The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition (original) (raw)

The Aesthetics of Human Experience: Minding, Metaphor, and Icon in Poetic Expression

.. Special issue on Exchange Values: Poetics and Cognitive Science, ed. Mark Bruhn. Poetics Today 32.4: 717-752, 2011

This paper argues that the cognitive sciences need to incorporate aesthetic study of the arts into their methodologies to fully understand the nature of human cognitive processes, because the arts re ect insights into human experience that are unobtainable by the methodologies of the natural sciences. These insights di er from those acquired by scienti c exploration, because they arise not from the conceptual logic of reason but from the precategorial intuition of imagination. Aesthetics provides a methodology whereby we are able to understand how art enables us to experience emotions caused by sense impressions. This methodology lies at the heart of Giambattista Vico's Principi di scienza nuova (1725-44), which attempts to account for the way we live and participate in cultural, social, and civic communities. Vico's theory challenges certain Western philosophical presuppositions that still inform much of cognitive science, such as the relation of language to our experience of the natural world, the nature of subjective and objective representations, and the role of the arts in the evolutionary development of the human mind. In basing my approach to literature on Vico's, Susanne K. Langer's ( , 1967, and Maurice , 1968) theories, I argue that the language of literature is distinguished from conventional language use by its imaginative use of aesthetic patterns that make manifest the inherent character of the external world a we experience it. By introducing the concepts of minding, metaphor, and icon as structures of the imagination, I show how the language of poetic expression in Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" enables us to apprehend the ways we intuitively par-

Visual Iconicity in Poetry: Replacing the Notion of “Visual Poetry”

Orbis Litterarum, 2016

This article argues for the advantage of applying the analytical perspective of “visual iconicity in poetry,” rather than trying to delimit the problematic old category of “visual poetry,” which has been understood to be a type of poetry that deviates from normal poetry in and through its visual characteristics (for instance, poems looking like physical objects). However, all written poetry is obviously perceived by the eyes, and the notion of visuality has proven to be insufficient for accommodating the features of “visual poetry”; it is visual iconicity rather than simply visuality that must be investigated. Whereas visuality is a sensory category, iconicity is a semiotic category consisting of meaning created by way of resemblance. When these two categories are conflated in poetry studies, so that visuality is understood to be the same as or to automatically include iconicity, or when iconicity is not recognized as a decisive notion for understanding how meaning is created in visual (written) poetry, the result is confusing. I therefore argue that all media, including art forms, must be understood as being based on four media modalities (essential categories of media traits): the material modality, the sensorial modality, the spatiotemporal modality, and the semiotic modality. Media differ in one or more of these four modalities. Some are visual, others are auditory, some are spatial but static, others are spatiotemporal, some are primarily based on conventional signs, others are based on iconic signs, and so forth. Written poetry is generally based on conventional, verbal signs, but most poems are also iconic to some extent; and not only poems that are categorized as “visual.” Visual iconicity in poetry can be based on, for instance, empty spaces between words and between verses, lineation, typeface, letter size, and word order. Since there are many types and degrees of iconicity, I present a semiotic framework based on the idea that meaning can be produced by all kinds of resemblances between visual, auditory, and cognitive structures (abstract relations that form concepts and ideas in mental space). Visual iconicity in poetry is a specific part of this rich field of iconicity. Finally, I analyze two poems that differ in their visual iconicity. No scholars refer to Sylvia Plath’s “I Am Vertical” as “visual,” but in addition to being visual this poem possesses a certain level of iconicity. Eugen Gomringer’s “Wind,” on the other hand, is a standard example of so-called visual poetry. Also this poem is certainly visual, even though it is not visuality but strong iconicity that sets it apart from poetry such as Plath’s. In fact, what is generally but misleadingly referred to as “visual poetry” is actually characterized by extensive iconicity.

Poetic Iconicity

In Cognition in Language: Volume in Honour of Professor Elzbieta Tabakowska,472-501. Władyslaw Chłopicki, Andrzej Pawelec and Agnieszka Pokojska, eds. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Kraków: Tertium, 2007

The interplay of the visual and the verbal in visual poems

Proceedings of the 10th World Congress of the International Association For Semiotic Studies Recurso Electronico Culture of Communication Communication of Culture Culture De La Communication Communication De La Culture Cultura De La Comunicacion Comunicacion De La Cultura 2012 Isbn 978 84 9749 522 6, 2012

The Interplay of the Visual and the Verbal in Visual Poems. Makiko Mizuno The relationship between visual information and verbal information has been an important issue in semiotic study since Roland Barthes (1964) described the relationship between the two in his analysis of the Spaghetti Poster. Advertisement was chosen as the subject of Barthes' analysis because its construction has a clear signifié a priori-it should promote consumption-and it enables the structural analysis to be simple. The present study concerns the question of how the relationship between the visual and the verbal in works of art can be described. Whereas the verbal information in normal advertising material often acts as an anchor of the visual information, to identify the figure and to guide the interpretation (cf. Eco: 1972), the verbal information accompanying artworks sometimes fulfils more diverse functions. Studies in cognitive psychology (Millis: 2001, Leder: 2006) report that aesthetic perception is reinforced when a viewer succeeds in finding a metaphorical relationship between a visual element and its elaborative title. In my talk I will analyze works of visual poetry, which has a unique position in the history of art and literature in view of its intermediality. Visual poems serve as an interesting subject for study because their essence as works of artistic expression lies in the very interplay of visual and verbal information. Several examples of visual poetry are to be examined, especially some poems by Heinz Gappmayr, whose works consist not of representational figures (image cf. Pierce: 1931-58) but of visual configurations (diagram cf. Pierce)*. I will demonstrate how such visual information is combined with the verbal information to establish metaphorical relationships, while making reference to the theory of metaphor in cognitive linguistic research.

Experience the World with Archetypal Symbols: A New Form of Aesthetics

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

According to the theories of symbolic interactionism, phenomenology of perception and archetypes, we argue that symbols play the key role in translating the information from the physical world to the human experience, and archetypes are the universal knowledge of cognition that generates the background of human experience (the life-world). Therefore, we propose a conceptual framework that depicts how people experience the world with symbols, and how archetypes relate the deepest level of human experience. This framework indicates a new direction of research on memory and emotion, and also suggests that archetypal symbolism can be a new resource of aesthetic experience design.

The Multimodal Icon: Sight, Sound and Intellection in Recent Poetries

Passage 69 (Summer 2013): 7-20. Special issue on “Lyric at the Crossroads,” edited by Louise Mønster and Peter Stein Larsen, Aarhus University Press, Denmark. Translated into Danish.

This paper examines the shift from single to multiple semiotic modes in poetry during the age of digital media. While one can argue that in the history of poetry the text has always represented “sight, sound and intellection,” the propagation of digital media and the devolution of popular culture into a predominantly graphical regime have made an irrevocable impression on poetry-on-the-page. The production of multimodal poetry in print literature presents the hybridization of text and image, or typography and the visual arts. Modernist experiments in poetry largely confined themselves to the single semiotic mode of alphabetic typography. By century’s end, however, digital page composition enabled the use of index, icon and symbol in increasingly complex relations. In the multimodal poetry of Emily McVarish, Steve McCaffery and Geof Huth, the reader encounters two or more semiotic modes simultaneously. The relation between text and image is not one of dependency (illustration; annotation) or autonomy (catalog; artist book) but rather a bilateral interactivity that requires and stimulates a cognitive poetics. Such print works demand that readers pursue a multiplicity of reading paths and develop the interpretive skills required by multimodal metaphor in which signs are drawn from more than one mode.