5.

Cognitive Stylistics

5.1. Stylistics
5.2. Discourse Analysis
5.3. Stylometry and Computational Stylistics
5.4. Cognitve Stylistics
5.4.1. Schema and Image Schema
5.4.2. Literariness
5.4.3. Cybertextuality
5.5. Overview

5.1. Stylistics

Style, obviously, is the object of study for stylistics, so any definition of one concept would
depend upon a definition of the other; and style will be defined on the fundamental
assumption that within any given language system (phonetics, graphetics and graphology,
semantics, and grammar—morphology and syntax) the same content may be encoded in
several linguistic forms (we deliberately overlook here the problematic relationship
between form and content); so, roughly, the same thing can be communicated in more than
one way, and this way may represent a variability at the level of intonation, type of writing,
word choice, morphological and syntactic organization of the utterance: stylistic analysis
operates thus at all levels of language use. For our purposes here, we need to look first at
these various levels and then see the four views on style in turn (style as choice, style as
deviation, style as recurrence, and style as comparison).
The two main modes of linguistic communication are speech and writing (with
complexities brought about by the internet), i.e. the phonetic level and the written level.
The constructional units in phonology are segmental (phones and syllables) and
suprasegmental or prosodic. Generally speaking, the segmental units show little variation
and are often regarded as stylistically neutral; there are, though, phonetic combinations
that may be perceived as expressive of certain peculiarities of style, such as cacophony,
euphony and a number of specific poetic devices (assonance, alliteration, consonance,
onomatopoeia, rhyme itself, synaesthesia and others) that exploit the language potential on
this level. The suprasegmental units are even more open to stylistic exploitation and effect,
as they contain such highly subjective processes as melody, stress, pause, rhythm (tempo),
intensity, and timbre. Intonation as such—an important component of phonological studies
—is the source of three types of modulation with stylistic relevance: temporal modulation
(manner and speed of pronunciation, giving it such characteristics as stilted, artificial,
natural, affected, to which rate and pause are added) resulting in so-called pronunciation
styles (familiar, colloquial, declamatory, formal…); then force modulation, given by stress
and emphasis and resulting in loudness level that may or may not emphasize the content of
speech; and tone modulation, a more or less physiological feature, represented by pitch and
characterized by height, range and movement (level, fall, fall+rise, rise+fall); as such
prosodic features are basically exploited to express emotions, and they are often
accompanied by such paralinguistic means as gestures, facial expression, and body
language in general.
 Written communication differs from spoken communication in terms of channel,
purpose, circumstances and format, to which a number of other linguistic aspects should be
added; the study of stylistic variation in written texts may consist in the study of
handwriting or calligraphy as an expression of character and personality (graphology:
layout and page size or color, line direction, regularity, angle, space, design, etc.) and of
printing (typography: layout again, shape, size, and type of font, underlining, paragraph
structure, space organization, the use of tables, graphs, illustrations, geometrical patterns
or devices used as graphic symbolism). If intonation is the way emotion is expressed in
speech, punctuation was devised for expressing the emotional and volitional aspects of
language in writing; the various punctuation marks are used to represent—as far and as
faithfully as possible—the suprasegmental features mentioned before; if orthography is the
prescriptive norm for using punctuation in this effort of representing tempo, timbre, stress,
intensity…, hen any deviation from it enters the field of stylistics (when you read a text in
front of an audience—a lecture before a class of students—what you do is to perform the
written mode according to the instructions of punctuation).
The main referent (signified) carrier in linguistic communication is the vocabulary, and
so semantics is bound to be the main field of investigation for stylistics; vocabulary or lexis
represents the greatest stylistic potential as it contains extremely large possibilities of
selection (see Jakobson’s axes: of selection and of combination, in his definition of the
poetic principle). From the point of view of its stylistic potential, the vocabulary of any
language (of English, for Galperin, 1977) contains a standard or neutral unmarked layer
(nonspecific, common-core words), a literarily marked layer (literary and learned words,
poetic and archaic ones, foreign words and barbarisms, etc.), and a colloquially marked
layer (colloquial words, slang, jargon, professional words, dialect words, vulgarisms…) The
semantic relations of some relevance to stylistics are synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy,
hyperonomy, polysemy, homonymy, homophony, homography…;and also relevant is the
distinction between denotation (referential, cognitive, conceptual) and connotation
(expressive, emotive, associative…); and, obviously, the special type of connotative
meanings represented by figurative language or tropes (simile, metaphor, synecdoche,
metonymy, epiphora, diaphora, anaphora, paronomasia, asyndeton, litotes, apostrophe,
allusion, personification, catachresis, paradox, oxymoron, antithesis…).
Leech and Svarvick (1975) propose the following three sentences to illustrate variation
of style at the level of grammar (with the observation that any stylistic shift on one level—
phonetic or lexical—is immediately projected onto other levels as well):
On the decease of his father, Mr. Brown was obliged to seek alternative employment.
After his father’s death Peter had to change his job.
When his dad died, Pete had to get another job.
(So, not only from decease to death, from obliged to to had to, from employment to job and
from Mr. Brown to Peter to Pete, but also from one organization—written, formal, even
stilted—to others—neutral, casual, spoken). If correctness is the norm, then other
grammatical levels—familiar, informal, polite…--represent stylistic variations to the same
extent as the lexical ones; as one general observation, nouns seem to dominate lexical
distribution in written texts, while verbs are more commonly utilized in speech. Otherwise,
specific grammatical features become markers for academic texts, administrative texts,
scientific texts, for advertising and conversation or public speaking and so on.
 Along these lines and on all these levels style may be regarded (as already noticed) as a
choice of linguistic means, as—again noted—deviation from a norm, as recurrence of
linguistic forms, and as comparison. Style as choice depends on such user-bound factors as
speaker’s or writer’s age, gender, regional and social background, or idiosyncratic
preferences, and on situation-bound factors (medium of communication, field and type of
discourse, attitude, etc.). Style as deviation is most commonly used in literary stylistics and
authorship identification (words and word combinations, unusual linguistic preferences,
typical variations, such formal structures as rhyme and meter, etc.) A statistical
understanding of style would generally refer to recurrence of linguistic forms; increasingly
important, with the advent of computers, become corpus linguistic methods and
stylometry. Finally, style as comparison comes only to reveal a feature implicit in all the
previous approaches, since texts can only differ from some norm as they are compared
both to the norm (which is often ambiguous) and among themselves; there are here many
applications in comparative cultural studies, translation studies and in the teaching of
foreign languages.
On the basis of these four views on style, linguistic schools proliferated—especially in
the 20th century--, depending on the types of emphasis placed in one field or another, and,
more relevantly, on the methodology and instruments used in research (see especially the
Prague School of Linguistics—Dolezel, Jakobson, Mukarovsky: “form follows function”;
and British Contextualism—Firth, Halliday, Sinclair: language use in context and corpus
linguistics).

