Skip navigation to main content
Discussion Seminar: Metaphor, cognitive poetics, and a quarrel with current literary theory
Semester II 2006
(Education 120, 11 September 2006, 12.00 noon)
Abstract
Cognitive poetics is an attempt to develop a description of poetry which is
based on experimental evidence. My paper starts with the problem of
Metaphor and my experience of teaching poetry over the past forty years.
It deals with my discomfort with post-structuralist, Lacanian, and
post-modern literary theory in the late twentieth century. My position is
one of old-fashioned empiricism, and the ideas I put forward are those of
an Israeli cognitive psychologist Reuven Tsur who has been researching
and writing about 'cognitive poetics for the past 20 years.
Note: This seminar is a discussion seminar of 30
minutes presentation and 30 minutes of discussion and input by other
disciplines. Prof Croft wants to know how people in disciplines with quite
different traditions of studying metaphor will react to his ideas.
