Cognitive Poetics and Italian Literary Criticism

Biffle, John (2014) Cognitive Poetics and Italian Literary Criticism. Undergraduate thesis, under the direction of Valerio Cappozzo from Modern Languages, The University of Mississippi.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the possibility of the application of cognitive poetics to Italian literature, with a comparison to four major nineteenth century currents of literary criticism. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the research, the data was obtained from reviewed psychology articles, textbooks regarding both psychological and literary subjects, original sources containing the examined poetry and prose, e-books, and open source web material for literary works that lacked copyright. Unless specified, all translations from Italian to English were done by me. Since cognitive poetics are based on the assumption that we perceive literature similarly to how we perceive reality and that no other information outside the text is needed, the method proved to be highly applicable to any examined literary work, regardless of the author or period in which it was composed. A less unexpected discovery after the two-year long investigation was that, while at first the old and new methods seem to clash, the Italian techniques of literary criticism gained gradually increasing common elements with the cognitive method. This seems to suggest an inherent tendency to strive towards an analytical and objective examination of art which, through the application of scientific cognitive principles, is the ultimate goal of cognitive poetics.

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