Rhetoric, Neurocognitive Poetics, and the Aesthetics of Adaptation

Abstract

Rhetorical effects in speech and writing have a great strategic importance in achieving the communicative end of being persuasive: they are key in the exertion of power through language. Persuasion occurs by cognitive-affective stimulation, relying on specific psychosomatic perceptual patterns which are used on all levels of speech reception in cultural and political contexts. This makes rhetorically conspicuous texts efficient as stimulus material for empirical research into neurocognitive modeling of how poetic texts are read. Adaptations as revisitations of prior works share with the rhetorical repertoire of repetition similar cognitive-affective properties, because both function via recognition of sameness or similarity. Recent paradigm shifts in adaptation studies have much enlarged the field of research, so Linda Hutcheon's as yet empirically unsupported insight that adaptation is the norm and not the exception in human imagination finds an unexpectedly large field of application. This shift away from the narrow standard paradigm of novels adapted for the screen to a more fundamental aesthetics of adaptation has also helped establish connections between adaptation studies and the experiment-based methodologies of empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics with a view to developing cognitive and affective models of the processes underlying the reception of adaptations.

What Is the Difference? Rereading Shakespeare’s Sonnets —An Eye Tracking Study

“…Within the framework of neurocognitive poetics (Jacobs, 2011(Jacobs, , 2015aWillems and Jacobs, 2016;Nicklas and Jacobs, 2017), two steps have been suggested to cope with the innumerable features of texts and/or readers and their many (non-linear) interactions. Firstly, a way should be found to break the complex literary works up into simpler, measurable features, for instance by Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA; e.g., Jacobs, 2015aJacobs, , 2017Jacobs, , 2018aJacobs, , 2019Jacobs et al, 2016aKinder, 2017, 2018;.…”

“…Recently, a QNA-based predictive approach was successfully applied to account for eye tracking parameters in the reading of three of Shakespeare's sonnets (sonnet 27, 60, and 66) using multiple psycholinguistic features . In the study of Xue et al, 2019, seven surface psycholinguistic features, a combination of well-studied (word length, word frequency, and higher frequent neighbors) and less-studied and novel features (orthographic neighborhood density, orthographic dissimilarity, consonant vowel quotient, and sonority score), were computed based on the Neurocognitive Poetics Model (NCPM, Jacobs, 2011Jacobs, , 2015aWillems and Jacobs, 2016;Nicklas and Jacobs, 2017) and recent proposals about QNA (e.g., Jacobs, 2017Jacobs, , 2018a. In addition, two non-linear interactive approaches, i.e., neural nets and bootstrap forests, were compared with a general linear approach (standard least squares regression), to look for the best way to predict three eye tracking parameters (first fixation duration, total reading time, and fixation probability) using the seven above mentioned features.…”

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

“…It is less clear whether readers’ longing for poetry like Shakespeare’s or Pushkin’s, as well as highly foregrounded narratives from Joyce or Proust is based on the same kind of neuropsychological processes or linked more to processes of aesthetic appreciation, as proposed by the Neurocognitive Poetics Model (NCPM; Jacobs, 2011, 2015a, 2016b; cf. also Miall, 1989; Lüdtke et al, 2014; Nicklas and Jacobs, 2016; cf. also Van den Hoven et al, 2016; Willems and Jacobs, 2016).…”

“…Their poetic and often anarchic offspring, so-called anti-proverbs , represents a special case of linguistic adaptation – more or less artful alternations of original proverbs like A Rolling Stone Gathers Momentum (Mieder, 2004; Jacobs, 2015c; Nicklas and Jacobs, 2016). …”

“…In terms of Kintsch’s (2012) model of beauty, proverbs might represent a verbal construction that minimizes complexity by averaging and compressing a (deeper) meaning over many instances of utterances/sentences that may not be quite prägnant or beautiful in themselves, thus ironing out the imperfections of particular instances and yielding an idealized verbal image. Anti-proverbs like “Mens sana in campari soda” (Nicklas and Jacobs, 2016) are interesting stimuli because they present a nice example of how background and foreground features can be combined in a single sentence (Jacobs, 2015b): Due to their multiple rhetoric features (phonological similarities like rhyme/alliteration, repetition and parallelism, meter, brevitas, i.e., artful shortness/prägnanz, or ellipses), all proverbs can be considered foreground elements of language if seen against a background of literal, i.e., non-rhetorical, non-figurative control sentences. However, while the memory of the original proverb (e.g., ‘All roads lead to Rome’) provides familiar background information, the one-word change in anti-proverbs like ‘All sins lead to Rome,’ creates a foregrounding effect and a subjectively felt tension, perhaps similar to puns.…”