Margaret H . Freeman - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Books by Margaret H . Freeman

The Jones Manuscript: A Dickinson Forgery, 2021

An account of how a cognitive approach detected forgery of a Dickinson poem when experts couldn't.

Please note that my book, The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition. was released two days... more Please note that my book, The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition.
was released two days before OUP's Distribution Warehouse was closed temporarily due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It is not certain when distribution of print copies will resume. However, e-book publication and Oxford Scholarship Online are alternative means where the book can be purchased. Details of the book can be found on the OUP website at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-poem-as-icon-9780190080419?cc=us&lang=en&.

The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition, 2020

Poetry is the most complex and intricate of human language used across all languages and cultures... more Poetry is the most complex and intricate of human language used across all languages and cultures. Its relation to the worlds of human experience has perplexed writers and readers for centuries, as has the question of evaluation and judgment: what makes a poem "work" and endure.

The Poem as Icon focuses on the art of poetry to explore its nature and function: not interpretation but experience; not what poetry means but what it does. Using both historic and contemporary approaches of embodied cognition from various disciplines, Margaret Freeman argues that a poem's success lies in its ability to become an icon of the felt "being" of reality.

Freeman explains how the features of semblance, metaphor, schema, and affect work to make a poem an icon, with detailed examples from various poets. By analyzing the ways poetry provides insights into the workings of human cognition, Freeman claims that taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts are simply products of the aesthetic faculty, and not the aesthetic faculty itself. The aesthetic faculty, she argues, should be understood as the science of human perception, and therefore constitutive of the cognitive processes of attention, imagination, memory, discrimination, expertise, and judgment.

Drafts by Margaret H . Freeman

An account of how a cognitive approach detected the forgery of a Dickinson poem when experts didn't.

An account of how a cognitive approach detected forgery of a Dickinson poem when experts couldn't.

Papers by Margaret H . Freeman

The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics

The Emily Dickinson Journal

The Poem as Icon

The self is more than we consciously know. Neural and bodily processes of sensory experience, mot... more The self is more than we consciously know. Neural and bodily processes of sensory experience, motor function, and emotive forces bind together to create the unity that is both the preconscious and conscious self. These sensate elements are governed by embodied schemata, a level of organization that binds subliminal sensory-motor-emotive processes with conceptual awareness in correlation with the worlds of our experience. Schemata internally structure metaphor by isomorphically creating correlations between its domains. The chapter first discusses the difference between the role of schemata that operate in everyday activities and behaviors and their role in the poetic arts. It shows how schemata bind the sensate elements of cognitive metaphoring in creating a poem as icon by revisiting Sylvia Plath’s poem discussed in the previous chapter, and two further poems by Li Bai and Elizabeth Bishop. The chapter ends by showing how schemata define the different poetics of Emily Dickinson and...

The Poem as Icon

Metaphor is dangerous. The act of metaphoring—mapping between unlike domains—has iconic power, po... more Metaphor is dangerous. The act of metaphoring—mapping between unlike domains—has iconic power, power to transform our conventional ways of seeing and, by so doing, to change or modulate our minds and our behavior. First, the chapter lays the groundwork for a cognitively oriented view of metaphor by discussing two contrasting views of what happens when one either takes metaphor literally or sees it as a model of reality. It then explores the ways in which good metaphor has been traditionally understood in literary criticism in order to suggest a more interconnected approach between ourselves and the worlds of our experience. The chapter compares the present view of metaphorical function in structuring a poem as icon with two Peircean-influenced approaches, and introduces hierarchic metaphoric processing at the linguistic, conceptual, and sensory-emotive levels. Finally, the chapter builds on the model of blending to explain how metaphoring functions in the creation of a poetic icon.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 1954

An article prepared at the request of Kang Yanbin for the Jinan Journal of Foreign Languages.

MESSENGER of Kyiv National Linguistic University. Series Philology

Introduction. In linguocognitive perspective the paper highlights the ways of integrating the met... more Introduction. In linguocognitive perspective the paper highlights the ways of integrating the methods of studying the linguistic phenomena from philosophy of science and the philosophy of arts points of view. The author tries to rethink the relation between aesthetics and the sciences, to explore the underlying nature of aesthetics arising from sensate cognition to discover whether or not it—and how, if it does—coincides, correlates, or complements the underlying nature of scientific theories and methodologies. Purpose. The paper focuses not on aesthetic experience only, in its modern, reductive sense of taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts, but on the role of sensate cognition underlying all human cognitive processing including scientific investigation and most manifested in artistic activity. Methods. The paper presents the beginnings of a theory that reconstructs aesthetics as the foundational basis for all human experience, knowledge, and creative activity. It suggests a more...

