Cognitive Rhetoric

Essays collected between 1994 and 2004, exploring the emerging field of literary Darwinism and working toward a comprehensive model of human nature; critiquing poststructuralism, traditional humanism, ecocriticism, cognitive rhetoric, Stephen Jay Gould, and narrow-school evolutionary psychology; offering examples of practical criticism of nineteenth-century British novels and novels depicting paleolithic life.

In this talk, I argue for a cognitive rhetorical approach to political discourse. While ‘political discourse’ is often thought to consist of texts such as policy documents, newspaper articles, televised interviews and political speeches, I suggest that it is also constituted by more literary text types, such as novels, television shows, films and memoirs. I outline the advantages of using frameworks from stylistics and narratology, which have traditionally been used to examine literary texts, to analyse the persuasive strategies used in political discourse. Of Aristotle’s three persuasive appeals to ethos, pathos and logos, contemporary Critical Discourse Analysis has tended to focus on logos, or ‘the information structure’ (Stockwell 2009: 166) of the text. Conversely, recent work in cognitive stylistics (for example, Brône & Vandaele 2009, Gavins and Steen 2002, Semino and Culpeper 2002, Stockwell 2002) and cognitive narratology (for example, Fludernik 1996, Herman 2003, 2007, Palmer 2006) has had a more holistic concern for both the emotional impacts of the text (the appeal to pathos), and how texts ethically position authors and readers (the appeal to ethos). In this talk, I use concepts from narratology, such as ‘implied author’ and ‘cinematic narrator’, alongside ideas from recent developments in cognitive narratology, such as ‘mind modelling’, to outline a framework for analysing ethos in political discourse. Throughout the talk, I draw on a variety of examples from literary and non-literary political discourse to illustrate the affordances of such a cognitive rhetorical approach.

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.

The cognitive rhetoricians have introduced the idea of cognitive domains into literary theory, but they have not yet developed a model for a comprehensive, species-typical structure of human motives. Evolutionary psychology can provide this model. Elemental human motives and basic emotions provide the deep structure of literary representations, and this deep structure serves to organize the particularities of circumstance and individual identity.

In this work, different occurrences of the connective “and" in some Basque proverbs gathered in the 16th and 19th centuries are studied. “And" appears in grammatically definable types of constructions beyond pragmatic ambiguity; the environments where “and" occurs show a fixed pattern linked to a conceptual structure. This work focuses on the less fixed pattern of the typology “A and B is Y", where the first term mentioned "A" is defined in terms of the second “B" demonstrating the important role played by analogy. There is also a complex variety of coordinated proverbs, which link two seemingly independent proverbs; in these proverbs “and" provokes a shift in point of view of the fictional utterer. The evaluative string (Y) poses the question of the directionality of the proverb, when there are variants of the same proverb, one of them lacking the string, what the presupposition range of the given cultural milieu is, from Honeck's (1997) ...

In the foreword to “Because You Bear This Name: Conceptual Metaphor and the Moral Meaning of 1 Peter”, Joel Green (Howe, 2006: xviii-xix) observes that, with reference to our understanding of language and specifically metaphor, the world of biblical scholarship “has gone about its business quietly, unaffected by … tectonic shifts, largely unaware of the quiet revolution gathering around the work of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Eve Sweetser, Mark Turner, and other cognitive linguists”. We are left with an “old-world understanding of symbols and ideas, disembodied and abstract” resulting in the treatment of metaphor “as evidence of a writer’s cultural conditioning or as flowery decoration.” In this process, the potential that textual meaning holds  is explored sub-optimally
Conference Theme
Rhetoric and Cognition in the New Testament: Methodological Exploration and Innovation in Textual Meaning in the Greek New Testament

Studies of biblical and related ancient texts have always, and necessarily so, stood on the shoulders of or hand in hand with other scientific disciplines. Thus, a tradition developed by which the horizons of New Testament studies expanded due to advances in literary critical developments in for example, literature studies, linguistics and philosophy. A cautious attitude, however, seem to hamper continuous exploration, experimentation and adoption and stifles the progress of studies in textual meaning despite the proliferation of methodological innovations in other disciplines engaged in unearthing textual meaning.
Call For Papers
This international conference invites academics that plunge head-first into investigating these "tectonic shifts", surfacing a new-world understanding of symbols and ideas. Papers bold enough to advance the discussion and explore our understanding of textual meaning specifically of, but not limited to, the New Testament text are welcome. Quality contributions that experiment with, explore and present fresh insights into New Testament language and metaphor in light of recent developments in linguistics, cognitive linguistics, cognitive literary theory, metaphor, rhetorics and poetics, receive preferential treatment. These include contributions that explore, introduce and pioneer crisp interactions with the text, based on the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries and that encourage methodological collaboration. Papers linking at a more general level with the abovementioned foci  are also welcome.