5.2. Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis has developed in the past few decades as a discipline in it own right, but
its slightly differing definitions place it in the strict vicinity of stylistics; thus, discourse
analysis has been described as the study of the organization of language above the level of
the sentence, which would make room for something defined as macrostylistics; discourse
analysis is also the study of language in use, which brings it very close to contextual
stylistics; and, thirdly, it is the study of the way language is used by particular groups in a
society (educators, journalist, scholars, politicians, lawyers…), which is also the field of
functional stylistics. As distinct from traditional linguistics, discourse analysis, while
studying language use “beyond the utterance boundary,” also focuses on naturally
occurring language use. Again like stylistics, it topics of interest include all levels of such
language use, from sounds to gestures, from vocabulary and meanings to syntax and speech
acts and all other aspects of linguistic interaction; it also analyses the relationships between
text and context, between discourse and power, discourse and cognition and so on. It can
thus safely be said that stylistics is included in discourse analysis, side by side with rhetoric
(also a close relative), applied linguistics, and cognitivism.
A number of principles will reveal more clearly both the distinct type of study that
discourse analysis pursues, and its many ties to other linguistic approaches, stylistics and
cognitive stylistics included. First, it analyses authentic texts as produced in some real-
world context, with careful emphasis upon the relationships between relevant textual and
contextual factors; second, it thus more appropriately studies three levels of language use:
the text as such, the processes and practices involved in creating a discourse, and the social
context or contexts that influence and determine it: so discourse analysis has in view most
of the cultural, political, and social dimensions with their relevant consequences upon the
existence of a community; fourth, there is an ethical stance involved since the analysis will
pay attention to social and political imbalances and inequities and also be critical about
them; fifth—which is more like an assumption or premise—discourse analysts base their
arguments on the idea that speakers and listeners interact in their construction and
reconstruction of reality by means of linguistic intercourse (certain groups construct their
versions of reality that might be at odds with those of other groups); and finally, in view of
what has just been shown, discourse analysis is accessible to large, non-specialist
communities of readers. It may have become obvious that “textual” manipulations will
form a major point of interest, and so stylistics is once again essential. After all, both
discourse analysis and stylistics are meant to draw inferences about the psychological state
of the speaker (sender), to evaluate the effectiveness of the discourse upon the listener
(receiver), to examine the effectiveness of words and constructions in conveying meaning,
to describe the poetic/literary form of a piece of writing, and to describe the lexical and
syntactic variability of one or several passages in the discourse. Given that the variability of
language is infinite and that new stylistic devices that never existed before can always be
created, it appears that discourse analysis, like stylistics, is an open-ended enterprise.

