This paper begins with the acknowledgment, on the 150th anniversary of his death, of Poe's significance as a great poetic theorist: whatever aesthetic and artistic evaluation the Bostonian Poe's work (1809-1849) may give rise to in the present-day reader, we must agree that his critical judgements of artistic works in themselves and his poetic theories have had far-reaching subsequent repercuss...

OETRY is not only central in the title, but for the study of the Hebrew Bible. There is no intention here of disvaluing the prose of the Bible, which constitutes the first major literary composition in that medium ever produced, so far as I am aware, whether we speak of the so-called Court History and the J source of the Pentateuch of the 10th century B.C., or the composite whole which we may c...

Musical behaviours are universal across human populations and, at the same time, highly diverse in their structures, roles and cultural interpretations. Although laboratory studies of isolated listeners and music-makers have yielded important insights into sensorimotor and cognitive skills and their neural underpinnings, they have revealed little about the broader significance of music for indi...

In the context of a single case study, this paper explores the musical interaction between a pupil and teacher, and the pupil’s evolving musicality, using the music-theoretical approach to the cognition of musical structure set out by Ockelford (2002, 2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2006a) – ‘zygonic theory’. The object of the study is a vocal improvisation by ‘K’, a 4 1⁄2 -year-old girl with septo-optic d...

Introduction. Most of the existing neurophysiological literature on metaphors comprehension focuses on the processing conventional metaphors (Coulson & Van Petten 2002) or generic novel metaphors (Tartter et al. 2002, Lai et al. 2009). Except for a few studies including poetic metaphors in Hebrew (Arzouan et al. 2007, Faust & Mashal 2007), no extensive neurophysiological investigation on the pr...

In many of my writings I have argued that poetic images have no fixed predetermined meanings. In my 1992 book What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?—The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception (originally published in 1987) I propounded the view that speech sounds do not have fixed predetermined symbolic values either.1 Poetic images as well as speech sounds are clusters of features, each of which may ...

In Poetic Effects Adrian Pilkington proposes that Sperber and Wilson's (1986; 1995) relevance theory can help fill the explanatory gap between textual patterns and their potential aesthetic effects. Before applying relevance theory to poetic texts, Pilkington first presents his position with regard to literary theory. This position is not unproblematic, however, and therefore requires some disc...

The space of bio-inspired hardware can be partitioned along three axes: phylogeny, ontogeny, and epigenesis. We refer to this as the POE model. Our Embryonics (for embryonic electronics) project is situated along the ontogenetic axis of the POE model and is inspired by the processes of molecular biology and by the embryonic development of living beings. We will describe the architecture of mult...

ntifying Poets Rohert Crawford speculates that 'the poet who constructs an identity I allows that poet to identify with a particular territory is the paradigmatic modern , adding that 'the position of poets in Scotland is typical of this situation' (Crawford 3: 142). One purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the limits of a Scottish literary ism preoccupied by the search for 'poetic selves t...

What cognitive processes are invoked in understanding the metaphors in a poem, or in any other work of art? Is there any creativity required from the reader? Indeed, as we will show with an example in this paper, some metaphors need creativity on the part of the reader to be interpreted meaningfully. Acknowledging the existence of such metaphor, however, raises a horde of other questions. How i...