The Poem as Icon

This introduction prepares the groundwork for explaining how a poem may become an icon. Drawing f... more This introduction prepares the groundwork for explaining how a poem may become an icon. Drawing from insights in cognitive science, it discusses the nature of sensate cognition and introduces a theory of aesthetic cognition that places poetic cognition as a subcategory within its interdisciplinary field. The chapter begins with the central question of poetic cognition: how poetry achieves the felt experience of the essential being of reality that poets and writers throughout the centuries have claimed for their art. “Being” is understood as both the “life force” of organic systems and the “essence” of what makes a rock a rock. In this sense, particular creations of human cognitive activity may become icons of the being of reality. As a preliminary, the chapter briefly discusses the nature of the cognitive self, the roles of science and aesthetics, and the need to establish appropriate terminology for the interdisciplinary fields concerned in an aesthetics of cognition.

Modern Language Review, 2020

With the onset of the cognitive revolution in the mid twentieth century, Dan Sperber and Dierdre ... more With the onset of the cognitive revolution in the mid twentieth century, Dan Sperber and Dierdre Wilson developed relevance as a theoretical concept to argue that human linguistic communication is always context-sensitive and inferential, as distinct from the code-decoding interpretative mode of previous theories. As relevance theory has evolved since then, this volume takes up the question of how far and how successfully it can account for interpreting literary language. An introductory chapter by both editors provides an excellent review of relevance theory, while the concluding chapters focus more specifically on the way the eight intervening essays reveal the advantages of using the theory to explore the non-propositional elements of literary language. ere is some indication in these essays that relevance theory is beginning to embrace the findings of other cognitive approaches in neuroscience, psychology, and phenomenology that explore the kinesic, sensory, emotive, and subliminal or preconscious processes of human cognition. Each contributor takes a slightly different approach. Elleke Boehmer focuses on the cognitive processes of siing propositions, inferences, and background knowledge activated by a Yeats poem. Raphael Lyne emphasizes the importance of multiple inferencing in the historical context of a poem by Robert Herrick. Kinesic analysis is Guillemette Bolens's focus, with passages from Don Quixote and Madame Bovary used to show how literary language enables readers to experience the embodied nature of the human mind. Neil Kenny explores the way one's beliefs can affect and be affected by literature in discussing Twain's character Injun Joe in e Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Kirsti Sellevold traces Edith Wharton's exploitation of the emotional significance of blushing in e House of Mirth. In studying the echoic nature of intertextual allusions in a Seamus Heaney poem, Wes Williams argues for poetic truth via inference of shared contexts through time as a common activity of human cognition. e focus of Kathryn Banks's study concerns sensorimotor qualities that allow meanings to emerge in Mary Oliver's poetry, while Timothy Chesters explores the way Emily Dickinson's apparently literal descriptions become metaphorical by inviting inferencing to determine their relevance. e main focus of relevance theory as applied to literature concerns the role of inference in determining selection strategies for meanings arising from the multiplicity of contexts in literary forms-linguistic, cultural, historical-as well as from a reader's belief system and from authorial intention. at is its strength. At the same time, however, much of the language used in relevance theory has different meanings from the same terms in other cognitive theories, such as blending, that seem imperfectly understood. e assumption that interpretation occurs through parallel online and conscious interpretative processes of inference, both explicit and implicit, in order to select the appropriate one on the basis of relevance is asserted without consideration that much pre-conscious kinesic, sensory, and emotive

The Poem as Icon

This chapter places poetic iconicity within the broader context of aesthetics. The history of aes... more This chapter places poetic iconicity within the broader context of aesthetics. The history of aesthetics has developed several diverse meanings over time and in different disciplines. The chapter therefore redefines the aesthetic faculty as basic to both the sciences and the arts. It involves purpose, intension, function, and value that leads to empathy and ethical judgment of human behavior and activity. Earlier chapters approached poetic iconicity mainly from the perspective of the poet’s motivations and intensions. This chapter shows how poetic iconicity can establish one means by which poetry can be aesthetically read and evaluated. After introducing what appear to be misreadings of a Matthew Arnold poem that do not take into account Arnold’s aesthetic principles as evidenced in it, the chapter shows that his poem “Dover Beach” is a meditation on the aesthetic faculty in creating a poem as an icon of the felt being of reality.