5.3.Slylometry and Computational Stylistics

Stylometry and stylometrics has a history that goes back to the 19 th century, but it is only in
more recent years—and especially with the availability of large computers—that this kind
of study really flourished. One of the main concerns in stylometry is authorship
identification (with the Bible as a favourite text, but also with Plato, or Shakespeare, or the
Federalist Papers, and, of course, with many anonymous authors of texts), and is mainly
based upon the statistical analysis of literary style, upon a quantification of its features
therefore. So the basic method is that of measuring and counting stylistic traits and the
assumption is that authors have a conscious as will as an unconscious aspect to their style.
Let us note, in passing, that by assuming that some particularities of style are actually
unconscious, and not the result of deliberate design, stylometry is in fact the opposite of
stylistics.
In simpler terms, stylometry is thus the discipline or science of measuring literary style,
and what it measures is a variety of aspects on different levels of textual functioning: rare
or striking features, word lengths and sentence lengths, common words (as opposed to rare
ones), vocabulary patterns and morphological data, total number of sentences and total
number of quotations, number of function words (temporal prepositions, for instance,
sentence embedding transformations, syntactic affinities between texts, frequency of
relative clauses, keywords, hyphenated compound words, etc., etc.
Since stylometry has proved to involve more and more sophisticated math and since the
amount of computer-readable literary texts continues to increase, it is expected that the
computers will take over the task—if they have not already done so—of finding features
that discriminate one text from anther; thus, authorship attribution, genre characterization
and others are taken over by modern—well, contemporary—computational stylistics that
applies statistical and machine learning techniques to features extracted from a text. The
new methodology—not very much different from the old one, but much more effective—
consists in finding as large a set of topic-independent (the content has never been important
in stylometrics) features as possible and use them as input to a generic learning algorithm;
this independence from the topic of the text (non-denotational) is both relative and very
important, since the assumption is that the author chose (consciously) one mode of
expression form among a number of equivalent modes, and this is reflected in choice of
words, syntactic structures, discourse strategy, or combinations thereof. This has been
done in what came to be called Systemic Functional Linguistics, i.e. analysis of a text as a
realization of particular choices of meanings (language itself is taken to be a system of
choices, not only a resource for making meaning; for which purpose language is modeled
stratally, with phonology/graphology in the center, surrounded by the lexico-grammar
stratum, then the semantics stratum and the contextual one).
A very interesting application in computational stylistics is the so-called FictionFixer, a
program that analyses more than two-hundred-and-fifty characteristics of best-selling
novels; the software combines this data with a consensus of expert advice and opinion to
define a model representing what the public expects from such books; FictionFixer applies
corpus linguistics and computational literary stylistics, side by side with deep-structure
pattern-recognition, predictive modeling, and information theory to indicate a book’s
potential to be on the best-seller list. It is also an important instrument in creative writing
since it tells you, the real or aspiring author, what the best ingredients for a novel to stand
out are and how close to the mark your novel is in relation to the current model of what
people vote for; and software tells you exactly what modifications are necessary for your
text to come close to the one people buy; so, it in not only form that is being quantified, but
content too, since readers prefer a certain kind of story and a certain type of message;
there is thus just one step before the computer will give us itself the vest novel on the
market. This application might also be used in another form of computer-based creativity,
which is the internet’s hypertextual literature, but this would take us into a different set of
problems.

