Michael Sinding

To explain how cultural worldviews cohere, we need to develop principles of worldview structure. Image schemas and force dynamics must be central to worldview structure, since they are central conceptual structures of both metaphor and narrative, and both metaphor and narrative are central organizing structures of worldview. However, the role of these conceptual structures in discourse has not been adequately studied, and they need to be developed (scaled up, supplemented, and integrated) in order to represent rich and extended narrative and metaphoric thought adequately. A promising line of development is to link these structures with “intuitive ontology” (especially “naïve physics”)—specifically, to characterize energy as a principle of conceptual structure for models of the physical world that can be used in metaphor and narrative to model the psychosocial world.

The key points of my proposal are: energy is a central folk concept of structure and causation in “intuitive ontology”; it enriches basic image and force schemas by blending the generic concepts of substance (“stuff”) and force (“umph”); energy patterns structure narrative and metaphoric representations of psychosocial dynamics; and contrasting patterns of psychosocial energy define the contrast of liberal and conservative worldviews. To get at those contrasting worldviews, I examine their founding documents: key texts in the 1790s debate over the French Revolution, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791/92).

I begin by motivating the energy model. I take William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) as a precursor vision of embodied cognition, as Blake declares that there is no soul distinct from body; and energy, which is life and delight, is from the body. I then examine representations of energy patterns in visual narrative (Blake’s illustrations of good and wicked souls for Robert Blair’s poem The Grave (1805)), and linguistic narrative (a key scene in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794)).

Turning to political argument and worldview, I show how Burke and Paine frame the French Revolution under contrasting models of psychosocial structures, causality, and valuation. Burke argues the inheritance analogy: “we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives.” This suits “a permanent body composed of transitory parts”, “binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties.” Paine argues the aid and trade analogy: “the unceasing circulation of interest, ... passing through its million channels, invigorates the whole mass of civilized man”, so revolution is not “the dissolution of society” but “by a contrary impulse ... brings the latter the closer together.” The metaphor scenarios (Musolff) in these arguments are of various ontologies and levels of schematicity: substances (property, body, parts, ties, mass), forces (tie, impulse), forceful movements (receive, hold, transmit, bind, circulate, pass-through, invigorate, dissolve, bring-together). Yet the arguments integrate the scenarios into broader psychosocial stories that are coherent and easily understood. It is only at the level of energy structure that we can specify how sequences of scenarios get integrated into patterns; and how coherent but opposite patterns of psychosocial energy underpin political models.

Genre theories frequently err by shortchanging the full range of genre processes. Focusing on only one stage or context — tradition, author, text or reception — can hide a whole world of genre-relevant facts. A more adequate analysis should consider at least the following ...

This article argues for a cognitive view of genre. Specifically, a cognitive view of categorization helps clarify how texts can participate in multiple genres-by instantiating several different genres more or less equally well and by mixing several genres. I respond to certain recurring assumptions in recent work on genre about the nature of categories and categorization, elaborating on John Frow's incisive critique of misconceptions of genre but correcting his discussion of cognitive poetics. I draw on concept and category research to sketch the three main contemporary approaches to categorization via prototype, exemplar, and knowledge theories. Against this background, I review the many genres that have been attributed to Gravity's Rainbow, then examine three influential generic framings of this text and what the text can tell us about the nature of categories and how people use them. I conclude by discussing the ways this example is particularly revealing about how prototypes, exemplars, and knowledge interact, how experts use categories to understand and experience the very rich and complex realities of their domains of expertise , and how this new understanding of categorization can help clarify Thomas Pynchon's blending of genres.

Frye’s approach to culture integrates bodily, cognitive, semiotic, social, and historical factors. Yet productive dialogue with other approaches is challenging: sympathizers may get stuck “inside” his capacious thinking, while skeptics remain “outside” – today, typically emphasizing contextual factors shaping cultural texts (e.g., ideology). I explore an integrative approach via Frye’s account of the inversion of the axis mundi.

