Cognitive Literary Studies

doi:10.1017/9781108973946.012

Chapter 11 - Cognitive Literary Studies

from Part II - Recent Critical Methods Applied to Stevens

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2021

G. Gabrielle Starr

Edited by

Bart Eeckhout and

Gül Bilge Han

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Bart Eeckhout: Affiliation:
Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium
Gül Bilge Han: Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden

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Summary

In recent years, the poetry of Wallace Stevens has begun to attract the attention of scholars in cognitive literary studies as well. Starr’s chapter offers a cognitive analysis of two aesthetic modes in Stevens’s poetry. The first of these is disruption, in which Stevens violates metrical expectations or creates perceptual or cognitive disorientation. The second involves the manipulation of pleasure (either that represented in the poem or that which might be generated in readers) to call attention to formal features of a poem, and at times to help new formal features emerge from a disorderly formal background.

Keywords

Wallace Stevens cognitive literary studies imagery meter expectation violation form pleasure genre

Type: Chapter
Information: The New Wallace Stevens Studies , pp. 148 - 158

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108973946.012 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2021

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References

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