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. 1 casual. associative…). scientific texts. foreign words and barbarisms. 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. and a colloquially marked layer (colloquial words. Mr. allusion. size. paronomasia. the vocabulary of any language (of English. nouns seem to dominate lexical distribution in written texts. apostrophe. even stilted—to others—neutral. as one general observation. for advertising and conversation or public speaking and so on. litotes. a literarily marked layer (literary and learned words. to which a number of other linguistic aspects should be added. but also from one organization—written. administrative texts. antonymy. purpose. angle. space. paragraph structure. antithesis…). oxymoron.). then other grammatical levels—familiar. diaphora. If intonation is the way emotion is expressed in speech. hyperonomy. cognitive. space organization. common-core words). homophony. formal. underlining. slang. personification. design. in his definition of the poetic principle). dialect words. catachresis. graphs. jargon. 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. (So. epiphora. Brown was obliged to seek alternative employment. The main referent (signified) carrier in linguistic communication is the vocabulary. regularity. geometrical patterns or devices used as graphic symbolism).) and of printing (typography: layout again. After his father’s death Peter had to change his job. Otherwise. emotive. punctuation was devised for expressing the emotional and volitional aspects of language in writing. metaphor. intensity…. the various punctuation marks are used to represent—as far and as faithfully as possible—the suprasegmental features mentioned before. and. conceptual) and connotation (expressive. paradox. Pete had to get another job. When his dad died. anaphora.and also relevant is the distinction between denotation (referential. timbre. 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). spoken). while verbs are more commonly utilized in speech. the use of tables. poetic and archaic ones. 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. homography…. From the point of view of its stylistic potential. line direction. from obliged to to had to. shape. 1977) contains a standard or neutral unmarked layer (nonspecific. informal. polite…--represent stylistic variations to the same extent as the lexical ones. and type of font. If correctness is the norm. not only from decease to death. circumstances and format. specific grammatical features become markers for academic texts. and so semantics is bound to be the main field of investigation for stylistics. for Galperin. illustrations. Brown to Peter to Pete. metonymy. obviously. etc. etc. vulgarisms…) The semantic relations of some relevance to stylistics are synonymy. if orthography is the prescriptive norm for using punctuation in this effort of representing tempo. homonymy. 2 . asyndeton. from employment to job and from Mr. the special type of connotative meanings represented by figurative language or tropes (simile. polysemy.Written communication differs from spoken communication in terms of channel. professional words. synecdoche. stress. hyponymy. or idiosyncratic preferences. second. Style as choice depends on such user-bound factors as speaker’s or writer’s age. Jakobson. Finally. such formal structures as rhyme and meter. depending on the types of emphasis placed in one field or another. Sinclair: language use in context and corpus linguistics). unusual linguistic preferences. side by side with rhetoric (also a close relative). A number of principles will reveal more clearly both the distinct type of study that discourse analysis pursues. while studying language use “beyond the utterance boundary. regional and social background. Again like stylistics. from vocabulary and meanings to syntax and speech acts and all other aspects of linguistic interaction. with the advent of computers.” also focuses on naturally occurring language use. lawyers…). applied linguistics. and its many ties to other linguistic approaches. the processes and practices involved in creating a discourse. translation studies and in the teaching of foreign languages. and the social context or contexts that influence and determine it: so discourse analysis has in view most 3 . as—again noted—deviation from a norm. discourse and cognition and so on. which brings it very close to contextual stylistics. stylistics and cognitive stylistics included. 5. politicians. As distinct from traditional linguistics.) A statistical understanding of style would generally refer to recurrence of linguistic forms. typical variations. it also analyses the relationships between text and context.). it topics of interest include all levels of such language use.Along these lines and on all these levels style may be regarded (as already noticed) as a choice of linguistic means. etc. between discourse and power. it thus more appropriately studies three levels of language use: the text as such. with careful emphasis upon the relationships between relevant textual and contextual factors. and as comparison.2. linguistic schools proliferated—especially in the 20th century--. gender. Style as deviation is most commonly used in literary stylistics and authorship identification (words and word combinations. it is the study of the way language is used by particular groups in a society (educators. which would make room for something defined as macrostylistics. and. discourse analysis is also the study of language in use. journalist. discourse analysis has been described as the study of the organization of language above the level of the sentence. Mukarovsky: “form follows function”. style as comparison comes only to reveal a feature implicit in all the previous approaches. etc. Halliday. since texts can only differ from some norm as they are compared both to the norm (which is often ambiguous) and among themselves. attitude. thus. scholars. it analyses authentic texts as produced in some realworld context. thirdly. as recurrence of linguistic forms. more relevantly. which is also the field of functional stylistics. field and type of discourse. It can thus safely be said that stylistics is included in discourse analysis. and cognitivism. increasingly important. become corpus linguistic methods and stylometry. but its slightly differing definitions place it in the strict vicinity of stylistics. First. discourse analysis. and British Contextualism—Firth. Discourse Analysis Discourse analysis has developed in the past few decades as a discipline in it own right. on the methodology and instruments used in research (see especially the Prague School of Linguistics—Dolezel. and on situation-bound factors (medium of communication. On the basis of these four views on style. and. there are here many applications in comparative cultural studies. from sounds to gestures. or Shakespeare. keywords. thus. etc. 