Frye’s principle that thought and meaning are structured by metaphor and narrative is central to cognitive science today (Lakoff and Johnson, Turner, Hogan). Studies of cultural and cognitive change and stability (e.g. Greenblatt, Zunshine) can therefore profit from his vision of intertwined imaginative-cultural processes.

Frye sees early cultures as rooted in mythologies (canonical narratives addressing “primary concerns”), which mentally crystallize into cosmologies. These world-pictures are organized by spatial metaphors based on the orientation of the human body (e.g. the axis mundi). Cosmologies become frameworks for later literary and theoretical structures.

Changes in cosmology, then, affect all of human experience. The most profound change in Western cultural history was the 18th-century inversion of the axis mundi: the locus of value and power shifted from God (above and outside) to humanity (below and within). To develop this account, I examine how cosmological structures inform Rousseau’s revolutionary early Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Words 239-43), and therein mediate historical change. I identify key spatial metaphors and myths, and assess how they embody and manipulate “image-schemas” such as the vertical scale (up/down) and container (in/out). Analysis indicates that the language of Rousseau's argument reorganizing the traditional cosmology focuses on the inner/ outer contrast more than on an axial above/ below contrast. Causal relations among souls depend primarily on the attachment or detachment of inner substance to outer surfaces: attached soul-substances get pulled apart, weaken, decline, and dissolve; while the detached soul, contained in and oriented to itself, remains solid (integrity) and (if ordinary) attends to words within, or (if extraordinary) rises up strongly and attaches to great things above and beyond.

This article draws together overlapping cognitive analyses of political thought, emotion, and language and shows how they can be supplemented with literary analyses of genre to illuminate the workings of the French Revolution debate of 1790s Britain. It focuses on enriching George Lakoff 's theory of the multiple levels of framing in discourse, concentrating on the interplay of argument and narrative frames. Studies of emotion and mood in narrative genres are adapted to refine Lakoff 's account of narrative , making it more complex, systematic, and sensitive to historical context. Applying the revised theory, the essay characterizes contrasts between Edmund Burke's and Thomas Paine's thought at all levels of framing. It shows how their lexical frames for "revolution" diverge as their main arguments craft opposing issue-defining frames for the central moral issue of revolution versus reform. Those arguments highlight different key figures and events yet draw on similar narrative genres to frame them. Importantly, high genres of heroic romance inspire elevation toward one's own side by celebrating victories and lamenting tragedies, and low genres of satire inspire contempt toward opponents by ridiculing deserved failures and absurd successes. Thus narrative genre ties surface-frame phrases like "rights of man" and "swinish multitude" to deep-frame assumptions about more fundamental concepts (human nature, society, government).

This essay approaches the question “What is a letter?” as a subquestion of two more general questions, “What is a genre?”, and “What is a category?” I offer a broad-ranging sketch of how how major findings in research on concepts and categories can help answer these questions; how research on letters might in turn illuminate the study of categories; and how this intellectual cross-fertilization may illuminate epistolary texts, structures, cultures and histories.

Rousseau's writings present a wealth of material for the topic of social minds in factual and fictional narration, not only because they were enormously influential in political as well as intellectual and literary history (e.g. Hunt); but especially because he wrote so successfully in so many genres, factual, fictional, and hybrid. Moreover, his work was fundamental to the development of three ideas relevant to narrating social minds:

1. The social contract: the “conjectural history” of “The Social Pact” (Social Contract book 2, ch. 6) that forms a society (body politic) out of a collection of separate individuals by an act of mutual agreement.

2. Individualism: the modern valuing of solitude, withdrawal from society, in order to find moral, aesthetic and spiritual truth by listening to the voice of nature within the heart.

3. Sentimentality: the valuing of authentic close personal relationships between individuals, based on mutual exposure and sharing the feelings of the heart.

