Cognitive Stylistics in the Classroom.pdf

Michael BurkeRoosevelt Academy

Cognitive Stylistics in the Classroom

1. IntroductionCognitive stylistics has recently emerged as a topic of much interest in

university education in both literature and linguistics departments.' Its popularityis primarily built on the success that literary stylistics has enjoyed over the pastthirty years, especially in Europe, and on the relatively recent emergence ofcognitive linguistics as a highly persuasive approach to the study of grammar andmetaphor. There has, however, been little interest in studying teachingmethodology in the cognitive stylistics classroom. This article will therefore seekto start to address this omission.

In the recent past there have been some excellent pedagogical articles writtenon the teaching of literary stylistics in the university classroom (see, for example.Short; Simpson; Verdonk). These articles have all sought to record the pedagogicalstate of literary stylistics at a particular moment in time. This article will seek to addto the periodical recording of such moments. In particular, it will attempt to presentan overview, albeit limited, of some teaching practices in this current transitionalperiod in stylistics, from primarily textual stylistic analysis to principally cognitivestylistic ones. The very fact that stylistics finds itself at the confluence of text,context, and cognition arguably makes this an even more interesting moment tocheck on teaching practices and student requirements. Essentially therefore, thisarticle will seek to consider what students may need to know from the domain ofmainstream literary stylistics in order to be able to fully and fruitfully access acognitive approach to stylistic study. Hence, the central question that will be posedhere is whether or not a prior grounding in mainstream literary stylistics is desirablefor undergraduate students who might wish to take a course in cognitive stylistics.It might well be the case that students can take courses in cognitive stylisticswithout any prior knowledge of the workings of language and style in literature,without this having a marked effect on their capacity to learn in a cognitiveenvironment. This is what this article will hope to go some way towardsdiscovering. In short therefore, this response-based study will consider howcognitive stylistics is currently being taught in just one tertiary educationalenvironment, namely, in the English department at the Free University,Amsterdam. In doing so, it will aim to highlight some of the pedagogical

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shortcomings and suggest some possible solutions in order to assist undergraduatelearning in the cognitive stylistic classroom.

2. Methodology: Some PreliminariesAs has been suggested, one of the major concerns in my own stylistics teaching

at the dawn of the cognitive age of critical literary practice is to discover whetheror not it is advisable to allow undergraduate students to take advanced courses incognitive stylistics before they have taken a regular literary stylistics course. Inshort, I am interested in finding out whether students require a more textualapproach to stylistics before they move on into a more cognitive stylistic domain.This then is the main question that the testing in this article will set out to determine,as none of the twelve students in my cognitive stylistics course had previously beeninvolved in any kind of regular literary stylistics program. Prior to setting up thetest, I was inclined to make the tentative prognosis that students would indeedbenefit from such a preparatory textual approach to stylistics. As such, I predictedthat the majority of the students might very well struggle to link those verycognitive concepts that they were in the process of learning back to linguistic formand function for the practicalities of stylistic analysis.

There are obvious pedagogical reasons for wishing to know whether or not itis beneficial to find out if undergraduate students might benefit from an essentiallylinguistic/textual approach to stylistics, before they are confronted with a far moreabstract, and arguably far more abstruse, cognitive one. Although far from being aperfect match, the old adage pertaining to the advantages of one first learning towalk, before one learns to run, is apt here as an anecdotal point of departure.

2.1. A Potential ProblemLiterary stylistics is essentially a category of literary criticism, even though it

is just as often taught and studied by linguists as it is by literary scholars. It can beobserved how other forms of literary criticism, especially postmodernism, havebeen essentially far more research-led in undergraduate teaching than they havebeen pedagogy-led. In other words, lately it has all too often appeared to have beenfar more important to teach undergraduate students cutting-edge research withoutfirst teaching them the underlying basics upon which that research is grounded.One example can be seen in the undergraduate teaching of postmodern literarytheory at some higher educational institutions, where undergraduate students areall too often obliged to study certain deconstructive readings of both classical andnonclassical literary texts through postmodern philosophical or psychoanalyticlenses without ever having actually read the original text in a previous course.

