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Patterns of cognitive dissonance in readers’ engagement with characters
Get PDFLeon Festinger’s account of cognitive dissonance, published in 1957, has become one of the most successful theories in the history of social psychology. I argue that Festinger’s framework—and the research it generated over the last sixty years—can shed light on key aspects of readers’ engagement with literary characters. Literature can invite the audience to vicariously experience characters’ dissonance through an empathetic mechanism, but it can also induce dissonant states in readers by encouraging them to take on attitudes and beliefs that are significantly different from their own. I suggest that there are two strategies—or patterns of reader-response—through which the audience can cope with the dissonance between their own worldview and the characters’: attitude change and imaginative resistance. In the first, readers adjust their own beliefs and values according to what they have experienced and learned in adopting characters’ perspectives. By contrast, in imaginative resistance readers’ worldview prevents them from establishing an empathetic bond with characters. I integrate these hypotheses into a model that builds on theoretical as well as empirical insights into reader-response
Kafkaesque Absurdity in the Aesthetics of Beckett and Giacometti
Get PDFThe complex zone of what I refer to as the aesthetical absurd is examined in the works of Modernists Kafka, Giacometti, and Beckett. This aesthetic zone, addressed through cognitive poetics, exists between artistic notion, the artist’s ideal cognitive image, and the actual performance or resulting image born in reality. Artistic ideal is evaluated as the aesthetic image or notion that exists in a tentative nascent and emotive state, but one that the artist strives to produce in the world—to reconstruct from the cognitive zone of creativity—but at times fails to bring to completion or fruition. This ever present bifurcation between these two conflictive states leads to a new view of the Sisyphean absurd. Kafka stands as the beginning point of the discussion. His fragmented, at times incomplete, writing serves as a touchstone to position the aesthetics of the later Beckett and Giacometti, a sculptor. Beckett mirrors Kafka’s sensibility, and relates his negative aesthetic, one lacking or hiding any visible scaffolding for the artistic process. Beckett and Giacometti were friends and collaborated on crafting props for a staging of his signature play Waiting for Godot, a failed attempt. An assessment of the aesthetics of these three artists advances the understanding of their works in terms of the aesthetical absurd
L’argomentazione nelle prime cento pagine dello Zibaldone
Get PDFLe prime cento pagine dello Zibaldone di Giacomo Leopardi sono organizzate diversamente rispetto al resto del libro: sono numerate ma non datate, e mostrano un disordine che, per contrasto, è invece sorretto da un pensiero rigoroso. Il discorso ragionativo procede prevalentemente attraverso due modalità cognitive: secondo un principio analogico, e per salti metaforicamente connessi.The first one-hundred pages of Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone follow an organisation that differs from the structure held by the rest of the book. First of all, they are numbered but not dated. Secondly, their organisation is seemingly chaotic, though they proceed according a rigorous argumentation. The argumentative discourse is mostly structured around two cognitive modalities: following an analogical principle and proceeding through logical gaps connected by metaphors.
Eloquence (‘Beredsamkeit’) and Rhetoric (‘Rhetoric’) as Terms and Lexemes. The Concept of Rhetoric in the Dictionary Deutsches Wörterbuch of Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm in the Context of European Idea of the ‘National Language’ in the 19th Century
No full textThis article focuses on the European heritage of rhetoric in the 18th century within the dictionary Deutsches Wörterbuch by the brothers Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm as a case of transformation of knowledge from the classical language of scholarship - Latin - to the vernacular of Germany in scholarly literature. The dictionary Deutsches Wörterbuch begun by the Grimm brothers was finally edited in the 20th century. It is a source for the historical terms used in the German language in the written and published books prior to the first half of the 19th century. The Deutsches Wörterbuch presents historical terms, which are documents of the usage of the German language since the time of Luther, and also newly created terms resulting from translations. The concept of «rhetoric» in the dictionary demonstrates this dichotomy. The effects this dictionary had on its readers’ understanding of language will be shown in contrast to other European movements of national identity in the 19th century
