity through their metaphorical connections to the content of the poem provided by the first frame- word blend. The analysis of this poem is incomplete without an examination of the letters that mirro love and evil together. King bemoaning his story while erhaps even glimpsing his guitar. T imagic iconicity through sound i. Thus, the visually derived aural cues blend with the specific musical and affective emergent structures of the frame, language and schematic perceptions, to construct a complex experiential gestalt and one which arguably employs paragrammatic methods to do so.
In this poem, we move through the careful enactment of a blues song, visually translate evolving from ecstasy to agony. By blending the connections of sounds, words, and visual aspects through iconic, metaphoric, metonymic, and image-schematic mappings some of which are limited by the grid , we simulate within the frame of blues music the complexity and balance of those compositions. In the end it p 4. A Book of Remembrances.
All thirty-two allegories employ comic-derived artistic styles to comment on language and meaning. Also, this series has been widely regarded in the criticism as visual poetry rath comics. What kind of reality do they represent? Allegorically, the letters of the alphabet stand for the Ten Commandments.
But the drawing gives another po view. In the drawing, the central image of Captain Poetry is melting into a pot, just as the Israelites melted their gold to produce the Golden Calf. On the perimeter, another Captain Po it. Thus, structural and ideational mappings between two subjects construct different emergent meanings. With this in mind, I will look at the possible mappings that offer allegorical interpretations and explain how the cognitive poetic vocabulary can help clarify the meanings this poem motivates.
These lines create an active connection between the Captain and the paper while also prompting the conceptual frame of writing and the associated actions, mediums and markings. This active mapping prompts t beginning of the allegorical reading, by blending the figure with his page through the active process of writing, left to right, top to bottom.
Likewise, in this emergent space, writing is fully and literally embodied, through the simulated material blending with its author. This highlights the actions within the writing frame and the notion that one places something of oneself on the page while writing, in effect fulfilling the goal of the schema of writing but also constructing an allegori b With this writing-author emergent structure in mind, we move to examine the two frames that sit behind him using the notion of the frame from comics as a perspectival space ra the cognitive one as conceptual domain.
This shift in focus is prompted by iconic and metonymic mappings between the handwriting of the primary blend and the alphabet of the f frame through form miming form and action invoking associated forms. However, once we emerge in the first frame the imagic iconicity prompted by the identical shape and opposing position in another blend, thus, extending the PATH yet further. The smiling face of the first figure is replicated in this frame, highlighting once again the role of the writer which was slowly lost on the path through the alphabet.
However, the question asks us to reconceptualize th figure, who until now seemed comfortable simply embodying language. To an question, we need to look carefully at what the poem has constructed so far. Through iconic and metonymic mappings and fictive motion we have shifted along a path from body to handwriting to abstracted alphabet and back to the body, going almost f circle.
The frames then act as containers for concepts and events in this process. Schematically put, we move from subject1 to object1 writing to object1o s 1o. The cyclic path that blends author and writing draws us through abstraction back t author. Interestingly, the author moves, via fictive motion, through letters to a new perspective, since he is now engaged in a richer environment or has stepped back for a better view. In simulating this movement, through the various fictive and iconic moveme through abstraction to a richer space.
In this poem, Nichol posits a view of language that seeks to transcend the boundaries imposed upon it by tracing its interaction with broader experiences, not simply to destroy it. Language is always present in the first three panels, not as a limitation bu as a prompt for the process of discovery of new meanings and perspectives.
Visual or concrete poetry makes up only about a third of the texts, but many of the other poems also employ dramatic material practices, much like the paragrammatic process I discussed in the previous chapter. The following untitled poem is one that I have returned to numerous times over the years. It was through a cognitive analysis that was ab lo Figure 4. Arguably, we can start with the words as the central prompts for a relational system, although the visual linkages are not far from vie inherently meaningful as words.
The pond presents the first possible relational frame. This word prompts a location its associated things, actions, and objects. The glop invokes the sound of movement into a liquid, but also qualifies the word pond. The pond frame blends with the curved lines to prompt an emergent structure of the cross-section of a pond, thereby highlighting the location as the edge rather than middle. Importantly, the schematic view prompts us to view the words as objects an elaboration of the CONDUIT metaphor , whereby the orientation of the words themselves reflects specific aspects o the pond too.
Thus, in blending the initial frame blend with the visual cues, the poem begins to take on more specific, locational features.
