This is an empirical study of trance-inductive poetry. Forty-one readers, classified as low- and high-absorption by median split, were asked to read a trance-inductive poem characterized by high metric regularity, and rate the latter on seven 7-point evaluative scales (e.g., boring-interesting). While low-absorption subjects found the poem to be boring and unpleasant, high-absorption subjects found the poem to be interesting and pleasant. We discuss how the low-absorption subjects respond to a flat sequence of monotonously rhyming lines, finding the text to be boring, while the high-absorption subjects detect a hierarchic structure in the poetic text, finding the latter to be pleasing.
The authors first present the interaction theory of metaphor, emphasizing its notion of bidirectionality. They then discuss the relationship between bidirectionality and blending, making explicit the different expectations regarding bidirectionality deriving from interaction theory and blending theory. With this as a suitable background for this special issue on bidirectionality in metaphor, the authors then provide a brief introduction to each of the essays that appear in the issue.
In Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1963[1929]), I. A. Richards marks his standing as the herald of three trends of literary criticism: the empirical study of literature, New Criticism, and Reader-Response Criticism. What is more, in this book he affiliates himself with the experimental psychology of his time and by extension with the rising prominence of Gestalt theory within this discipline. Our research weaves together not only these three trends but also his Interaction Theory of Metaphor, detailed in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). This essay draws out the implications of Richards's approach to cognitive literary studies for our work on poetic metaphor. In the section entitled “A Gestalt Approach to Poetry” we develop and incorporate his Interaction Theory of Metaphor into our Gestalt-Interaction Theory of Metaphor, applying it to a reading of John Donne's poem “The Bait.” In the section“An Empirical Study of Poetry” we discuss Richards's empirical study of poetry, followed by our own empirical study, in line with the same Gestalt-Interaction Theory of Metaphor.
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