Cognitive Stylistics

There are two things about cognitive stylistics that should be pointed out right away; first,
since it finds itself at the confluence of text, context and the effort toward cognition by
means of textual organization, stylistics has always been principally cognitive; and second,
dealing as it does with figures and grounds and prototypes, with cognitive deixis and
cognitive grammar, scripts and schemas, mental spaces and discourse worlds and text
world theory, with conceptual metaphor and the parabolic literary mind and narrative
comprehension, i.e. with the application of theories of cognitive linguistics (specifically,
cognitive semantics) to the interpretation of literature, or with a field covering the interface
between linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science, cognitive stylistics is often used as
a synonym for cognitive poetics (see, for instance, Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper,
eds., Cognitive Stylistics; Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 2002 and Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics: And Introduction, London:
Routledge, 2002). In their “Introduction,” Semino and Culpeper present cognitive stylistics
as combining “the kind of explicit, rigorous and detailed linguistic analysis of literary texts
that is typical of the stylistics tradition with a systematic and theoretically informed
consideration of the cognitive structures and processes that underlie the production and
reception of language,” (IX) while cognitive poetics would study the psychological and
social effects of the structure of a literary text on the reader’s mind. In his turn, Stockwell
believes that cognitive poetics often combines with critical theory and literary philosophy in
an attempt to address the important question of literary value and status.

