认知诗学讲座报告AfterthoughtsonthelecturegvenbyMargaretH.Freeman.docx

Afterthoughts on the lecture given by Margaret H. FreemanThe lecture which was titled “Dwelling in Possibility: A Cognitive Poetics Approach to the Poetry of Emily Dickinson” was given by Margaret H. Freeman, an American scholar who is specialized especially in the research of Emily Dickinson. She offered us a new and inspiring way of analyzing and appreciating English poems, which is often not the methodology we use in our literature class.: the cognitive poetic approach. By carefully listening and reflecting on what Professor Freeman’s remarks during the lecture, I have reached a better understanding of cognitive poetics. Cognitive poetics is the study of literature using knowledge from the cognitive sciences, a theory that attempts to account for the affective aspects of a literary text, a means for understanding the aesthetic processes of human cognition, otherwise called mind science, or “minding”. About Emily Dickinson, Professor Freeman showed us her own insights in the works and cognition of Emily Dickinson by citing some of her poems. Dickinson’s poetry was not published until after her death. That meant that the editors had to work from manuscripts like the one above. The poem “At length, a Mourner, like Myself” was used here. Note that the poem printed in the latest Franklin edition has regularized lines, chosen the original entries for the words recollected, crape, dwelt, contract, wiser. In the last stanza, the line “I never questioned Her” has been replaced with the two following lines, “She never questioned Me - /Nor I - Herself -.” The markings, which go up or down, or straight, dots or longer, are all rendered either as commas or as dashes. Even her capitalization is problematic. Such problems highlight the perennial and vexing question of what, exactly, constitutes a Dickinson poem. Most Dickinson scholars prefer to consider that the poems represent the fluctuating nature of the poetic process rather than being fixed and unalterable artifacts. For