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. it appears that discourse analysis. in view of what has just been shown. and not the result of deliberate design. to examine the effectiveness of words and constructions in conveying meaning. In simpler terms. and social dimensions with their relevant consequences upon the existence of a community. contemporary—computational stylistics that applies statistical and machine learning techniques to features extracted from a text. authorship attribution.Slylometry and Computational Stylistics Stylometry and stylometrics has a history that goes back to the 19 th century. with many anonymous authors of texts). total number of sentences and total number of quotations. upon a quantification of its features therefore. but much more effective— consists in finding as large a set of topic-independent (the content has never been important 4 . stylometry is thus the discipline or science of measuring literary style.of the cultural. to describe the poetic/literary form of a piece of writing. discourse analysis is accessible to large. syntactic affinities between texts. 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. fourth. number of function words (temporal prepositions. and to describe the lexical and syntactic variability of one or several passages in the discourse. etc. but also with Plato. and what it measures is a variety of aspects on different levels of textual functioning: rare or striking features. both discourse analysis and stylistics are meant to draw inferences about the psychological state of the speaker (sender). but it is only in more recent years—and especially with the availability of large computers—that this kind of study really flourished. 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). vocabulary patterns and morphological data.. to evaluate the effectiveness of the discourse upon the listener (receiver). genre characterization and others are taken over by modern—well. for instance. One of the main concerns in stylometry is authorship identification (with the Bible as a favourite text. stylometry is in fact the opposite of stylistics. and finally. in passing. political. common words (as opposed to rare ones). non-specialist communities of readers. of course. frequency of relative clauses. The new methodology—not very much different from the old one. sentence embedding transformations. word lengths and sentence lengths. and so stylistics is once again essential. It may have become obvious that “textual” manipulations will form a major point of interest. Given that the variability of language is infinite and that new stylistic devices that never existed before can always be created. hyphenated compound words. is an open-ended enterprise. 5. 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. Since stylometry has proved to involve more and more sophisticated math and since the amount of computer-readable literary texts continues to increase. and. and is mainly based upon the statistical analysis of literary style. like stylistics. or the Federalist Papers. that by assuming that some particularities of style are actually unconscious.3. Let us note. After all. 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.e. 2002 and Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics: And Introduction. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper. i.” Semino and Culpeper present cognitive stylistics as combining “the kind of explicit. since readers prefer a certain kind of story and a certain type of message. mental spaces and discourse worlds and text world theory. It is also an important instrument in creative writing since it tells you. Cognitive Stylistics There are two things about cognitive stylistics that should be pointed out right away. analysis of a text as a realization of particular choices of meanings (language itself is taken to be a system of choices. but content too. 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. so. and information theory to indicate a book’s potential to be on the best-seller list. or with a field covering the interface between linguistics.e. London: Routledge.” (IX) while cognitive poetics would study the psychological and 5 . context and the effort toward cognition by means of textual organization. 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.in stylometrics) features as possible and use them as input to a generic learning algorithm. but this would take us into a different set of problems.. scripts and schemas. for instance. This has been done in what came to be called Systemic Functional Linguistics. i. and software tells you exactly what modifications are necessary for your text to come close to the one people buy. with conceptual metaphor and the parabolic literary mind and narrative comprehension. syntactic structures. or combinations thereof. literary studies and cognitive science. dealing as it does with figures and grounds and prototypes. Language and Cognition in Text Analysis. surrounded by the lexico-grammar stratum. eds. and second. discourse strategy. first. stylistics has always been principally cognitive. 