The question is whether we, as teachers, want our undergraduate students toposses the jargon and the knowledge or just the jargon. Far too often, studentsappear to be extremely eloquent in dealing with cutting-edge critical, literaryconcepts but, when pressed, appear to lack a fundamental depth to their literary-

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critical knowledge. For example, a student might know Hamlet through somefamous psychoanalytic or postmodern reading of the play, but he or she mightnever have actually been obliged to read or see the play previously as part of amainstream Renaissance drama course. This, of course, can in no way be labelledan "error," since didactic choices are almost always ideologically tinted in tertiaryeducation. However, the pedagogical responsibility of such decisions can indeedbe questioned. It is clear that the vast majority of the people instructing suchcutting-edge courses do themselves posses a solid grounding in the basics of thefield they are teaching. Why then, we might ask, should instructors appear todisenfranchise their students by not preparing them properly for their intellectuallife in the same thorough fashion as the instructors were prepared by theirlecturers?

To bring the discussion back to stylistics, I am concerned that by allowingundergraduate students to take courses in cognitive stylistics before they take onesin mainstream literary stylistics, we might be travelling down a similar road to theone previously taken by post-structuralists in their teaching. The result of this maybe that we have students who will be able to converse fluently and intelligentlyabout all kinds of cognitive constructs and top-down reading strategies within astylistic framework, but, when pressed, will be unable to say what kind of effectcertain deictic elements or aspects of free indirect discourse or certain noun-phrasepatterning might be having on a text, as experienced by the reader. Even worse,they might not even be capable of pointing out how these essentially linguisticcriteria function or what linguistic form they take in the text. In short, the dangersof allowing students to take courses in cognitive stylistics before they have takenone in mainstream literary stylistics may mean that they will be articulate incognitive psychology but inept in functional linguistics. In light of the fact thatstylistics is essentially grounded in the notion of style, and style in inextricablylinked to language and form, one might ask whether, from a pedagogicalperspective, such a development is desirable in language and literaturedepartments.

2.2. The MethodThe methodological approach I have adopted here to look at this question is

essentially empirical. However, it does not consist of the kind of qualitative datanormally associated with numerical and statistical empirical testing. Instead, ittakes a far more qualitative, subjective approach that is based on a questionnaire,the type of which also seeks to also take into account the inherently subjectivenature of human experience. All data presented here are thus based on this end-of-semester questionnaire. All responses were anonymous and were completed whilethe instructor was in a different location. There were twelve students in the course,although only ten of the twelve actually took part in this end-of-semester courseevaluation, which took place in the very last week of the term.

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It should be pointed out that although all the students were proficient Englishspeakers and some were studying English as their major at the Free UniversityAmsterdam, it was not their mother tongue. As such, several irregularities appearin a number of their open responses. These have been transcribed as they originallyappeared, as it was thought best not to interfere with the written data. Fortunately,those open responses that are ungrammatical are often still comprehensible. Wherethe actual meaning of the response is unclear, because of either grammaticalclumsiness of native speaker interference, an attempt has been made by me, as afluent speaker of the Dutch language, to recreate what I believed might haveoriginally been meant. This added information appears and in square brackets.Original spelling errors have been retained throughout.

The questionnaire itself contained nine questions. Most of them involvedcircling categories or ticking yes/no boxes. However, some of the more significantquestions were open-ended. It was from these questions that it was hoped that themost meaningful feedback would be obtained. The nine questions can besynopsized as follows:

1, How difficult did you find this course?2, What might have caused this?3, What was your overall view of the teaching methodology?4, Which of the ten topics did you like best in the two books and why?5, What was your general impression of the material in the two books?6, Do you feel you have learned something from this course?7, Do you feel you have been encouraged to develop your own opinion?8, Please give a mark out of 10 for the course,9, How do you think the course might be improved?

A direct positing of the central research question, "do you think you might havebenefitted, had you taken an earlier course in mainstream stylistics prior to thiscognitive one," was purposely avoided. This was done in order to attempt to obtainthis information indirectly from a number of less overt questions (in particularquestions 1, 2, and 9). It was thought that such indirect methods might reveal amore accurate picture than a single direct question would, where students may tryto acquiesce to the wishes of their instructor, either consciously or subconsciously.^

The reason why this qualitative methodological approach was deemed morepreferable at this initial stage of testing in the cognitive stylistics classroom wasbecause it was thought that if it pointed towards potentially significant outcomes,then these could be followed up in a far more rigorous, quantitative manner. LTsingidentical questionnaire forms, testing could then be conducted across differentuniversities in different countries in a far more structured and statistical fashion inorder to see (1.) whether certain hypotheses, supported by the qualitative data, stillhold, and (2.) whether cultural constraints play a role in altering those initial data-influenced hypotheses.


