The Stylistics of Embodiment Language and Sensory Memory in Lyric Texts

This book presents a stylistic framework for analysing embodiment in lyric texts. While the assumption that our minds are embodied underlies most approaches in cognitive stylistics (and beyond), a systematic account of the linguistic patterns through which the body may be manifested in poetic expression has not yet been provided. Aiming to fill this gap, the book focuses on contemporary lyric texts that prominently engage the senses in depicting past experiences. Drawing its tools mainly from Cognitive Grammar and research on conceptual metaphors and iconicity, the book investigates how sensory language gives rise to simulated embodied responses. In doing so, the book views poetic expression as a complex interplay of modalities and seeks to expand the concept of the lyric by incorporating digital poetry, song lyrics, performance poetry and lyrical prose among its case studies. The book furthermore brings in current cognitive scientific research on the workings of memory to the analysis of sensory memory, most centrally the psychological phenomenon of mental time travel. It will be of interest to students and scholars working on stylistics, literary studies, and multimodal and intermedial studies.

1.- Introduction:- language, the senses, and mental time travel.- 2.- Perspective: presence and distance through deictic expressions.- 3.- Spatial awareness: marking and crossing boundaries with prepositions.- 4.- Specificity and (in)tangibility: nouns as grounds.- 5.- Simulated motion: verbs communicating change.- 6.- Sensing the past: multimodal adjectives.- 7.- Perceptual metaphors as cognitive resources.- 8.- Review:- embodied retrospection.

Anne Holm is a Senior Lecturer in Literatures in English at Linnaeus University, Sweden. She earned her PhD at the University of Tampere, Finland in 2014 with a dissertation on embodied metaphors in Dylan Thomas’s writing. Her research revolves around embodiment and sensory language, multimodality in poetry, and the stylistics of lyrical prose. She is a member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS), where she is also involved in the MIDWorld graduate school (Multimodality and Intermediality: Humanist Research in a Digital World).