2002). In their “Introduction. This application might also be used in another form of computer-based creativity. with the application of theories of cognitive linguistics (specifically. with phonology/graphology in the center. there is thus just one step before the computer will give us itself the vest novel on the market. side by side with deep-structure pattern-recognition. predictive modeling. since it finds itself at the confluence of text. the real or aspiring author. with cognitive deixis and cognitive grammar. which is the internet’s hypertextual literature. and this is reflected in choice of words. for which purpose language is modeled stratally. not only a resource for making meaning. FictionFixer applies corpus linguistics and computational literary stylistics. it in not only form that is being quantified. this independence from the topic of the text (non-denotational) is both relative and very important. cognitive semantics) to the interpretation of literature. then the semantics stratum and the contextual one). a program that analyses more than two-hundred-and-fifty characteristics of best-selling novels. since the assumption is that the author chose (consciously) one mode of expression form among a number of equivalent modes. A very interesting application in computational stylistics is the so-called FictionFixer. cognitive stylistics is often used as a synonym for cognitive poetics (see. Cognitive Stylistics. but we can revise our schema for understanding a poem when or as we read a prose poem or a picture poem. 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. an any given domain. some sort of literary competence which obviously is not a stable state. 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. but also in interpreting or decoding it. much of what a conversation partner is going to say to you before he has actually said it. In his turn. Ronald Langacker. in a certain way. all schemata are context specific. if we have a hierarchy of knowledge organization. and particularly in the teaching of reading. Schema and Image Schema Cognitivism in general may be a very complex process resulting in a complicated philosophy. information coming from him that does not fit into the listener’s schema or schemata may not be comprehended. You know. without any change at all in the information received). they do not remember the exact sentences and organization of the text. However. Schemata are categorical roles or scripts or scenarios (avoid the negative meaning here) according to which people interpret the world. for better educational results. then subject is what and how we remember that plot. so that when they think back to such a text. readers of novels use their schematic representations of story to turn it into their own story. Moreover. if plot is the sequencing of events in a narrative. and it is received according to what already is there. so that a reader of scientific texts will or may have difficulties in understanding a critical essay on aesthetics. conversely. As already suggested. in this view. that hierarchy may and will change as we experience other similar cognitive processes. but rather their own interpretation of it. much better that novices in the same domain. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff) found it fit to restrict textual knowledge to a theory of schemata. for that matter—actively builds schemata and revises them in light of new information. teachers of reading have discovered that they need to activate certain reading schemata by 6 . what we seem to be talking about is. schemata are patterns of expectation built on our prior knowledge. for instance. 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. what is important to note is that a receiver in schema theory—a reader or a learner. but a number of scholars (like Leonard Talmy.social effects of the structure of a literary text on the reader’s mind. in fact. 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. So. Schemata are important not only in receiving information. tuning (reader realizes that his schema is inadequate and modifies it accordingly—experience and learning provide room for a new schema hierarchy). we know a poem when we see one (see Stanley Fish’s Essay “How to Recognize a Poet When You See One”). but an infinitely (well. experts function. So. this schema theory may have an important role in instructional strategies. 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). a life long) progressive accumulation. Viktor Shklovsky. let us also say that an image schema is a recurring pattern in our cognitive process and. in the period. and equilibrium. more constantly at least since its explicit conceptualization by the Russian Formalists (Roman Jakobson. except for image schema. cyclic climax. blockage.using metacognitive strategies to activate pupils’ schemata before reading proper begins.and interdisciplinarity) in order to be able to construct more complex schemata. full-empty. there are several concepts here. “Leave out that big log when you stack the firewood”—direct. such as interpreting the title of a text. merging. contact. it may also be that learners should be exposed to similar knowledge in quite a number of different contexts (trans. removal of restraint. object. path to endpoint. “Tell me the story again. across. linguistic experience and historical context. non-metaphorical schema. since the theory is too extensive. in the “force group” schemata of compulsion. according to Mark Johnson (The Body in the Mind) and George Lakoff (Women. link. looking for comparisons and analogies—in the genre. cycle. Thus. length) and in the “transformational group” (linear path from moving object. path. Having thus come closer and closer to literature. contact. diversion. and don’t leave out any details”—schema metaphorically projected onto story-telling. Boris Tomashevsky. or even commenting on the cover of the book and other visuals in the text. Johnson identifies in his book over thirty image schemata. rotation…) Literariness From early on in literary studies and. attraction.