Schema and Image Schema

Cognitivism in general may be a very complex process resulting in a complicated

philosophy, but a number of scholars (like Leonard Talmy, Ronald Langacker, Mark
Johnson and George Lakoff) found it fit to restrict textual knowledge to a theory of
schemata. Schemata are categorical roles or scripts or scenarios (avoid the negative
meaning here) according to which people interpret the world; we see what we know and we
hear according to what we have heard before: new information coming to us does not come
on barren ground, and it is received according to what already is there. You know, for
instance, much of what a conversation partner is going to say to you before he has actually
said it; conversely, information coming from him that does not fit into the listener’s schema
or schemata may not be comprehended. So, in a certain way, schemata are patterns of
expectation built on our prior knowledge. However, what is important to note is that a
receiver in schema theory—a reader or a learner, for that matter—actively builds
schemata and revises them in light of new information; we know a poem when we see one
(see Stanley Fish’s Essay “How to Recognize a Poet When You See One”), but we can
revise our schema for understanding a poem when or as we read a prose poem or a picture
poem. So, if we have a hierarchy of knowledge organization, that hierarchy may and will
change as we experience other similar cognitive processes; and experienced reader or a
literary critic perceives the same text in vastly different ways from a beginning reader
because his hierarchical schema organization is much more complex; what we seem to be
talking about is, in fact, some sort of literary competence which obviously is not a stable
state, but an infinitely (well, a life long) progressive accumulation; experts function, an any
given domain, much better that novices in the same domain. Moreover, all schemata are
context specific, so that a reader of scientific texts will or may have difficulties in
understanding a critical essay on aesthetics.
Schemata are important not only in receiving information, but also in interpreting or
decoding it; readers of novels use their schematic representations of story to turn it into
their own story, so that when they think back to such a text, they do not remember the
exact sentences and organization of the text, but rather their own interpretation of it; if
plot is the sequencing of events in a narrative, then subject is what and how we remember
that plot; in this view, subject is the reorganization of the plot at the end of the reading
process. Piaget’s model proposes three different types of reaction that a reader/learner
usually has while facing new information: accretation (wholesale reception, without any
change at all in the information received), tuning (reader realizes that his schema is
inadequate and modifies it accordingly—experience and learning provide room for a new
schema hierarchy), and restructuring (creating a new schema or set of schemata that could
address the inconsistencies between the newly acquired information and the old schema—a
novel or a poem that changes your whole view of the genre).
As already suggested, this schema theory may have an important role in instructional
strategies, and particularly in the teaching of reading; for better educational results,
teachers of reading have discovered that they need to activate certain reading schemata by
using metacognitive strategies to activate pupils’ schemata before reading proper begins,
such as interpreting the title of a text, or looking at the first paragraph, or even
commenting on the cover of the book and other visuals in the text. Since context seems to
be so important, looking for comparisons and analogies—in the genre, in one language, in
the period, etc.—and proposing multiple schema-building experiences (such as adopting
several different approaches to or theories of a literary text) will also help readers/learners
develop new functional schemata. The above mentioned context may become even more
relevant if the reading/learning process includes information from the cultural and other
types of background; it may also be that learners should be exposed to similar knowledge
in quite a number of different contexts (trans- and interdisciplinarity) in order to be able to
construct more complex schemata.
Having thus come closer and closer to literature, let us also say that an image schema is
a recurring pattern in our cognitive process and, according to Mark Johnson (The Body in
the Mind) and George Lakoff (Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things) image schemata
emerge from our bodily interactions, linguistic experience and historical context; these two
authors look at an image schema as being an embodied prelinguistic structure of
experience that motivates conceptual metaphor mappings; there are several concepts here,
except for image schema, that need exemplification at least, since the theory is too
extensive. Thus, Johnson identifies in his book over thirty image schemata, which he places
in several groups. In the “spatial motion group” he defines schemata of containment (“out”
is his example: “He went out of the room”—a clearly defined trajectory; “The train started
out for Chicago”—the containing landmark is only implied; “Leave out that big log when
you stack the firewood”—direct, non-metaphorical schema; “I don’t want to leave
anything out of my argument”—schema metaphorically projected onto argumentation;
“Tell me the story again, and don’t leave out any details”—schema metaphorically
projected onto story-telling; “She finally came out of her depression”—schema
metaphorically projected onto emotional life), path, source-path-goal, blockage, center-
periphery, cycle, cyclic climax; in the “force group” schemata of compulsion, counterforce,
diversion, removal of restraint, enablement, attraction, link, scale; in the “balance group”
schemata of axis balance, point balance, twin-pan balance, and equilibrium; and then a
number of other schemata that are just listed and not discussed, such as surface, contact,
merging, object, splitting, part-whole, near-far, full-empty, process, collection… Lakoff
adds a number of schemata in the “spatial group” (above, across, covering, contact,
vertical orientation, length) and in the “transformational group” (linear path from moving
object, path to endpoint, path to object mass, reflexive, rotation…)

