Leseliste Prof. M. Rubik

1. Leseliste Prof. M. Rubik Stockwell, Peter. Congnitive Poetics. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Kövecses, Soltan. Metaphors of Anger, Pride and Love. Plus: 1 Artikel konkret zu den Primärtexten

2. Primärtexte: • Aphra Behn: Oroonoko • Henry Rider-Haggard: She • Jasper Fforde: The Eyre Affair • George Etherige: The Man of Mode. • David Hare: Stuff Happens

3. Rubik, Margarete. „Estranging the Familiar, Familiarising the Strange: Self and Other in Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter.“ (auf meiner HP) • Etherington, Norman. „Introduction.“ The Annotated She. • Rubik, Margarete. „Invasions into Literary Texts, Replotting and Tranfictional Migration in Fforde‘s The Eyre Affair“ • Kachur, B.A. „The Man of Mode: Comedy and Masquerade.“. • Rubik, Margarete. „Contemporary Political drama and ist Claim to Authenticity.“

4. Diplomarbeiten Datenbank Anglistik HP  Studienservicestelle Anglistik Organisatorisches Prüfungen Diplomarbeiten-Datenbank Prüfer eingeben

5. Schema theory: • Definition: • Schemas are the building blocks of cognition, the fundamental elements upon which all information processing depends (Rumelhart 33). They contain prototypical world knowledge about how to behave in particular situations, etc. • Any new experience is processed in terms of and in relation to previous experience andworld-knowledge. • A schema has default values (=what is usual) and variables. • A schema can help you make inferences about aspects of a situation not mentioned (Rumelhart, 36): • “I went to the market but all stalls were closed.”

6. There are: • World schemas: cover schemas concerned with context, life-experience. • Text schemas: represent our expectations of the way that world schemas appear to us in terms of their sequencing and structural organisation in various genres. • Language schemas contain ideas of the appropriate form of linguistic patterning and style in which we expect a subject to appear. • Schemas are not fixed but culturally and historically contingent; they are dynamic and can change to adjust new information.

7. Scripts: • Schemas consist of scripts (“socioculturally defined mental protocol[s] for negotiating a situation”(Stockwell, 77), stored in memory) • Scripts are learned from experience and not static. • Example: “pub script”: you know how to behave in a pub from experience (e.g.: order and pay at the bar....) • Expansionof script (pubs that have adopted the continental practice of having waiting staff), or adapting script to similar situations (e.g. buying a drink on an aeroplane) (Stockwell, 77) • Miscues in script application can explain the “confusion caused to the French family waiting in an English pub to be served at their table...” (77)

8. Scripts such as pub scripts are situational scripts. We use these to negotiate commonly experienced events (being in a restaurant, taking the bus ...) • personal scripts tell us what to do and say in order to be a complaining passenger, or how to talk to someone you have never met before. • instrumental scripts: how to light a barbacue, how to switch on the computer, how to read, etc. (Stockwell, 77) • Scripts consist of props, participants, entry conditions, results, and sequence of events. • In any particular script, these slots are filled with specific items (e.g. beer glasses, a barman, walking into a pub, getting a drink, ordering and being served). This can explain why ‘but’ in the following sentence seems natural: “Peter walked into the pub, but the place was deserted.” Compare this with the oddity of “Peter walked into the pub, but there were people in there, and beer pumps and glasses.” The application of schema theory can thus contribute to our understanding of textual coherence (Stockwell, 78)

9. Changing schemas: • Schema accretion: the addition of new facts to the schema • Schema tuning: the modification of facts or relations within the schema • Schema restructuring: the creating of new schemas (Stockwell 78-79)  • Everyday discourse is mostly schema preserving (i.e., confirms existing schemas), or even schema reinforcing.

10. Surprising elements and entirely new experiences can potentially result in schema disruption (challenge to familiar knowledge structure). • Schema disruption can be resolved either by schema adding (i.e., accretion) or by radical schema refreshment (= schema change). • Defamiliarisation is followed by a refamiliarisation) ( Stockewell, 79)

11. Schema theory presumes that we process literary text s in the same way as we process real world experience(i.e., by use of schemas). • Literary genres, imagined characters, etc. in narrated situations can all be understood as part of schematised knowledge negotiation. • Because we process new experience by means of old schemata we always have certain expectations of how things will work (both in real life and in literature) and an (initial) tendency to decode new experience in the well-known way.

12. Comprehension is like hypothesis testing. “Readers are said to have understood the text when they are able to find a configuration of hypotheses (schemata) that offers a coherent account for the various aspects of the text.” (Rumelhart, 38) • To find the schemata they are expected to draw upon, readers depend on ‘headers’ (references, hints at these schemata) in the text.(Stockwell 78). • In the reading process, if sufficient evidence is accumulated against a schema, processing of that schema is suspended and more promising schemata are applied tentatively. Thus schemata are activated, evaluated, refinedordiscarded. and replaced by new hypotheses in the course of the reading process.

13. Prior knowledge (of the world or genres) is essential in forming impressions, e.g. of literary characters. We try to fit textual information about characters into pre-formed social schemas, rather than adding up individual pieces of information. But schema-based impressions entail simplification. • Initially, we always assume that the text world works in the same way as the real world (realistic novel). Realist features form a background, whereas everything that is foregrounded is primed and becomes something the reader actively engages with (Culpeper 256-66), e.g. by schema accretion. • If text worlds deviate radically from known reality (second and third order informativity, Stockwell), the writer must explain this in the text, otherwise the readers will be confused.