—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. centerperiphery. part-whole. covering. collection… Lakoff adds a number of schemata in the “spatial group” (above. process. reflexive. Fire. enablement. Since context seems to be so important. vertical orientation. in the “balance group” schemata of axis balance. these two authors look at an image schema as being an embodied prelinguistic structure of experience that motivates conceptual metaphor mappings. “I don’t want to leave anything out of my argument”—schema metaphorically projected onto argumentation. “She finally came out of her depression”—schema metaphorically projected onto emotional life). path to object mass. point balance. etc. such as surface. or among other discourse? If literature transforms and intensifies 7 . 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. and Dangerous Things) image schemata emerge from our bodily interactions. or looking at the first paragraph. In the “spatial motion group” he defines schemata of containment (“out” is his example: “He went out of the room”—a clearly defined trajectory. literariness imposed itself as a constant preoccupation and challenge for literary scholars in general and stylisticians in particular. splitting. “The train started out for Chicago”—the containing landmark is only implied. Yury Tynyanov. in one language. Osip Brik. near-far. twin-pan balance. source-path-goal. and then a number of other schemata that are just listed and not discussed. scale. The above mentioned context may become even more relevant if the reading/learning process includes information from the cultural and other types of background. which he places in several groups. Boris Eichenbaum) in the early 1920s. that need exemplification at least. counterforce. e. and the Russian Formalists themselves provide only partial explanations (others denying the concept outright). than as a number of ways in which we (readers) relate ourselves to writing. thus all literary works are rewritten. 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. again. to a larger or lesser extent. so. literature is an assemblage of devices (narrative contracts and techniques. do we (again. in view of readers’ interests at one moment or another (since interests are constitutive of our knowledge. it is this markedness of a text that conditions our proper approach to literature. in this sense. syntax. for instance. By being particularly focused on the study of language. but from some inherent features of the text’s makeup. rhythm. From a slightly different perspective. that “the sound and the fury” is form a certain passage in Macbeth in order to more appropriately read 8 . So we come to the point where we might have to distinguish between the text’s literariness and its communicative function as a message. the capacity of a text to deliver a simple message. 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). so that the cognitive character of literariness comes not only form how it is received. but from how somebody decides or chooses to read. meter…)which individually and collectively contribute to an effect that they called “estrangement. which is why one (like Terry Eagleton) might want to introduce here the concept of ideology as something that determines our reading (in context). for the formalists. since the communicative message and the literary text are received cognitively in completely different ways. thus literature is as much a question of what people do to writing as of what writing does to them. imagery.ordinary language. the appropriate (let us forget about the meanings of this word) responses to each are different. if it deviates systematically from everyday speech (one is tempted to avoid the highly problematic concept of “norm”). Russian Formalists were essentially interested in the application of linguistics to the study of literature. sound. they saw literariness as a function of the differential relations between one kind of discourse and another. This way. by some kind of linguistic violence.” or “defamiliarization”. and so the definition of literature comes not necessarily from the nature of what is written. since we already know that we always interpret literary work. dramatic representations. in other words. one can think of literature less as some inherent set of qualities (devices. one has to take into account that such a text is intended as a work of art. as distinct from our automatized ordinary way of speaking—our everyday “discourses”—literature forces us into a dramatic awareness of language as such. or language that talks about itself. figures) displayed by certain kinds of writing. being selfreferential language. even though these features may be blurred between one type of discourse and another. and regarded the latter as a particular organization of language. in the light of our concerns (i. 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. over and over again. hence. schemata or schemas). 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.” or “making strange. by recognizing that norms and deviations shifted around from one social or historical context to another. implications for cognitive stylistics. or a literarily marked aesthetic emotion depends upon the specific knowledge of its readership (we have to know. ” Text Technology. Miall and Don Kuiken (“What Is Literariness? Empirical Traces of Reading. the gradual modification of a (pre-)existing concept or feeling. is the primary vehicle for the process of literary understanding” (p. receive our language acts before anyone else does. David S. word-processor. lexical. not cognition.8). how the reader infers features of the literary universe (however that may be represented) in text organization.” web) move one step away or beyond this type of cognitivism and try to persuade us that “feeling. 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. in fact.Faulkner’s novel. since it had been used. markedness on a variety of levels requires knowledge of another variety of contexts. and how we identify textual cues in text organization. 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. among others. University of Toronto’s Ian Lancashire (“Cybertextuality. starting from the premise that we are “cognitively blind to how we create most utterances” since we unselfconsciously model our very language acts. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature).62): “Can we 9 . printed book…) His new question—which is old. 