Literariness

From early on in literary studies and, more constantly at least since its explicit
conceptualization by the Russian Formalists (Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky,
Viktor Shklovsky, Osip Brik, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Eichenbaum) in the early 1920s,
literariness imposed itself as a constant preoccupation and challenge for literary scholars in
general and stylisticians in particular.
The basic question is: can we readers (very seldom is the question asked about writers)
recognize and identify and know those features that make literature stand out among other
kinds of writing, or among other discourse? If literature transforms and intensifies
ordinary language, if it deviates systematically from everyday speech (one is tempted to
avoid the highly problematic concept of “norm”), do we (again, we readers) get a feeling
that such a text may have a surplus or an excess of meaning? Surplus and excess as
compared to what? It is obvious that more questions are raised than answered, and the
Russian Formalists themselves provide only partial explanations (others denying the
concept outright).
By being particularly focused on the study of language, Russian Formalists were
essentially interested in the application of linguistics to the study of literature, and
regarded the latter as a particular organization of language; literature is an assemblage of
devices (narrative contracts and techniques, dramatic representations, sound, imagery,
syntax, rhythm, meter…)which individually and collectively contribute to an effect that
they called “estrangement,” or “making strange,” or “defamiliarization”; so, as distinct
from our automatized ordinary way of speaking—our everyday “discourses”—literature
forces us into a dramatic awareness of language as such, by some kind of linguistic
violence; in other words, for the formalists, by recognizing that norms and deviations
shifted around from one social or historical context to another, they saw literariness as a
function of the differential relations between one kind of discourse and another; being self-
referential language, or language that talks about itself, the context plays an essential role
as one thing that seems a deviation or a defamiliarization at one moment or in one place
may not be as such in another; and so the definition of literature comes not necessarily
from the nature of what is written, but from how somebody decides or chooses to read;
thus literature is as much a question of what people do to writing as of what writing does to
them; hence, implications for cognitive stylistics, since we already know that we always
interpret literary work, to a larger or lesser extent, in the light of our concerns (i.e.
schemata or schemas); in this sense, again, one can think of literature less as some inherent
set of qualities (devices, figures) displayed by certain kinds of writing, than as a number of
ways in which we (readers) relate ourselves to writing; thus all literary works are
rewritten, over and over again, in view of readers’ interests at one moment or another
(since interests are constitutive of our knowledge; which is why one (like Terry Eagleton)
might want to introduce here the concept of ideology as something that determines our
reading (in context).
From a slightly different perspective, it is this markedness of a text that conditions our
proper approach to literature, so that the cognitive character of literariness comes not only
form how it is received, but from some inherent features of the text’s makeup, even though
these features may be blurred between one type of discourse and another; one has to take
into account that such a text is intended as a work of art. So we come to the point where we
might have to distinguish between the text’s literariness and its communicative function as
a message; when the reader perceives the text as literary, the apparent communicative
content of the message is a sort of virtual rather than an actual communication, so one
would have to think again of Jakobson’s six function of the language in the communicative
process (one of which is the poetic function). This way, since the communicative message
and the literary text are received cognitively in completely different ways, the appropriate
(let us forget about the meanings of this word) responses to each are different; the capacity
of a text to deliver a simple message, or a literarily marked aesthetic emotion depends upon
the specific knowledge of its readership (we have to know, for instance, that “the sound and
the fury” is form a certain passage in Macbeth in order to more appropriately read
Faulkner’s novel; or we may have to know quite a number of things about Emily
Dickinson’s life and work to understand her first line “I heard a fly buzz when I died” an
so on); cognitivism focuses on avoiding the confusion between a literary text and a
communicative message; markedness on a variety of levels requires knowledge of another
variety of contexts, and thus literariness conditions the proper approach to literature.
David S. Miall and Don Kuiken (“What Is Literariness? Empirical Traces of Reading,”
web) move one step away or beyond this type of cognitivism and try to persuade us that
“feeling, not cognition, is the primary vehicle for the process of literary understanding”
(p.1). Literariness is defined as a distinctive mode of reading (rather than the outcome of
rhetorical devices on one hand and of operations of discourse processing on the
other)identifiable through three components of reader response (their study seems to have
as a background I. A. Richards’ experiment in the 1920s, published as Practical Criticism).
The first component of literariness is style, or the use of a distinctive kind of language; ;the
second is defamiliarization; and the third is what we discussed before under the heading of
schemas, i.e. the gradual modification of a (pre-)existing concept or feeling; thus, it is
feeling which is the primary vehicle for both foregrounding and defamiliarization and for
the transformation of readers’ concepts. And array of cognitive processes in reader’s
response is based upon the fact that “feeling… implicates the reader’s self concept and
provides a route to specific issues relating to the self, as well as the experiences and
memories that may provide a new interpretive context following the moment of
defamiliarization” (p.8). It is the reader’s attempts to articulate the phenomena within the
text that are striking and evocative of feeling that makes both markedness and
defamiliarization important in constituting literariness.

