NARLYR

THE NARRATIVE LYRIC: CONCEPTUAL BLENDING OF SPATIAL SCHEMATA WITH EMOTION IN POETRY AND BEYOND

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'The Narrative Lyric (NARLYR) explores mainly Greek (ancient and modern), English, and Spanish poetry to understand how some basic emotions, such as love, anger, fear, or hate, are integrated with schematic narratives grounded on embodied cognition. This process gives rise to a wide range of products of the imagination, and to a great variety of meanings and forms, all conceiving basic emotional situations and relationships as small spatial events at the scale of a human body. The methodology combines conceptual blending, image schemata, and other analytic tools from cognitive science and linguistics, with more traditional approaches from semiotics, poetics, and classical rhetoric. The main methodological hypothesis is that Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory can be productively employed in a systematic contrastive study of the figurative language of emotions, both in poetry and in other usages. In order to model recurrent imaginative patterns, NARLYR proposes generic structures of conceptual integration that build abstract networks capable to analyze a wide variety of examples, ranging from poetic imagery to other artistic manifestations, rituals, religious symbols, or everyday communication. The results expected should challenge the extended conception of the lyric as a non-narrative expression of feelings. As a cognitive poetics enterprise, NARLYR also employs empirical methods to explain literary production and reception in relation with human cognition, and to extend the model from the literary study so that it can contribute to the understanding of emotion language, along with related aspects in communication and art. The fellow will collaborate with leading groups of cognitive scientists, linguists and literary scholars in the US and Spain, under the supervision of Mark Turner, co-author of Conceptual Blending Theory.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

The connection between poetry and the images that crop up in our minds has never been clearly investigated. One EU project is unveiling these surprising connections of the emotional power of poetry and the images it conjures.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

The poetry of yesteryear, from the Greeks and Romans of antiquity to the English and Spanish in later centuries, conjures strong feelings that have shaped the thoughts and emotions of society. The EU-funded project 'The narrative lyric: Conceptual blending of spatial schemata with emotion in poetry and beyond' (Narlyr) is examining the emotional and metaphorical aspects of ancient poetry. It is combining conceptual integration, spatial schemas and analytic tools from cognitive sciences bringing together cultural and linguistic analysis, diachronic study, methodologies from philology and literary studies.

This multidisciplinary project is a joint effort between the University of Murcia in Spain and two universities in the United States (Case Western Reserve University and the University of California San Diego). It is studying how poetic imagery conveys emotion through spatial stories or image schemas from childhood, looking at spatial interaction and verbal figurations to highlight effect and intentionality.

Examples include poetic schemas such as a person emitting light to seduce someone, a god that shoots an arrow to provoke passion, and a wind that shakes the mind of a lover. Such implausible scenarios are conceptualised in our minds as infants and can recur in today's creative metaphors and language. The patterns of thought become ingrained within the human psyche and help process novel, elaborate poetic images creating interesting connections that affect thought and conceptualisation of emotions.

Based on this research, the project is cataloguing these patterns and examining them both individually and in comparison. It has already produced in-depth studies related to image schemas in love metaphors and to time metaphors with affective meaning. More comparative work on the early developmental features of these schemas in poetry is expected to emerge from the project, as well as a detailed catalogue of conceptual blends of emotion and spatial structure.

Narlyr results will surely support literature and literary theory on cognitive science. It will also reveal the necessity to combine humanities and the cognitive sciences for studying verbal art to understand the interplay between creativity, cognition and emotion. Narlyr has published several informative studies under this complex topic with more on the way.