2020 m. vasario 7 d. 17 val. kviečiame į Kognityvinių mokslų centro seminarą, kuriame VU Filologijos fakulteto mokslininkas dr. Davide Castiglione skaitys pranešimą „Poetic difficulty vs obscurity: a new conceptualization”.Renginys vyks VU Filosofijos fakulteto (Universiteto g. 9) 307 aud.
Pranešimo santrauka (anglų kalba):
In literary criticism and aesthetics, “difficulty” and “obscurity” are often used interchangeably. Despite personal preferences and differences in emphasis across different authors, both terms have been consistently associated to (a) lack of understanding at textual level, and (b) distortion of linguistic norms at textual level. Against this general trend, in my work (Castiglione 2019) I draw a neat line between “difficulty” and “obscurity” – without denying the possibility that the experiences these terms describe may tangentially overlap in a reader (i.e. a poem can be deemed both difficult and obscure).“Difficulty” is conceptualized as a process-oriented reading experience underpinned by the conceptual metaphor DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDEMENTS TO MOVEMENT (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). “Obscurity”, on the other hand, is conceptualized as a goal-oriented hermeneutic practice underpinned by the common UNDERSTANDING IS LIGHT metaphor. In this talk, I intend to explore the consequences of this conceptualization by mapping such aesthetic experiences onto cognitive processes of comprehension: difficulty is understood in terms of deautomatized low-level processing operations (e.g. parsing, decoding, integration through bridging inferences meant to retrace coherence in the text) whilst obscurity is understood in terms of deautomatized high-level processing operations (e.g. inferences on intention, thematic inferences beyond the representation level, etc.). The theory is applied to specific poems or poetic extracts, arguing that their stylistic and compositional qualities play a role in prompting primarily a sense of surface resistance (difficulty) or enigmatic depth (obscurity). Finally, suggestions are given to test such hypotheses empirically.