3. Some Details about the Course and the StudentsThe course was taught in the spring semester of the 2002-2003 academic year

as part of the undergraduate program in the language section of the EnglishDepartment at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The main linguistic approachesadopted within this department are primarily functional and discourse orientated:this is in spite of the fact that nonfunctional/noncognitive generative approaches tolanguage learning are still predominant in the Netherlands.' The course ran throughthe whole spring semester, lasting for fourteen weeks. This was split into twoperiods of seven weeks with a week's break in the middle of the semester. In thefirst half of the semester the group met twice a week for two sessions lasting twohours each (7x2x2). This meant that there were twenty-eight contact hours in thisfirst half of the semester. In the second half of the semester the group met just oncea week for one session lasting two hours (7 x 2). This amounted to fourteen contacthours in the second half of the semester. There were thus a total of forty-two contacthours (28 + 14) for the entire course. As has already been mentioned, there weretwelve students in the course.

Despite the fact that this program in cognitive stylistics was being taught by theEnglish department, the students were not all English majorsindeed only twowere majoring solely in English language studies. Of the rest, four were majoringin both English language studies and communication and information studies(called CIW in Dutch), two were majoring solely in CIW, and four were majoringin Word and Image studies, as part of the General Cultural Studies program. Therewere thus no English literature majors taking this course, despite the fact thatcognitive stylistics is first and foremost a mode of literary criticism, as has beenpreviously stated.

All of the students were Dutch nationals except one who was Spanish (a nativeCatalan speaker)r Ten'students were female and two were male. The two malestudents were both Word and Image majors. All of the students were in their thirdor fourth undergraduate year, except the four Word and Image students, who werein their second year. All of the students were familiar with discourse and functionalapproaches to language. The English language students and the CIW students hadprimarily been exposed to the functional linguistic theories of Simon Dik, while theWord and Image students were primarily acquainted with the systemic-functionallinguistic theories of Michael Halliday. This last group also had some knowledgeof cognitive studies from a previous course that I had taught.'' One student (theSpanish national) had also previously encountered Ronald Langacker's cognitivegrammar at her previous university. However, as already stated, none of thesestudents had in any way been previously exposed to stylistics.

The two books used in the course were Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, byPeter Stockwell, and the companion volume Cognitive Poetics in Practice, editedby Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen. Another book. Cognitive Stylistics: Language

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and Cognition in Text Analysis, edited by Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper,was considered but was not used for practical rather than pedagogical reasons. Onesuch reason was that it was assumed that as complementary volumes, Stockwell'sbook and Gavins and Steen's book would offer the students a good view of thetheoretical topics being discussed in the weekly sessions. This compatibility foundform in the fact that there were essentially ten key corresponding cognitive stylistictopics in both these books. These topics were: (1.) figures and grounds, (2.)prototypes, (3.) cognitive deixis, (4.) cognitive grammar, (5.) scripts and schemas,(6.) mental spaces and discourse worlds, (7.) conceptual metaphor, (8.) theparabolic literary mind, (9.) text world theory, and (10.) narrative comprehension.'

The course itself was broadly taught in the following way. As has already beenmentioned, in this first seven-week period there were two 2-hour sessions. In thesecond half of the semester there was just one 2-hour session. During the first halfoiFeach lesson there was an interactive lecture. This involved the instructor talkingabout the theoretical content of the chapter and giving the students lots ofadditional background information. The instructor also encouraged students tocritically question a whole host of inputs. These included (1.) the course material,(2.) the topic of cognitive stylistics itself, (3.) each other's responses andcomments, (4.) their own responses and comments, and (5.) the instructor'scomments. As a result of this approach, a kind of workshop situation oftendeveloped in the classroom. This was especially the case towards the end of thesemester, once students had started to feel at ease in the critical and self-criticalpedagogical environment that has been created. At the beginning of the course, theinstructor had to do the majority of the discussion work but, by the end of it, thestudents had taken responsibility for their own intuitions and questions. As a result,the instructor's role was gradually reduced to one of merely guiding the discussionsand adjusting or correcting them where necessary. The sessions were thusessentially interactive in nature. Students were not purely "instructed," rather theywere "activated." As such, they were allowed to function in manner that they feltwas most appropriate from moment to moment as each lesson unfolded.

