Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

Mental spaces are often connected by vital conceptual relations. When mental spaces serve as inputs to a blended mental space, the vital conceptual relations between them can be ‘compressed’ to blended structure inside the blended mental space. In other words, ‘outer-space’ relations become ‘inner-space’ relations. This article discusses compression of the outer-space relation of representation under mental blending.

This article proposes a new interpretation of the relationship between poetic form and literary interpretation in Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, focusing on the special affordances of rhyme and meter in dramatic verse and on Rostand's virtuosic exploitation of poetic blending possibilities in Cyrano. I claim that poetic blends play a thematically essential role in this work, at a level far beyond their thematic contribution to most verse drama. Such a reading of Cyranomay thus help to expose general aspects of poetic blending which may be less visibly present in other texts. It also has consequences for our understanding of verbal humor and irony. In the final section of the article, I propose an extension of my analysis of metric and rhyming blends to the beginnings of a cognitive poetic treatment of intertextuality as blending.

In this article I apply Fauconnier and Turner's (2002) theory of conceptual integration, or blending, to the analysis of a central aspect of the main characters’ mental lives in Virginia Woolf's story ‘Lappin and Lapinova’. The female protagonist of the story, Rosalind, has difficulties adjusting to her role as the new wife of Ernest Thorburn, and therefore constructs an alternative fantasy world where Ernest is a rabbit king called Lappin. At the beginning of their married life, Rosalind and Ernest develop this fantasy world together, and add to it a counterpart for Rosalind herself – a hare called Queen Lapinova. With the passing of time, Ernest loses interest in the fantasy, but Rosalind becomes increasingly dependent on it, so that Ernest's announcement of Lapinova's death at the end of the story also results in the ‘end’ of their marriage. In my analysis, I show how the ‘rabbit’ fantasy world can be described in terms of what Fauconnier and Turner (2002) call a conceptual integration network: a dynamic construct resulting from the interaction of different mental spaces and involving the creation of a blended space with ‘emergent structure’ of its own. In order to account for the different roles that the blended space plays for Rosalind as opposed to Ernest, I adopt Palmer's (2004) distinction between ‘intramental’ and ‘intermental’ functioning. I therefore describe the fantasy world as a multiple blend that begins as an intramental construct, develops into an intermental construct, and ends as a largely intramental construct once again, with serious implications for Rosalind's sanity and the relationship between the two main characters in the story.

Current work on conceptual integration and literary texts often features detailed analysis of a single reading of a text in terms of the conceptual integration networks involved in constructing that interpretation. However, a single linguistic form can inspire manifold readings. This article takes a historical view of the conceptual blends involved in a range of different literary interpretations generated by different groups of readers of a single set of texts, the Sherlock Holmes detective stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. First, it examines the case of the numerous and diverse historical readers who took these fictional texts to be non-fiction, and how their conceptions mirror and diverge from the ways readers become immersed in texts they know to be fiction. This is followed by an analysis of the early ‘Sherlockian’ essays, criticism operating under the pretense of a historical Holmes and a historical Watson who recorded his adventures with varying accuracy. In the Sherlockian tradition, something very like the naïve believer stance independently emerges from this playful and parodic novel blend. The history of this stance among its practitioners is then shown to be an example of the routinization of a blend within a discourse community. These complex discourse blends turn out to have much the same capacity for entrenchment and semantic change as any grammatical construction.

This article attempts to show how a cognitive approach to textual analysis can function alongside other critical methodologies. Helen Weinzweig's novel Basic Black with Pearlsis an examination of the effects of trauma on the psyche, and in particular on its construction and maintenance of a sense of identity. As Shirley, the novel's narrator, struggles to locate the various aspects of her own identity, so too is the reader forced to experience this struggle in the act of attempting to construct for Shirley an identity out of her fragmented and discontinuous narrative. I approach this interpretational problem from two perspectives. Making use primarily of the work by Caruth, I demonstrate how Weinzweig's text might be read according to a canonical trauma paradigm. On the other hand, I consider Weinzweig's text within a cognitive stylistic framework, making use of Turner and Fauconnier's theory of conceptual blending and its various incarnations, as well as Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory. With these methodologies, the article proposes an account of the specific stylistic differences between the narrative representation of identity and that of identity in trauma.

This response to the five articles in this special issue on blending focuses on how the power of blending as a basic human cognitive ability not surprisingly extends into all aspects of human creativity, illuminating such literary forms as narrative perspective, character and identity formation, and poetic styles, as well as reader reception and response or cultural development and transmission. In their extension of earlier studies of blending in poetry to drama, film, and prose narratives, these five articles reveal the possibilities of a broader scope for blending theory in literature. However, if blending theory is to succeed in modeling the human mind, it must also account for intentionality and feeling. In the second section of this article, therefore, I explore Susanne K. Langer's idea that literature creates the semblance of felt life, an idea that raises the possibility that form-meaning blending includes the iconic notion of form as feeling. Using Per Aage Brandt's cognitive-semiotic elaboration of Fauconnier and Turner's blending model and Masako Hiraga's model for metaphor-icon links in language, I suggest the possibility of constructing an aesthetic theory of literature that would reveal the central and crucial role that literature (and all the arts) play in human consciousness and feeling.