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Margaret H. Freeman is Co-Director of the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts, MA, USA. Professor Freeman's past publications include The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition (2020).A must-read not only for literary scholars, but also for students of literature and even amateur poetry lovers who seek intellectual satisfaction in confronting literature. It is strongly recommended both for academic and personal use, as closing the final page of the book, we remain truly astonished by this, at the same time, familiar and new experience as much as we do “know that is poetry” and that there is no other way.
Style
[Freeman’s] book appeals to both emerging and established academics, as it demonstrates a unique and innovative perspective that offers new insights into one of America’s most celebrated poets. [It] provides valuable insights into the cognitive mechanisms underpinning the comprehension of Dickinson’s poetry, highlighting how poets and readers alike process and extract meaning, contributing significantly to expanding academic discourse on cognitive approaches to literature and the arts.
Women’s Studies
Freeman's book is not just an engagingly learned re-introduction to Emily Dickinson but a provocation to consider how contemporary scholarship on embodied cognition may serve as a means of building a more complete understanding of Dickinson's poetic art.
Ryan Cull, Associate Professor of English, New Mexico State University, USA
Drawing on the insights of cognitive science, Margaret Freeman demonstrates that understanding a poem, even before any attempt at interpretation, is to cognitively experience it, allowing it to reveal itself by what it is saying and doing. Her subtle and meticulous analyses illustrate how those “animate organisms” work, and they are thus true eye-openers as well as an enormous gain for all lovers of Dickinson’s poems, academics and general readers alike.
Gudrun Grabher, Professor Emerita of American Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Margaret Freeman's new book challenges our preconceptions not only about Emily Dickinson but also about the rapidly growing field of cognitive literary studies. She works scrupulously with all levels of Dickinson's poems, descrying impalpable nuances of poetic language while never losing sight of the final analysis and sense of indefinable but alluring artistic work. Freeman's book applies cognitive science findings and heuristics to literary studies and proffers a holistic view of the ways we read a poem, accompanied by step-by-step comments and striking readings.
Denis Akhapkin, Associate Professor of Languages and Literature, Smolny College, Russia
[The] prospects of what Freeman claims for her cognitive approach are tantalizing, bold, exciting. Freeman is not focused on what a poem can “mean,” but on what a poem is “doing.” What happens to a reader who “experiences” a Dickinson poem?
ALH Online Review
Winner of the Literary Encyclopedia 2024 Book Prize, in the category of literatures originally written in English.
Emily Dickinson's Poetic Art is both an exciting work of literary criticism on a central figure in American literature as well as an invitation for students and researchers to engage with cognitive literary studies.
Emily Dickinson’s poetry can be challenging and difficult. It paradoxically gives readers a feeling of closeness and intimacy while being puzzling and obscure. Critical interpretations of Dickinson's poems tend to focus on what they mean rather than on what kind of experience they create. A cognitive approach to literary criticism, based on recent cognitive research, helps readers experience and understand the hows and whys of what a poem is saying and doing. These include cognitive linguistic analysis, versification, prosody, cognitive metaphor, schema, blending, and iconicity, all of which explain the sensory, motor, and emotive processes that motivate Dickinson’s conceptualizations.
By experiencing Dickinson’s poetry from a cognitive perspective, readers are able to better understand why we feel so close to the poet and why her poetry endures. Emily Dickinson's Poetic Art: A Cognitive Reading is an important contribution to the study of a major American poet as well as to the vibrant field of cognitive literary studies.
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Demure as Dynamite: Dickinson and Cognition
2. Everything Counts: Reading the Manuscripts
3. The Manuscript Markings
4. Measuring Time in Meter and Rhythm
5. Affective Prosody
6. The Life of Words
7. Bringing a Poem to Life
8. Intimate Discourse
9. Grounded-Self Spaces
10. The Presence of Self
11. The Way We Map
12. Intentional Mapping
13. Conceiving a Universe
14. A Transformative Poetics
15. Dickinsonian Cognition
Appendix
References
Index of First Lines
Subject Index
Cognition, Poetics, and the Arts fosters high-quality interdisciplinary research at the intersection of the cognitive sciences and the arts. Its focus both acknowledges and reacts to the increasing correlation of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science and the humanities, especially in regard to the particular relation and interdependence between creative art and cognitive competence.
The series focuses on four related major objectives:
- to expand the development of theories and methodologies that integrate research in relevant cognitive science and humanities disciplines to further our understanding of the production and reception of the arts as one of the most central and complex operations of the human mind;
- to encourage exemplary applications of these theories and methods to both established traditions and emerging practices in artistic creation and expression and the various modes of cognitive engagement they entail;
- to investigate the various ways models of the mind and models of artistic creation and reception have been developed and revised in relation to each other throughout history and in different cultures and contexts;
- to develop theoretical and methodological understanding of how the arts illuminate and contribute to the cognitive sciences.
In acknowledging that the field has a strong international dynamic, the series addresses and invites global communities and audiences of scholars.
To submit a proposal, please contact Amy.Martin@bloomsbury.com or the series editors: Margaret H. Freeman (info@myrifield.org), Peter Schneck (peter.schneck@uos.de), and Alexander Bergs (abergs@uos.de). For more information, see www.bloomsbury.com/discover/bloomsbury-academic/authors/submitting-a-book-proposal.