Clearly, there are tensions if not contradictions among these ideas. Rousseau despises society as corrupting the original purity and self-sufficiency of the individual. In primitive society, this process results from the individual's weakness, which leads to social cooperation, specialization of tasks and inequality. In advanced society, it intensifies into the desire for the admiration of others, which is particularly associated with urban centres, and the arts and sciences. Yet he also despises individualism, insisting that whoever does not conform to the “general will” of society will be “forced to be free” (Social Contract 20).

I compare the (quasi-)factual narrative of the social contract story with the fictional narrative of sentimental love in the novel Julie, focusing on events of transition from individual to social minds, and on the role of metaphor and metonymy as narrative techniques. These tropes arguably straddle the border between linguistic and conceptual structure, so the details of texts reveal both linguistic and conceptual patterning. I examine Rousseau's underlying conceptual model of psychosocial dynamics. The model is structured by basic concepts of space, force, and substance (Johnson, Talmy, Kövecses, Hampe). To sketch this briefly, individuals must be open and transmit their inner feelings (regarded as forces) to establish connections with others. Emotional connections can be moving and agitating and transporting; and can develop into attachments, which can have varying degrees of closeness and strength. But attachments are highly ambivalent: they can be the best or the worst possible things. They can fill voids in hearts and unite souls; but they can also lead to dependence on others (framed as “slavery,” symbolized by unbreakable bonds such as chains) and thus loss of strength of will and liberty (often symbolized as movement), and dispersion of self. This model is partly conventional, but Rousseau restructured it in a new way.


Bibliography

Hampe, Beate, and Joseph Grady, ed. From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics Research, 29. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005.

Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: Norton, 2007.

Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
---. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.

Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. 2nd ed. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2003 [1980].
---. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic, 1999.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Palmer, Alan. Social Minds in the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. The Essential Rousseau. Trans. Lowell Bair. New York: Penguin Books, 1975 [1750]. 204-30.
---. Discourse on Inequality. The Essential Rousseau. Trans. Lowell Bair. New York: Penguin Books, 1975 [1754]. 125-201.
---. Julie, or the New Heloise. 1761.
---. The Social Contract. The Essential Rousseau. Trans. Lowell Bair. New York: Penguin Books, 1975 [1762]. 1-124.

Talmy, Leonard. “Fictive Motion in Language and ‘Ception’.” Language and Space. Ed. Paul Bloom, Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel, and Merrill F. Garrett. Language, Speech, and Communication. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996. 211-76.
---. “Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition.” Cognitive Science 12.1 (1988): 49-100.

We may for convenience refer to “Theory” as the set of interconnected ideas about thought, language and culture that inform the currently dominant schools of literary and cultural scholarship (Cultural Studies and New Historicism). These schools focus on the interplay of culture with history and politics; their Theory remains largely poststructuralist.

Some in these schools have drawn extensively on Frye’s literary thought while condemning a perceived anti-historical, formalist, and religious bias (e.g. Jameson). Other critics (Hamilton, Saluszinsky, Adamson, Ning) have strongly argued Frye’s importance as both contributor and challenger to Theory. Hayden White calls him the “greatest natural cultural historian of our time” (“Frye’s Place” 28). Such efforts to place Frye in relation to a dominant Theory risk leaving him obscured by its shadow—superceded as contributor or doomed as challenger.

White puts his finger on what is most lacking in Theory and its schools when he attacks Frye’s detractors for failing to reflect on “the problem of the ‘form-content’ distinction itself” (“Ideology” 107). Hence we may make Frye’s ideas more vital to present concerns by developing them (not just contextualizing or applying them) in conjunction with flourishing post-Theory research in form and meaning in thought, language, literature, and culture. Specifically, Cognitive Linguistics has sparked powerful work in poetics and semiotics (see Richardson). Lakoff, Johnson, and Turner, like Frye, see metaphor and story as schematic and systematic, deep and pervasive in language and thought, and based in bodily experience. I suggest that Frye shares enough with both Cognitive and Theory approaches to fill in the topical and logical voids separating them, promising some interpenetration despite antagonism.