In the second hour of every session the students gave short presentations. Thiswas done in groups that were made up of two students. There was usually time forthree presentations per session. So although students did not give presentations onevery single topic, they were presenting on roughly half of them (i.e., in every othersession). These presentations sought to set out very briefly the main theoreticalpoints of the previous week's cognitive stylistic theory and then conduct a shortanalysis, based on a text that had been selected by the students themselves withoutsupervision. Handouts were made by the presenters and distributed to the wholeclass for critical introspection. After each group presentation, a short discussionwas held among the other students, reflecting on the summary of the theory and thepractical application of it in textual analysis. Critical feedback was then given.


firstly by the rest of the group, and thereafter, by the instructor himself, whosecomments were then also open to critical introspection by the whole class.

4. The Course Evaluation DataAs has been stated, every week a new concept was discussed in class.

Subtracting the introductory lectures and the concluding lectures, which largelydealt with practical and structural matters, this left ten weeks from the originalfourteen in which ten different topics in cognitive stylistics were dealt with in boththeory and practice. The practice element involved looking at the analyses in thebook and conducting new ones based on texts that were first selected by theinstructor and thereafter by the students.

Attendance throughout the course was good. As a result, the students had aproficient working knowledge of all of the theoretical topics by the end of thesemester, when the questionnaire was distributed and completed. The introductorychart below shows how many of the twelve students were present to deal with thematerial on a week-to-week basis. As can been seen, and as has previously beenmentioned, in the all-important final session in week 14 only ten students out of thetwelve attended and therefore only these ten completed the questionnaire."

Topic 1: Figures and GroundsTopic 2: PrototypesTopic 3: Cognitive DeixisTopic 4: Cognitive GrammarTopic 5: Scripts and SchemasTopic 6: Mental Spaces and Discourse WorldsTopic 7: Conceptual MetaphorTopic 8: The Parabolic Literary Mind (Turner)Topic 9: Text World Theory (Werth)Topic 10: Narrative Comprehension (Emmott)Week 14 (final week): End-of-semester questionnaireWhat follows below are the nine questions and all of the responses. An attempt hasbeen made to reproduce them here as close to their original form as was possible.

Question 1: Please circle the word that best describes how easy/difficult youfound this course. Your choices are (i) easy (ii) relatively easy (iii) average(iv) difficult (v) very difficulteasy 0relatively easy 0average 3difficult 7very difficult 0

Attendance1211111010891211810

Absentees

(1)(1)(2)(2)(4)(3)

(1)(4)(2)

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Question 2: In your view, what do you think the reason was for yourdecision in the previous question? Please circle any of the following five (i)the actual topic of cognitive stylistics/poetics (ii) the hooks (iii) the lecturer(iv) the time framework (iv) yourself (i.e., you did not put enough time intopreparing, reading and analyzing). You may circle more than one categoryif you like.

the topic (cognitive stylistics/poetics) 4the books 8the teacher 1the time framework 3yourself 2

A space was also left open here for additional comments. Only four of the tenstudents decided to make use of this space. Their comments were as follows:

It was just all good, well balanced The books were relatively difficult but the amount of time you put in

makes a big difference It was not a particularly interesting topic and if that is the case, then it is

very hard to really get into and understand the material One class per week (in the second half of the semester) is not enough to

deal with the weekly topic

Question 3: What was your overall view of the teaching methodology?very poor 0poor 0average 0good 5very good 5

Once again, a space was left open for additional comments. Six of the ten studentsdecided to make use of this space. Their comments were as follows:

It was very clear what the classes would look like each week. Theinstructor is very enthusiastic about the topic

The instructor supported the discussion and got us to develop our ownthoughts. The structure of the lessons was also good

The instructor has a positive attitude and doesn't put you under pressure The teacher proved to be an expert in his field and at times I could feel a

gap between his knowledge and mine. At times, his mind seemed to "flyaway" between all the cloudy notions, and the problem for me was that Icould not follow. The stuff is pretty dense for a student (me) to grasp atonce

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The instructor provided enough room for questions, and gave enoughbackground knowledge to be able to embed the material in a historicalcontext

The instructor is a good teacher who knows how to explain difficultaspects. At times, parts of the books would become too vague or toodifficult (loads of scientific detail) and extra explanations were definitelyneeded. Next to that, he had no problem with admitting every now andthen that the writers and he himself were not wholly correct. That helps ingiving the student more confidence about his own findings and makes thestudent more critical

Question 4: Which of the ten topics in cognitive stylistics/poetics did youlike best in the two books?