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). 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.the second is defamiliarization. cybertextuality refers to a kind of linguistic mental modeling that observes three principles: recursiveness (since we ourselves. no.1). This new concept (no longer new.2. and thus our every utterance serves as an input to another. The first component of literariness is style. published as Practical Criticism). it is feeling which is the primary vehicle for both foregrounding and defamiliarization and for the transformation of readers’ concepts. p. and very general in cognitive stylistics—comes from John R. . A. over and over again sometimes. 2004) complicates the pattern a little by introducing this new concept. Cybertextuality Cognitive stylistics seems to be addressing three main questions: how the reader’s prior knowledge contributes to an understanding of a literary text. what is being said or written—in manuscript. complexity (this feedback messaging operates at several levels: phonetic. as well as the experiences and memories that may provide a new interpretive context following the moment of defamiliarization” (p. by Espen Aarseth in his 1997 Cybertext. cognitivism focuses on avoiding the confusion between a literary text and a communicative message. i. grammatical. Pierce (An Introduction to Information Theory. or the use of a distinctive kind of language. and thus literariness conditions the proper approach to literature. we say and think of what we are saying and change the saying in the process). Richards’ experiment in the 1920s. thus. we get our own feedback—already a problematic term here—to represent those speech acts meaningfully. as speakers. semantic…) and homeostasis(the most obvious one: dynamic self-regulation as we revise.e. 1961. and the third is what we discussed before under the heading of schemas. but reconstructs and even constructs its reality. in the case of literature) during its transit.8). he can sometimes hear. if the cybertextual message includes first the sender’s subvocalized speech (followed by speech as such. for our ending. steersman. written text or printed text). Hyde would do). in cybernetics. their own readers. and a receiver.someday say valid. there is also the noise which may corrupt the message (or enrich it.9) It is difficult not to quote. we cannot help noticing that the emphasis upon the receiver as the most important constructor of meaning is somewhat far-fetched. In 1999. therefore. rather than of writing. there is. Jekyll always know what Mr. Let us say here that noise in literary communication (this time) is represented mostly by figures. i. with al five modules at work in the communication process.” (p. on the spot. This cognitive psychology of speaking. of course. 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. who receives feedback from the helm as he is controlling the ship. since it is basically how mind and language interact in the production of utterances. sending the message and receiving the feedback. from sender and sending of messages to receiving and receiver of messages. writers-senders self-regulate by becoming. very often almost simultaneously. simple.” Torus or no torus. and reading is encompassed by cybertextuality. but it will do for the moment) to stabilize their (cyber)texts so that they could be held in their consciousness. hearing. the cybernetic channel thus contains two actions. Hayles shifts again the emphasis. or snared in recursive self-revision. 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. we hear only what we actively construct. or of texts (in a very general meaning of the term). Discourse 10 . once again. means the mind talking to itself. a channel. and Informatics Katherine N. which. Lancashire’s final statement about literature: “literature depicts us cybernetically stalled in midcycle. of messages. however. Literature.Overview Cognitivism seems to have accompanied stylistics from its early stages of development as a discipline. both authorial intention and text-object are dissolved into reader-response theory. in her How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics. 5. the reader does not merely receive the text (to deconstruct it.5. and the cybernetic cycle becomes a torus. things that had never been uttered. in a cybernetic system everything seems to be performed by the observer. of course. practices. most likely). and literature might thus be defined as the only communication system that derives extra-meanings from the “noise” along the channel. that reader in the writer is the ideal reader who constructs the real message (Dr. “the author becomes the reader who provides mainly negative feedback to himself as author. or isolated on the threshold of a cacophonous channel. in fact. the receiver subvocalizes (and then understands) the feedback itself. revision itself might be regarded as a cybernetic cycling. the receiver seems to unconsciously vocalize (and then hear or read) a model of what he suspects the speaker is saying. writers find several means (revision is not a very good term. 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. a message accompanied by noise. and takes us back to literariness as the product of reading.e. but with the oncome of computers. but it shares many of its interests with stylistics. and literary critical thinking and creativity on the other. a number of revised views on literariness. In as far as we are concerned here. Ed. finally. Iaşi. DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES. since it is basically the relationship between critical thinking on one hand. quantitative analyses especially used in authorship identification received a much greater impetus and importance. 2010 11 . „Universitas XXI”. and most importantly. cybertextuality only projects older questions onto a new background. stylometry itself is not very new. in the sense that critical thinking had been there before and is there after the creative process.analysis may be closer to pragmatics. cognitive stylistics comes directly on the front stage and imposes such types of interpretation as those connected with schemas and image schemas.