An icon always stands for something beyond itself. This chapter explores the various ass... more An icon always stands for something beyond itself. This chapter explores the various assumptions made by thinking of that relation in such terms as likeness, similarity, and representation that do not capture the nature of a poem as icon. Therefore the term <italic>semblance</italic> as "simulation" is chosen to avoid misconceptions that result in the separation of self from world. Semblance is the ontological underpinning of iconicity that relates it to the "felt life" of our epistemic reality. From a phenomenological perspective, the "being" of reality is in-visible, hidden within the precategorial realms of our preconscious sensory, motor, and emotive processes. The essence of being does not reside in a unified sense of one entity but in life in all its various manifestations. The ways in which poems create semblance are manifold and varied, as indicated in discussions of poems by Brendan Galvin, W. S. Merwin, and Wallace Stevens.

Icons mean different things to different people. This chapter describes how the term &lt... more Icons mean different things to different people. This chapter describes how the term <italic>icon</italic> is understood in semiotics, linguistics, religion, and popular discourse in order to establish a working definition for understanding how a poem can become an icon. Iconicity is the means whereby poetic features contribute to achieving a poem's status as an icon. The chapter then takes up two problematic issues in the question of "meaning." Making objects (nouns) out of actions (verbs) obscures the processes of minding that underlie aesthetic activity. Likewise, separating form from content obscures the integrated relation between "ceptions" (conceptions, perceptions, and proprioceptions) and structures. By replacing these assumptions from a cognitive science approach, the chapter prepares the groundwork for understanding the role of iconicity in the arts. After giving some examples of iconicity in literary critical approaches to poetry, it ends with a brief summary of the main features that constitute poetic iconicity.

Innovations in linguistics education, 1983

The Jones Manuscript: A Dickinson Forgery, 2021

An account of how a cognitive approach detected forgery of a Dickinson poem when experts couldn't.

The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition, 2020

An account of how a cognitive approach detected the forgery of a Dickinson poem when experts didn't.

An account of how a cognitive approach detected forgery of a Dickinson poem when experts couldn't.

The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics

The Emily Dickinson Journal

The Poem as Icon

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 1954

An article prepared at the request of Kang Yanbin for the Jinan Journal of Foreign Languages.

MESSENGER of Kyiv National Linguistic University. Series Philology

The Poem as Icon

Modern Language Review, 2020

The Poem as Icon

Innovations in linguistics education, 1983

The Poem as Icon

Schemata acquire affective value through force dynamics at the deepest level of cognition. Affect... more Schemata acquire affective value through force dynamics at the deepest level of cognition. Affect is a transitive activity between the self as agonist and an “other” as antagonist that arises from sensory, motor, or emotive factors. In poetry, affect results primarily from a poem’s sonic and structural prosody to create the impression or “illusion” of virtual life. The affect respondents feel isn’t something static “in” the poem but a dynamic response to the poet’s intensions and motivations. Missing a poem’s affective tone can lead to misreading its emotive import and misevaluating the poet’s intension, as the discussion shows in a poem by Thomas Hardy. It also shows how the force dynamics of the FEAR schema in a Wallace Stevens poem creates an icon of danger confronting the self’s homeostasis. The chapter ends by summarizing the aspects of affective schemata that can lead to a theory of a model of affect in poetry and life.

The Poem as Icon

Not all poetry achieves the status of becoming an icon, nor is it necessarily a poet’s intent. In... more Not all poetry achieves the status of becoming an icon, nor is it necessarily a poet’s intent. Inevitably, however, the question arises as to whether such iconicity indicates one way of evaluating poetry that lasts. In a case study of two poems on the same theme, I show how only one becomes an icon in my sense of the term. I then revisit the question of iconic motivation by briefly exploring our human propensity for finding aesthetic coherence between ourselves and the external world through our cognitive faculties of imagination and reason. Wallace Stevens’s poetics constitutes a revelation of his theory that the aim of poetry is to enact an iconic semblance of the felt but hidden reality of being, exemplified throughout his poetic corpus and culminating in his poem “The Rock.” The chapter concludes with a brief example of the transformative power of the icon for both poet and respondent.

This paper looks at how blending theory needs to develop in order to account for literary creativ... more This paper looks at how blending theory needs to develop in order to account for literary creativity and thus provide a more comprehensive picture of human cognition. Exploration of the emotional, formal, and aesthetic affects of a literary text suggests ways in which literary analysis may illuminate cognitive processes and contribute to the development of a theory of aesthetic emotion. I argue that the synthesis of material-medial-affect modes needs to be modeled in order to capture the nature of a literary text in achieving poetic iconicity, the semblance of felt life through forms symbolic of human feeling. The opportunity for poetic iconicity occurs when the structural schemas that trigger the blending of material-medial modes are metaphoric in nature and are motivated by the feelings of lived experience. Analysis of an Emily Dickinson poem shows how metaphorical schemas blend feeling, form, and functional perspectives on our embodied experience of reality to create such poetic ...