Lakoff’s analyses of the metaphorical frames shaping liberal and conservative morality and politics is the most important of few cognitive forays into politics. Lakoff sees conservatism and liberalism as contrasting metaphorical systems based on opposed models of the family. In the “strict father” model, a strong authority protects subordinates but also punishes disobedience in order to instill the discipline to take personal responsibility. In the “nurturant parent” model, empathetic authority shares power and respects subordinates in order to promote their empathetic responsibility.

Frye sees the conservative/ liberal contrast as resting rather on two fundamental social myths of the Western mythological framework that address the ultimate origin and the ultimate destiny of society: the social contract, and utopia. Hence conservatism focuses on and values the past, group loyalty, and continuity of tradition, whereas liberalism focuses on and values the future, individual conscience, and the struggle for social betterment. These social myths descend from the Bible, where they are connected. They are displacements of, respectively, its opening “Fall from Paradise” myth, and its closing “Heavenly City” myth. Accordingly, Frye envisions integrating the social myths, such that subjects assimilate their social traditions in order to grow through them towards social progress via disciplined individuality.

Frye’s views can be fine-turned with reference to Lakoff’s attention to the conceptual details of metaphor in everyday thought and language; and Lakoff’s views can be broadened and qualified in the light of Frye’s attention to patterns in literature, their roots in religion, and their “displacements” in the conceptual structures of metaphysical and social philosophies. A critical synthesis of these analyses of linguistic and literary forms could do much to sharpen and revitalize studies of the sociopolitical aspects of culture.


Bibliography

Adamson, Joseph. “Northrop Frye, Semiotics, and the Mythological Structure of  Imagery.” “Northrop Frye and Contemporary Literary Theory.” Special issue, Recherches sémiotiques/ Semiotic Inquiry 13.3 (1993): 85-100.
---. “The Treason of the Clerks: Frye, Ideology, and the Authority of Imaginative Culture.” Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works.  Ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999: 72-102.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton UP, 1971.
---. The Critical Path. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971.
---. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: U of Toronto P,  1991.
---. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
---. Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974-1988. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1990.
---. Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth and Society. Richmond Hill: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1991 [1976].
---. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1970. 
---. Words With Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature”. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

Hamilton, A. C. Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism. Toronto: U of Toronto P,  1990.
---. “Northrop Frye and the New Historicism.” “Northrop Frye and Contemporary Literary Theory.” Special issue, Recherches sémiotiques/ Semiotic Inquiry 13.3 (1993): 73-83.
---. “The Legacy of Frye’s Criticism in Culture, Religion, and Society.” The Legacy of Northrop Frye. Ed. Alvin Lee and Robert Denham. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. 3-14.
---. “Northrop Frye as Cultural Theorist.” Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works.  Ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999: 103-121.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1981. 

Lakoff, George. Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004.
---. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.
---. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
---. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Lakoff, George and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Ning, Wang. “Northrop Frye and Cultural Studies.” Northrop Frye: Eastern and Western Perspectives. Ed. Jean O’Grady and Wang Ning. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003. 82-91.

Richardson, Alan. Literature, Cognition & the Brain.
<http://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/home.html>

Salusinszky, Imre. “Frye and Ideology.” The Legacy of Northrop Frye. Ed. Alvin Lee and Robert Denham. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994: 76-83.
---. “Towards the Anatomy.” English Studies in Canada 19.2 (June 1993): 229-40.

White, Hayden. “Frye’s Place in Contemporary Cultural Studies.” The Legacy of Northrop Frye. Ed. Alvin Lee and Robert Denham. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. 28-39. 
---. “Ideology and Counterideology in the Anatomy.” Visionary Poetics: Essays on Northrop Frye’s Criticism. Ed. Robert D. Denham and Thomas Willard. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. 101-11.