However, the lines, which I have focused on developing a specific location through the schematic blend also indicate fictive motion, prompting another blend. Again, the iconic mappings prompt the words as objects. This specific connection cues us to see the individual letters as constructive, not just the words themselves, since the line directs our attention to specific ones in specific places. Th blend highlights the agent of motion and instigator of sound within the pond frame. However, the emergent structure of the frog causes us to re-assess the inputs and emergent structures that constructed it, prompting yet another blend.
Here we have the pond, location, action, letters and words as objects, and the newly born frog. In the blend we simulate the movements of the frog, through which we reinterpret the drawn lines again, this time as factive rather than fictive motion. In the end, through interpreting and simulating key prompts in this poem, we have developed a very specific scene in our minds. Without o the frog would remain glimpsed but ill-conceived. The iconic, metaphoric, and metonymic aspects of both form and content prompt complexity where simplicity lay.
His humanistic drive to open up entrances and exits within the poem finds expression here. The entrances are found in letters, words images and the rich perceptual and conceptual content they bring; the exits are far more comple than initially imagined. Even the simplest poem deserves contemplation rather than dismissal, since, as we now know under the guise of a word comes a textured and intelligent, meaningful experience.
The cognitive poetic method of interpretation I have demonstrated here helps locate the spaces of generative poetic action in these simple texts by tracing the conceptual and perceptual mappings that construct meaning. It is hoped that it has shown them to be anything but banal. In this regard they move beyond the linguistic drive for propositional statements and truths towards a richer experiential knowing. Cognitive Poetics and Other Multimodalities: Material and Theoretical Extensions While the previous chapters have focused on applying cognitive poetics to the visual poetry of bpNichol, there are clearly broader applications for this multimodal framework.
In this chapter I will briefly address specific scholastic spaces that can benefit from an embodied understanding of meaning and the frameworks that construct it. This methodology can inform theoretical, descriptive, and investigative aspects of many fields, but I will focus primarily on directly related mediums and their cultural spaces. Thus, comics are the sequential presentation of perspectival frames, in which texts and images not always but often inform each other and which subsequently combine. This involves the conceptual blending of visual and verbal cues through iconic, metaphoric and metonymic mappings once again.
Scott McCloud notes how the content both imagistic and pictorial in neighboring frames blend to construct a sense of action, time, scene, subject, and aspect figure and ground shifting For example, in the purely pictorial presentation of a moment Figure 5. This is just one simple example of how the sequential nature of comics constructs narratives with rich perceptual and affective content.
However, the sequential form of the comic medium can also form more complex narrative structures, through which the artist and author adjusts the medium to complicate the story. The blending of textual and pictorial cues within the frame and between frames sequentially construct the main thrust of the narrative, but the iconic mappings construct a meta-narrative that illuminates key aspects of the story.
With the turn to the present-day narrative, the father is sitting in an authoritative position over the son, shaking his finger at him again centrally located and pointing at an ash he dropped on the rug. Another example from Maus which I will articulate in more detail builds from the stories dominant imagistic cat and mouse metaphor for the Nazis and Jews, respectively.
For example, in Figure 5. We can see then through this cognitive analysis the potential to articulate both the commonalities within comics as a communicative medium and the differences between sub-genres. Thus, while the next frame has a camer with his fame and which later explains his desperate reactions to the media mob that engulfs him. It further shows how this methodology for close reading can account for visual and verbal iconic, metaphoric, and metonymic mappings throughout a more clearly defined media of image-text interaction, but which also incorporates more subtle image-image and text-text blending as w Also, in these cases it is interesting to compare the differences between the crisp and colorful mainstream presentation in Watchmen, and the rough, black and white, underground comic presentation in Maus.
These texts again employ very similar blending practices as comics between images and texts and frame to frame, but in simpler ways by connecting the words with the images more directly. In this form, the use of language and images to blend and prompt simulation of actions and engagement with objects is what makes these texts so important to literacy.
However, her question is somewhat misdirected. Thus, the logo acts as a metonym for a larger capitalist and ideological venture. Thus, while a concrete poet made the logo the link largely ends there, and, more importantly, the poems live on. Such is the case with simplistic logos; however, when one opens up the discussion of more complex advertising ventures the cognitive links with visual poetry become more obvious. Thus, the cognitive poetic model can explain the emergent structures of various styles of advertising more easily, without having to rely on categorical statements, by linking the different tropes together into a synthetic and simulated meaning.
The simulative aspect of cognition is also of particular interest in the case of advertising, since advertisers want to prompt people into consumer action. By presenting advertisements that prompt the simulation of positive conceptual and physical action, the company potentially generates an active and positive affinity with that product.