14. Disruptions of our expectations constitute discourse deviation, which offers the possibility of an overthrow of known schemata (Stockwell, 80). • Radical and unexpected schema replacement always involves a shock. • “One way in which writers have exploited schema-based processing of character has been in creating a situation where a character is formed according to a particular schematic category, but then force the reader to abandon the schematic category totally and activate another one “ (Culpeper 266) – creates shock and surprise effects

15. Scholars also use the term “cognitive frame”, mental framework or to “reframe” an experience (term is derived from visual art and frame semantics: you cannot understand the meaning of a single word without access to all the essential knowledge that relates to that word. For example, one would not be able to understand the word "sell" without knowing anything about the situation of commercial transfer, which also involves e.g. a seller, a buyer, goods, money…. Thus, a word activates, or evokes, a frame of semantic knowledge relating to the specific concept it refers to.) • Therefore evoking a cognitive frame (e.g. by means of a schema, script or metaphor) is never merely cerebralbut emotionally charged. Frames do not only describe reality but also constitute it and give it an emotional spin.

16. Cf: Lakoff's First Law: Frames trump factsAll of our concepts are organized into conceptual structures called "frames" (which may include images and metaphors) and all words are defined relative to those frames. Conventional frames are pretty much fixed in the neural structures of our brains. In order for a fact to be comprehended, it must fit the relevant frames. If the facts contradict the frames, the frames, being fixed in the brain, will be kept and the facts ignored.We see this in politics every day. Consider the expression "tax relief" which the White House introduced into common use on the day of George W. Bush's inauguration. A "relief" frame has an affliction, an afflicted party, a reliever who removes the affliction and is thereby a hero, and in the frame anyone who tries to stop the reliever from administering the relief is a bad guy, a villain. "Tax relief" imposes the additional metaphor that Taxation Is an Affliction, with the entailments that the president is a hero for attempting to remove this affliction and the Democrats are bad guys for opposing him. This frame trumps many facts: Most people wind up paying more in local taxes, payments for services cut, and debt servicing as a result of the Bush's tax cuts.There is of course another way to think about taxes: Taxes are what you pay to live in America—to have democracy, opportunity, government services, and the vast infrastructure build by previous taxpayers.... Taxes are membership fees used to maintain and expand services and the infrastructure. But however true this may be, it is not yet an established frame inscribed in the synapses of our brains.This has an important consequence. Political liberals have inherited an assumption from the Enlightenment, that the facts will set us free, that if the public is just given the facts, they will, being rational beings, reach the right conclusion. It is simply false. It violates Lakoff's Law. http://www.edge.org/q2004/page4.html

17. Application to colonial writing • We can only comprehend the ‚other‘ by means of familiar schemas. • If familiar schemas are applied to describe something alien (e.g. the encounter with foreign ethnicities), there will always be blind spots which are not covered by the ‚home‘ schema. • The choice of cognitive frame (e.g. metaphors) also reveals what implicit attitudes are transmitted. The emotional component inherent in the frame is not verbalised, but colours the reader‘s response to the subject.

18. Typical attitudes and textual schemas in colonial writing • Surveillance: privilege of the gaze (of viewing, examining, describing) rests with coloniser. The subaltern‘s point of view is not given. • Appropriation: implicitly claims foreign lands as the coloniser‘s rightful property (colonies: chaos waiting for order and economic development) • Classification: other cultures classified according to how close they come up to western standards of ‚civilisation‘ • Idealisation:‚primitives‘ styled into noble savages

19. Debasement: individual (lazy, violent, dirty) ‚savage‘ seen as emblematic of his society and race. • Naturalisation: ‚primitive‘ people linked with nature, colonisers with culture; but ‚natural law‘ grants dominion to the ‚fitter‘, ;more civilised‘ nations; i.e.: discourse finds natural justification for conquest. • Eroticisation: represents the colonised word as feminine; seductive fantasies of possession and conquest

20. western metaphors of love • Love (sexual desire) is hunger, the beloved is food („sweetheart“, „sex-starved“) • Love is magic („bewitching“) or rapture („high on love“) The beloved is a deity („I adore you“) • Love is a natural force („she swept me off my feet“, „she dazzled me“) • Love is a fluid in a container („he poured out his affections“, „full of love“)

21. Love is fire („burning love“) • Love is insanity („crazy about her“) • Love is a valuable commodity („she‘s invested a lot in that relationship“). The beloved is a valuable object („my treasure“) • Love is an opponent („she surrendered to her love“, „tried to fight her feelings “ „he could not resist her“) • Love is an animal („fierce passion“; „“he seemed to devour me with his flaming glance” [Jane Eyre])

22. Bibliography • Bortolussi, M. and P. Dixon: PsychonarratologyFoundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2003. • Culpeper, J. : “A Cognitive stylistic approach to characterisation” : Cognitive Stylistics. Language and Cognition in Text Analysis.Eds. ElenaSemino and Jonathan Culpeper. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002, 251-277. • Rumelhart, David E. "Schemata: The Building Blocks of Cognition." Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension. Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology, Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence and Education. Eds Rand J Spiro, Bertram C. Bruce and William F. Brewer. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1980, 33 – 58. • Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, London: Routledge, 2002.