This essay draws on cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to illuminate what may be the most important issue in genre theory at present: genre mixture and hybridization. Genres have been very productively treated as cognitive schemas, but so far such treatments have not adequately accounted for critics' descriptions of their encounters with complex works, because they have lacked a model of how schemas are modified, rearranged, and combined. In the past decade, however, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have worked out just such a model in considerable detail. Conceptual Blending Theory has roots in linguistics, psychology, literary hermeneutics, and brain science. Fauconnier and Turner and others have used Blending Theory to analyze a wide range of thought and meaning, both m undane and highly creative, in the arts, sciences, and everyday life. Taking the example of Joyce's Ulysses, and focusing on the "Circe" episode, I discuss various kinds of genre mixture, showing how surface details as well as structural aspects of the text can be explained in terms of the processes and principles of conceptual blending.

Recent studies of conceptual metaphor and blending provide new tools and vocabulary for an account of allegory as a conceptual operation. Mark Turner's theory of conceptual blending takes off from Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor as a systematic projection of the structure of a source domain to a target domain. The theory of conceptual blending goes beyond one-way projection from source to target to address instances of projection that: use several "input spaces" with complex counterpart connections; that project contrary to the usual direction, from the more abstract and subjective to the less; that have emergent structure (not available in any input space but constructed in a "blended space"); and that are recursive (using prior blends as input spaces in further blends). Such complexities, familiar to interpreters of allegory, refute the notion that allegory is a "mechanical" unidimensional mapping. Turner has developed this model in the service of "cognitive rhetoric." I show how analyzing allegory according to this model can resolve recognized theoretical difficulties while preserving critical insights and hitching them to a modern linguistics that far exceeds the powers of semiological approaches.

I propose a theoretical model of genre with parameters organized in terms of the concept of “frame.” The model has three nested frames: a sociocognitive action frame contains a rhetorical situation frame, which contains a discourse structure frame. I motivate the model in relation to existing research on both literary and extraliterary genres, sketch its advantages and the lines of research it suggests, then address challenges to it. First, to clarify how genre relates to language, discourse and cognition, and the balance of my investments in various research areas, I review major conundrums about genre identity [in relation to epistolary genres]. Second, I argue for an inclusive approach to genres, as against defining “genre” to suit assumptions and methods. Third, I discuss the broader conception of discourse structure and sequencing that this inclusive approach entails. Fourth, I investigate frame-based sequencing in text composition—specifically, how poets adapt everyday genre frames for literary purposes.

Genre mixture is central to genre theory, in both literary and discourse studies. I
characterize genres as multidimensional schemas integrating frames for action, situation, and discourse. Blending theory, as a model of the interaction of schemas, can clarify genre mixture and help to connect these fields. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy exemplifies Bakhtin’s view of the early novel cannibalizing extraliterary genres. Sterne framed his famous “Abuses of Conscience” sermon in four genre contexts: first, as the annual assize sermon at York Minster (1750); second, as a six-penny pamphlet (1750); third, integrated into Tristram Shandy (1760); fourth, in a collection of his sermons (1760). These productions vary considerably in purpose, rhetorical situation, and audience response. Notably, Tristram and Sterne’s sermons were great but mixed
successes. The clash of the pious genre in the profane story, and Sterne’s attribution of his sermons to his comic alter-ego Mr. Yorick, prompted both denunciation and praise. I compare the blending and framing involved in the novel with the other cases, to examine how different conceptual networks produce different categorizations, meanings, and responses. I reflect on principles of genre blending relating the sermon to the book as a whole.

Mixing and hybridization among genres is a central issue in genre theory and literary history. Critics as diverse as Bakhtin, Cohen, Colie, Derrida, Duff, Fowler, Todorov, and Frow have recognized the significance of the phenomenon, but they lack conceptual instruments for rigorous analysis. I take Don Quixote as a test case to illustrate and assess the potential of Conceptual Blending Theory as a framework for the phenomenon.