For example, Forceville discusses a Dutch advertisement for Dove hair cream Figure 5. The mapped feature is the notion of spoiling oneself with luxury food. The placement of the lid in the air, the container at an unnatural angle ie. These schemas mark the container, lid, and spoon all as active or moving. The schematic content prompts the viewer to simulate the experientially required actions of moving the lid down out of the way, indulging in scooping the ice cream, and continuing the process of picking up the jar. This advertisement, furthermore, through the assumed affective response of enjoyment tied to picking up and eating ice cream maps that same affective cue to the picking up and using of the product.
This is a smart advertisement, subtly and simply constructed. While most consumers may make it to the caption which reinforces the visual blend of the ad, the metaphorical and simulative work has already transpired, setting up a possible and pleasant consumer experience. Firstly, it illustrates how a cognitive poetic model provides a more fluid, less terminologically cumbersome, and more productive interpretative framework.
While often viewed as anarchistic and nihilistic, this movement attempts to counteract the persuasion of advertising by altering its material against itself, which I would argue is remarkably positivist. The material playfulness of culture jamming places its sensibilities quite close to that of the visual poets, as it recognizes the richly evocative and communicative aspects of lines, images, and texts.
The work of this movement looks very similar to advertising by necessity, since it superimposes or alters various cues in commonly recognized advertising ventures to shift the dominant frames employed by them to construct a counter-argument. Normally these ads have a very fit man posing in his underwear, looking somewhat indifferently out of the page with often a slightly suggestive pose. The title of obsession prompts its associated frame with the roles of the obsessor and the thing obsessed over. By blending the term and frame with the image the ad presents someone who is the focus of sexual desire since he is not obsessively viewing anything, taking on the role of the thing obsessed over.
However, through the desire to be obsessed over, the ad confers onto the reader the role of the obsessor as well as the desire to be obsessed over. Very simply, by simulating these gazes tied to the product, the viewer is in essence told that they need this cologne to become obsessed over. On the other hand, the spoof ad, which we recognize as such because of strong parallels imagic iconicity between words, font choices and sizes, figures and poses, and other material cues, presents a similar man but who is looking down the front of his underwear.
Through this simple shifting of the disinterested, un-obsessed gaze towards himself, the spoof advertisement adjusts the entire original blend. While the humor of this advertisement is certainly important, the underlying refutation of the capitalist drive of advertisements is its central conceptual action, and is principally driven through metonymic and iconic connections through form to the a particular advertisement or campaign. As such, it constructs self-referential and critical blends out of pre-existing, socially salient conceptual and perceptual frameworks.
Importantly, this example also extends the discussion into a more actively social space, shifting the focus out of textual analysis to social interactions and cultural analysis although, obviously, this level is present in the textual analysis as well in the guise of evoked frames. Culture jamming requires sensitivity to broader cultural spaces and information technologies: Hilariously, the sign fooled both other graffiti artists and the federal agents across the street Through this work which blends official typography and diction with a counter-discourse, Banksy offers a subtle critique of assumptions of governmental control of public spaces and who gets to share what where.
By evoking the frames of various societal assumptions of government, decorum, public spaces, etc , Banksy creates a dialogic space out of a strictly controlled medium. Likewise, the culture jamming promoted by Adbusters may at first appear self-aggrandizing since it circulates the culture jamming ideals only on the page, producing arm-chair jammers; however, it often shifts the focus from reading to action through directions to cut out pages and post them in public spaces as well thereby at the very least prompting mental simulation of the actions.
Through this encouragement of active social engagement, the social sphere becomes a space of textual competition between the advertisers and other major sources of cultural imagery, including governments and the culture jammers and graffiti artists, among many other interested parties.
On the streets a conceptual and perceptual war is waging: A cognitive model of meaning can articulate more clearly the conceptual and perceptual armaments of the warring factions, be they texts, images, colors, or spaces, and who is caught in the crossfire.
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Entering the Electronic Age While there are many other prevalent multimodal texts,9 I want to shift the focus more broadly. Even in name alone this approach prompts an embodied view of people in their environment. The cognitive poetic model I have outlined views embodiment in its most natural sensuousness—bodies, objects, things, forces, etc. However, now we need to move out of the idealized evolutionary savannah of proprioceptive experiences into the electronic, technological age we live in, where these bodies are far more complexly engaged with.
The cognitive view of embodiment is not outdone here, but extended, by articulating the aspects of the rich techno-informational environment which motivate meanings. Frank Zingrone, a media ecologist, argues that all mediums and information are manifest within a tension between simplicity and complexity, what he calls a state of symplexity.
He suggests that our minds work to take disparate information and assimilate and simplify it in meaningful ways: Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources.
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