Margaret Freeman

Aesthetics is generally understood as considerations of taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts. However, the aesthetic faculty depends on eight interrelated elements that constitute all human cognitive activity. Memory, imagination, knowledge, experience, discrimination, expertise, judgment, and creative activity constrain and are constrained by how much we apply them—or don't apply them— to all the different aspects of our lives, empathetically and ethically. Together, they give rise to all our apprehensions and understandings of the worlds of which we are a part. The aesthetic faculty is therefore as much a part of scientific creativity as it is of the arts.

ABSTRACT Emily Dickinson attracted an international following almost as soon as her poetry was published. That fact contributed to the founding of the Emily Dickinson International Society in 1988. Its first conference (Washington, DC, 1992) focused on Translating Dickinson in Language, Culture, and the Arts, attracting scholars and translators from fifteen different countries. A special issue of the Emily Dickinson Journal (1997, 6.2) followed, based on the translation workshops featured at that conference. It is timely and appropriate that Domhnall Mitchell and Maria Stuart's edition of The International Reception of Emily Dickinson extends those early explorations into how different cultures and nations have experienced Dickinson, and how our understanding of the poet is enriched by appreciating the responses to her poetry of readers from multi-linguistic and cultural communities. Creating an international bibliography that documents a comprehensive and cumulative record of translations, scholarship, and artistic works influenced by a particular writer is an incommensurably difficult task. Continuum Press' idea of creating a series of international "Receptions" based on contributors' research and knowledge of their own national, cultural, and historical situtations is therefore nothing short of inspired. Adding Dickinson to this series makes sense. Mitchell and Stuart are to be commended for their contribution to this way of seeing Dickinson through other perspectives and other eyes. Their volume sets the framework for further research. After a brief introduction by the editors, the volume comprises contributions from twelve Dickinson scholars representing eighteen different countries, discussing the history of Dickinson reception, questions of translation, and how Dickinson's writings have been expressed through other art forms. The fascinating result of these detailed explorations, for this reader, turns out to be how other cultures and nations have responded to Dickinson's poetry—through translations, transformations into other artistic media, general interest articles, university and school studies—and how those experiences shaped the creativity of their own poets, scholars, and artists. The individual chapters provide an extensive and comprehensive resource for scholars interested in exploring the ways in which Dickinson's writings have been disseminated; their influence on general readers, poets, and artists in a particular country or linguistic community; and the ways Dickinson's reception has been affected by nationally oriented social, educational, and political situations. The dissemination of Dickinson's oeuvre in other countries occurs in two ways and through several avenues. First is the question of whether she is being read in English or in translation. Second is the extent to which she is known both within and without an educational setting, experienced through the various arts and more generally in popular media, understood in terms of her own life and cultural influences, or perceived through the lens of politics, religion, or gender. The authors of each chapter vary in their focus on these issues. Though this can be attributed to the contributors' own experiences and backgrounds, whether as poet-translators or scholars or both, nevertheless the chapters provide details that provide illuminating insights into the various languages and cultures discussed. From a linguistic perspective, the most illuminating details occur in the chapters on the Low Countries (Marian de Vooght) with Dutch, Frisian, and Flemish; Norway (Domhnall Mitchell), with its two language registers reflecting either the social elite (bokmål) or everyday spoken dialect forms (nynorsk); or Japan (Masako Takeda), with its mixed system of logographic kanji Chinese characters and the phonographic hiragana and katakana of Japanese syllabary. Issues regarding the quality of available translations reflect Dickinson's syntactically difficult and idiosyncratic poetic style, not to mention the problems of understanding and interpretation faced by all readers, and these issues inform the content in each chapter in important ways. Many of the chapters reflect the historical changes in Dickinson's reception, from her introduction through the earliest edited editions of the poems to an increasing awareness of the scope of her achievement through the later Johnson and Franklin editions. Documentation of various translations and their historical effects are especially strong in the chapters on Francophone Europe and North America (David Palmieri), Portugal (Ana Luísa Amaral and Marinela Freitas), Brazil (Carlos Daghlian), and Sweden (Lennart Nyberg). Lila Lachman's chapter, as its title indicates (not "Emily Dickinson in Israel," but "Emily...

Abstract Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences provides tools for humanities scholars to make explicit the nature of creativity in the arts and their importance in the development of human cognition. From this perspective, the notion of the arts as play takes on new meaning. In his book, Finite and Infinite Games, James P. Carse explores through the metaphor LIFE IS A GAME the way we are both finite and infinite players in the worlds of human life and nature. Three elements define the distinction between finite and infinite ...

/" ¡ m/he cuckoo is a European bird. Emily Dickinson never heard its call, I though she might have encountered a transliteration in song. The-*-English robin she would not have recognized, the American robin being a member of the thrush family, a different species altogether. These two themes—nonexistence (cuckoo) and difference (robin) —sound throughout this collection of essays on the challenges of translating Emily Dickinson's poetry into other languages and cultures. This special issue of The Emily Dickinson Journal ...

It is a critical platitude that artistic works express the inexpressible. With respect to literature, the paradox specifically claims that language, the means of expressive communication in literature, can convey that which cannot be captured through the medium of language. Much of the work of art historians, musicologists, and literary critics attempts to describe what it is that is being expressed. Reuven Tsur's work is different: for more than three decades, Tsur (1992: 1) has been engaged in developing his theory of cognitive poetics, discovering not ...

Metaphor studies and studies of iconicity have had parallel but separate trajectories in cognitive linguistic studies over the past thirty years, as evidenced in the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), Zóltan Kövecses (1986, 2002), Mark Turner (1987), Lakoff and Turner (1989), Antonio Barcelona (2000), and Line Brandt and Per Aage Brandt (2005), among many others, on metaphor, and, for iconicity, the extensive bibliography listed on the Iconicity Project Web site (home. hum. uva. nl/iconicity). It has been Masako Hiraga's ...

... Toward a theory of cognitive poetics. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Tsur, Reuven. PUBLISHER: North-Holland (Amsterdam and New York). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1992. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 0444889965 ). VOLUME/EDITION: PAGES (INTRO/BODY): xii, 573 p. ...

In Réka Benczes and Szilvia Csábi, eds. The Metaphors of Sixty: Papers Presented on the Occasion of the 60th Birthday of Zoltán Kövecses, 127-135. Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University, 2006. ... Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts ... This paper is a brief sketch of the development of cognitive poetic theory from traditional to cognitive accounts of metaphor to poetic iconicity, as they can be traced in interpretations of one Emily Dickinson poem. ... The development of metaphor studies over the past thirty years or so has transformed our understanding of ...

This special issue of Poetics Today grew out of three consecutive sessions on cognitive approaches to literature organized by Donald and Margaret Freeman at the second international conference of the International As- sociation for Literary Semantics in September 1997, which was ...

Complexities of cognition in poetic art: Matthew Arnold's " The Last Word " Abstract: The cognitive complexity of Matthew Arnold's poem " The Last Word " has resulted in diverging literary critical evaluations. By applying several cogni-tive approaches to the poem, I develop a reading that reveals the poem's underlying coherence. I then address the question of how that reading might reflect Arnold's own intentions and motivations in responding to adversaries of his social criticism. In doing so, I hope to present a way of showing how both cognitive approaches to literature and traditional literary expertise complement each other in contributing to our understanding of the complexities of human minding: the integration of sensations, emotions, and conceptual reasoning that constitute the way we experience and interact with each other and the world of which we are a part.