The significance of individual texts and writers is naturally phrased in terms of their roles in processes of intra-generic “evolution”, and inter-generic “mixture” that are definitive of modern genre theory (Duff). Thus the individual work that ushers in a new genre by combining existing genres epitomizes the nature of creativity in generic literary history (Todorov). It has long been agreed that Cervantes’s Don Quixote created the modern novel by blending romantic quests for supernatural adventures with picaresque cynical drifting among low-life. To do this, Cervantes subtly manipulated mental representations of the genres of “romance” and “picaresque” narratives.

Turner and Fauconnier’s “blending” is a conceptual operation occurring under uniform principles at all semantic levels, from word-formation to grammar, metaphor, analogy, fictional characters and scenes, etc. Briefly, a conceptual blend projects selected elements from various mental “input spaces” into a “blend space” where a new construct is developed through processes of composition (matching of elements from different spaces), completion (filling out details of elements from existing knowledge), and elaboration (“running” the blend according to its own new logic).

I show how blending’s constitutive principles figure in Cervantes’ invention. I focus on
characterizing Cervantes’ mental spaces for romance and picaresque, and on how they are blended by composition, completion, and elaboration, within a template of narrative elements of character, setting, plot, and style. Genres are large schematic arrays of narrative and rhetorical conventions, but are also embodied in prototypical texts such as Orlando Furioso and Lazarillo de Tormes. We can examine the relations between specific sources and schematic features in the details of how certain scenes play out. I will also review briefly how a range of other genres is evoked and integrated.

When it comes to generic literary histories, the blending framework can overcome the weaknesses of existing studies—which usually focus on single genres, not many interacting complexly; are largely couched in terms of the influence of specific texts, not genre features; are approximate rather than precise; and make little effort to name and analyze forms and principles of combination and transformation. But we must also consider the challenges posed to blending theory by the difficulties of genre blending analyses. As inputs, genre concepts are highly complex, specific as well as schematic, and variable over individuals. In the mixed-genre text, it may not be obvious which elements are generic, or how “compression” and other governing principles of blending operate; moreover, non-blending processes of transformation may be at work. I explore how far the case of Don Quixote can clarify these matters.

I would like to bring together cognitive narratology and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) by examining how metaphors enter into the spatial structure of the storyworld of Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. David Herman defines storyworlds as “mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate [ . . . ] as they work to comprehend a narrative” (2002: 5). Thus spatial modeling is essential to narrative understanding: stories prompt readers to “spatialize storyworlds into evolving confi gurations of participants, objects, and places”2 (2002: 263).3 The technique of spatializing metaphors in storyworlds (sometimes called “realization” or literalization) goes back to Aristophanes (Whitman 1981), and continues in postmodernists like Pynchon. Essentially, the author takes a conceptual connection implicit in linguistic metaphor and uses it to structure an imagined scene or story. J. Paul Hunter notes the centrality of the technique in Gulliver’s Travels:

Swift is especially fond of literalizing metaphors and turning them into narrative events; he has, for example, courtiers walk tightropes, dance before the king, etc.; he has Gulliver urinate on the royal palace and land in excrement when he tries too ambitious a leap; and the government of Laputa oppresses its subjects by hovering over them or physically crushing their rebellion. The stable society at the end of Gulliver seems to me to have a similar status. (2003: 239 n26)

My list of authors suggests that the technique is often satirical. It is also similar to allegory, but distinct from it, as I will discuss below. CMT claims that “image schemas” structure human perception and are also central to the structure of concepts (both literal and metaphorical). I will argue that, as they also structure narrative spatialization, they therefore guide the projection of metaphors in the spatial structure of imagined storyworlds.

Michael Kimmel and Thomas Eder brought together established experts and younger researchers at the University of Vienna in May 2008 to reflect on and contribute to the »cognitive turn«, a major development in recent cultural theory and criticism. This turn, as the conference program said, grounds literary reception in general human psychology and everyday knowledge without losing sight of the specificity of literary aesthetics. It addresses central topics of literary structure and response in new ways. I will briefly contextualize the conference’s themes, review the papers and comment on them, then discuss them in light of some recent debates in the Journal of Literary Theory.