Pigmalione: le forme e la struttura di un mito di sublimazione
Get PDFL’obiettivo di questo articolo è quello di tentare una definizione dei fenomeni del pigmalionismo e dell’effetto Pigmalione attraverso il confronto di alcune versioni del mito, e in particolare di quelle ‘superiori’, vale a dire quelle di Ovidio e di Rousseau, e delle interpretazioni avanzate da alcuni critici, come Maurizio Bettini, Gianpiero Rosati, Emilio Pianezzola, Charles Segal e Piero Bernardini Marzolla. Data la propria selettività, questa ricognizione non ha alcuna pretesa di esaustività documentaria: non si intende quindi fornire un repertorio completo delle successive variazioni, ma compiere un’analisi strutturale del mito considerandone le diverse declinazioni in una prospettiva sincronica. Una volta mostrato che, da un certo momento in avanti, l’artista che seppe commuovere gli dèi olimpici e vide esaudito da loro il proprio desiderio d’amore diventa suo malgrado protagonista di vicende comiche, nelle quali sarà l’oggetto principale delle beffe, si passerà a un punto di vista diacronico per mostrare che il Pygmalion di George Bernard Shaw rappresenta nella maniera più caratteristica e problematica il passaggio dal mito all’anti-mito.This essay aims at defining pygmalionism and the Pygmalion effect by comparing different versions of the myth, in particular the highbrow ones, i.e. Ovid’s and Rousseau’s, as well as analyses offered by scholars such as Maurizio Bettini, Gianpiero Rosati, Emilio Pianezzola, Charles Segal and Piero Bernardini Marzolla. This is a partial and selective overview which does not aim at completeness and exhaustiveness; the goal is to make a structural analysis of the myth by considering some variants in synchronic perspective. It will be first shown how, from a specific moment onwards, the artist who had been able to move Olympic gods and had his love desire granted, becomes a comic figure, where he is the main object of jokes and pranks, then we will see how George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion enacts the problematical shift from myth to anti-myth
Entretien avec Catherine Depretto
Get PDF Catherine Depretto est professeur de Langue et Littérature russe à l’Université de Paris – Sor-bonne et fait partie du comité de rédaction des “Cahiers du monde russe”. Elle est l’auteur d’une importante monographie sur le Formalisme Russe (Le Formalisme en Russie, paris IES, 2009). Elle a étudié des figures de premier plan du formalisme, telle que Jurij Tynjanov, ainsi que des linguistes proches des formalistes, comme Evgenij Polivanov. Elle a mené des recherches sur le contexte historique et théorique de l’Union Soviétique des années 30, en analysant les rapports entre marxisme et sciences du langage. Discacciati, Ornella. Interview with Catherine Depretto, 2013. Print
Rotte per muoversi dietro il paesaggio. Su due raccolte di Giulio Iacoli e Marina Guglielmi
Get PDFReview of Iacoli, Giulio, ed. Discipline del paesaggio. Milano-Udine: Mimesis, 2012. Print; Guglielmi, Marina and Giulio Iacoli, eds. Piani sul mondo. Le mappe nell’immaginazione letteraria. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012. Print.Recensiamo qui due raccolte di saggi: Giulio Iacoli (a cura di), Discipline del paesaggio. Milano- Udine: Mimesis, 2012, pp. 239; Marina Guglielmi e Giulio Iacoli (a cura di), Piani sul mondo. Le mappe nell’immaginazione letteraria. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012, pp. 197. Usciti a poca distanza l’uno dall’altro, entrambi i volumi intendono operare una ricognizione complessiva delle riflessioni teoriche intorno al paesaggio e alla sua rappresentazione, proponendo un approccio inter- e transdisciplinare.
Rapsodie della frontiera, di Stefano Rosso
Get PDFRecensiamo il volume di Stefano Rosso, Rapsodie della frontiera. Sulla narrativa western contemporanea. Genova: ECIG – Edizioni Culturali Internazionali, 2012. Review of Rosso, Stefano. Rapsodie della frontiera. Sulla narrativa western contemporanea. Genova: ECIG – Edizioni Culturali Internazionali, 2012. Print
Giorgio Caproni. La lingua, la morte di Paolo Zublena
Get PDF Recensiamo il volume di Paolo Zublena, Giorgio Caproni. La lingua, la morte. Milano: Edizione del Verri, 2013. Review of iZublena, Paolo. Giorgio Caproni. La lingua, la morte. Milano: Edizione del Verri, 2013. Print
Conversation with Peter Steiner
No full textBelow is the video of the interview recorded in Moscow in August 2013.Conversation with Peter Steine