Cybertextuality

Cognitive stylistics seems to be addressing three main questions: how the reader’s prior
knowledge contributes to an understanding of a literary text; how the reader infers
features of the literary universe (however that may be represented) in text organization;
and how we identify textual cues in text organization. University of Toronto’s Ian
Lancashire (“Cybertextuality,” Text Technology, no.2, 2004) complicates the pattern a
little by introducing this new concept, starting from the premise that we are “cognitively
blind to how we create most utterances” since we unselfconsciously model our very
language acts. This new concept (no longer new, in fact, since it had been used, among
others, by Espen Aarseth in his 1997 Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature),
cybertextuality refers to a kind of linguistic mental modeling that observes three principles:
recursiveness (since we ourselves, as speakers, receive our language acts before anyone else
does, we get our own feedback—already a problematic term here—to represent those
speech acts meaningfully, and thus our every utterance serves as an input to another; we
say and think of what we are saying and change the saying in the process), complexity (this
feedback messaging operates at several levels: phonetic, lexical, grammatical, semantic…)
and homeostasis(the most obvious one: dynamic self-regulation as we revise, over and over
again sometimes, what is being said or written—in manuscript, word-processor, printed
book…) His new question—which is old, and very general in cognitive stylistics—comes
from John R. Pierce (An Introduction to Information Theory, 1961, p.62): “Can we
someday say valid, simple, and important things about the working of the mind in
producing written text and other things as well?”
Lancashire’s arena for communication is based upon Norbert Wiener’s kubernetes, i.e.
steersman, who receives feedback from the helm as he is controlling the ship; the
cybernetic channel thus contains two actions, sending the message and receiving the
feedback, very often almost simultaneously; there is, of course, a channel, a message
accompanied by noise, and a receiver, with al five modules at work in the communication
process. Let us say here that noise in literary communication (this time) is represented
mostly by figures, and literature might thus be defined as the only communication system
that derives extra-meanings from the “noise” along the channel.
In 1999, in her How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,
and Informatics Katherine N. Hayles shifts again the emphasis, in cybernetics, from sender
and sending of messages to receiving and receiver of messages, and takes us back to
literariness as the product of reading, rather than of writing, practices; both authorial
intention and text-object are dissolved into reader-response theory; the reader does not
merely receive the text (to deconstruct it, most likely), but reconstructs and even constructs
its reality; in a cybernetic system everything seems to be performed by the observer; once
again, we hear only what we actively construct; if the cybertextual message includes first
the sender’s subvocalized speech (followed by speech as such, written text or printed text),
the receiver seems to unconsciously vocalize (and then hear or read) a model of what he
suspects the speaker is saying; the receiver subvocalizes (and then understands) the
feedback itself; he can sometimes hear, therefore, things that had never been uttered; of
course, there is also the noise which may corrupt the message (or enrich it, in the case of
literature) during its transit. This cognitive psychology of speaking, hearing, and reading is
encompassed by cybertextuality, which, in fact, means the mind talking to itself.
In Lancashire then goes on to tell us (we already know what he means to say as we are
the constructors of the message) that “the principal mechanism of cybertextual control… is
to internalize the cybernetic cycle”(p.8); writers-senders self-regulate by becoming, on the
spot, their own readers; writers find several means (revision is not a very good term, but it
will do for the moment) to stabilize their (cyber)texts so that they could be held in their
consciousness; revision itself might be regarded as a cybernetic cycling, as critical thinking
—which had been there in the first place—returning to see how the text of its own making
has come to function; that reader in the writer is the ideal reader who constructs the real
message (Dr. Jekyll always know what Mr. Hyde would do); “the author becomes the
reader who provides mainly negative feedback to himself as author, and the cybernetic
cycle becomes a torus.” (p.9) It is difficult not to quote, for our ending, Lancashire’s final
statement about literature: “literature depicts us cybernetically stalled in midcycle, or
snared in recursive self-revision, or isolated on the threshold of a cacophonous channel.”
Torus or no torus, however, we cannot help noticing that the emphasis upon the receiver as
the most important constructor of meaning is somewhat far-fetched.

5.5.Overview

Cognitivism seems to have accompanied stylistics from its early stages of development as a
discipline, since it is basically how mind and language interact in the production of
utterances, of messages, or of texts (in a very general meaning of the term). Discourse
analysis may be closer to pragmatics, but it shares many of its interests with stylistics;
stylometry itself is not very new, but with the oncome of computers, quantitative analyses
especially used in authorship identification received a much greater impetus and
importance; finally, cognitive stylistics comes directly on the front stage and imposes such
types of interpretation as those connected with schemas and image schemas, and most
importantly, a number of revised views on literariness. In as far as we are concerned here,
cybertextuality only projects older questions onto a new background, since it is basically
the relationship between critical thinking on one hand, and literary critical thinking and
creativity on the other, in the sense that critical thinking had been there before and is there
after the creative process.

DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES, Ed.

„Universitas XXI”, Iaşi, 2010