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 article deals with the phenomenology of reading narrative fictions, in particular with the production of mental imagery in the process of reading. Because readers differ in their capacities to visualize, this article proposes a distinction between default visualization and vivid images, a difference experienced by readers regardless of whether they are prone to more or less visual imagining. It argues that the default mode of visualization is unlike actual perception. It is indistinct, transient, and lacking in saturation and memorability, since it relies on cultural schemata and prototypes for efficient processing of the text. These indeterminacies do not, however, disturb readers or cause dissonance. Rather, they are advantageous, as they allow the constant accommodation of new incoming facts. In contrast to what is assumed by traditional reader response theories, gaps left in default visualization do not for the most part need filling in. At certain stages in the reading process, however, narrative texts do trigger a kind of vivid imagery that is akin to actual perception. Based on recent neuroscientific experiments, this article suggests that these highlighted and especially vivid images occur when fictional acts of seeing force readers to shift from action-oriented visualization to object visualization. Some pertinent examples of these close-up, focalized descriptions of perception are discussed, which encourage substituting the automatic default mode with a more conscious and focused object visualization.

REF Compliant by Deposit in other institution's Repository: Edinburgh's repository by 31/05/2017: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/immersion-and-defamiliarization(1a866d00-e55c-4744-9b72-38b5a43c60b6).html

Book Review| February 01 2017 Mixing Metaphor Gibbs, Raymond W.Jr., ed., Mixing Metaphor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016. xiv + 269 pp. Eyal Segal Eyal Segal Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2017) 38 (1): 205–208. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3716354 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Eyal Segal; Mixing Metaphor. Poetics Today 1 February 2017; 38 (1): 205–208. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3716354 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPoetics Today Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article considers how postcolonial narratives written partly in the first-person plural collective voice reflect recent critical developments in postcolonial studies rather than echoing the outmoded “writing back” paradigm. Even colonial texts such as Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” according to narratologists the earliest example of extensive we-narration to which postcolonial authors respond, dramatize the inherent multiplicity of the self rather than writing into being an opposition between a colonial “we” and a colonized “other.” Early postcolonial we-narratives such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat, this essay suggests, also display a narrative “we” that transgresses the conventional postcolonial center/periphery paradigm. Here the first-person plural voice becomes a marker of multidirectional inclusions and demarcations, equally highlighting the internal fragmentation of the collective “we.”

Book Review| March 01 2016 The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach Caracciolo, Marco, The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. xiii + 231 pp. Eyal Segal Eyal Segal Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2016) 37 (1): 222–225. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3453006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Eyal Segal; The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. Poetics Today 1 March 2016; 37 (1): 222–225. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3453006 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPoetics Today Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The main question posed in the article is, was the historical development of the novel characterized by an increase in the quantity of dialogues? To test whether this is true, the author conducted a quantitative study of four hundred Russian novels of the nineteenth century. Using the “coefficient of dialogic liveliness” — a measure suggested by Boris Yarkho in the 1930s — this article suggests an answer in the affirmative. In addition, it attempts to answer three subsequent questions: (1) Why did the number of dialogues increase? (2) Why was this increase not linear? (3) Why did some of the highly dialogic Russian novels appear already at the beginning of the nineteenth century? The first problem is explained by some psychological features of readers' perceptions of dialogues. The second problem is answered by the theory of evolution. The third problem is solved by a brief analysis of the historical context of the epoch.

Book Review| March 01 2016 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth: Metaphors and Cognition in Adolescent Literature Trites, Roberta Seelinger, Literary Conceptualizations of Growth: Metaphors and Cognition in Adolescent Literature. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2014. viii + 164 pp. Eyal Segal Eyal Segal Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2016) 37 (1): 225–227. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3453018 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Eyal Segal; Literary Conceptualizations of Growth: Metaphors and Cognition in Adolescent Literature. Poetics Today 1 March 2016; 37 (1): 225–227. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3453018 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPoetics Today Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: New Books at a Glance You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| September 01 2015 Fiction and Narrative Matravers, Derek, Fiction and Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. viii + 169 pp. Eyal Segal Eyal Segal Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2015) 36 (3): 313–314. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3160793 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Eyal Segal; Fiction and Narrative. Poetics Today 1 September 2015; 36 (3): 313–314. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3160793 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPoetics Today Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| September 01 2015 Literature as Dialogue: Invitations Offered and Negotiated Sell, Roger D., ed., Literature as Dialogue: Invitations Offered and Negotiated. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2014. xv + 274 pp. Eyal Segal Eyal Segal Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2015) 36 (3): 315–318. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3160805 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Eyal Segal; Literature as Dialogue: Invitations Offered and Negotiated. Poetics Today 1 September 2015; 36 (3): 315–318. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3160805 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPoetics Today Search Advanced Search © 2016 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: New Books at a Glance You do not currently have access to this content.