Gavins & Final essayStockwell Steen [Total] topic

figures and grounds 5 2 [7] 1prototypes 2 1 [3] 0cognitive deixis 1 1 [2] 4cognitive grammar 1 2 [3] 0scripts and schemas 5 3 [8] 1mental spaces and discourse worlds 6 7 [13] 0conceptual metaphor 5 1 [6] 0the parabolic literary mind 1 3 [4] 0text world theory 3 4 [7] 2narrative comprehension 4 3 [7] 2Total 33 27 [60] 10Here, as in question 2, students could choose more than one topic. The table aboveshows these choices. It also shows which topic the student eventually choose to useas a theoretical framework to analyze a text for their final papers. The paper (3000-5000 words) was worth 50% of their final grade. The in-class presentationsaccounted for the rest of the grade.Question 5: What was your general impression of the material in the twohooks?All ten students responded to this open question to both books. This amounted totwenty responses in total. The ten responses to Stockwell's Cognitive Poetics were:

My impression was good in general. However,. Iyhave the feeling that Ineed more input in order to fully understand and follow the book

The book was a rather good introduction although sometimes tooelaborate and slightly difficult for beginnersIt was a good book, made me think about lots of things and made me lookat literature in a different way

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OK, but often went too fast, or could have been more explicit. It reallyhelped to read the companion chapter in the Gavins and Steen book

Hard to say what I thought. The overall structure is clear but where itelaborates on the theories it seems unclear and leaves me with a lot ofquestion marks [questions]. I would also have liked the book to havegiven me more meaning and guidance

Quite okA very good and well-structured book. The subjects treated are veryinteresting. Some of the theory is difficult at times and I thought the authormixes up some terms, but overall very good

Good and well-structured way of introducing the student to difficultaspects of cognitive poetics. The author seems to know whom he writesfor, and therefore does not make it too difficult. An interesting book!

Good overview of the field Some chapters were more comprehensible than others. When it was

difficult to understand it was almost always the case that some terms thatwere used throughout the chapter were not defined

The ten responses to Gavin and Steen's Cognitive Poetics in Practice were asfollows:

This was also a good book, and also made me think about lots of thingsand look at literature in a different way

Could be better or improved if both books are to be complementary andif they are meant for cognitive stylistic lessons. It should not be forgottenthat the student in question does not know anything about the subject

Really helpful. I would not have understood as much if it wasn't for thisbook. Just reading two chapters on the same subject was helpful tounderstand the often difficult stuff. More material would be even better,but I don't know if I would have time to read itThere were more chapters here than in the other book that lackedcoherence. But as an extra book it was usefulOK, but it could have been more structured and more applied to the otherbook, especially in the terminology of the theories discussedOK, but the different writers do not always go well together. It is nice toread different viewpoints but they didn't always make the correspondingStockwell chapter clearer

A good book that complements the Stockwell one. On the one hand it wasinteresting to see different writer's ideas and opinions, on the other handit did make it into a book that didn't have a single structure to hang on to

These chapters focussed more specifically on one subject in particular.The chapters didn't always complement the Stockwell chapters well.


Also, now and then terminology got mixed up which made the whole lessclear

Mostly good chapters. Sometimes not too complementary to the chaptersin Stockwell

Some chapters really helped me to better understand the Stockwellchapter (like those by Semino and Gavins) and they added otherinformation as well. Other chapters were too far removed from the theoryin the Stockwell book (especially the chapter by Tsur)

Question 6: Do you feel you have learned something from this course?Yes 9No 0Yes & No IQuestion 7: Do you feel you have been encouraged to develop your ownopinion?

Yes 10No 0Yes & No 0

Question 8: Please give a total mark out of 10 for the course (taking intoaccount the topic, the hooks, the teacher, the time-framework, etc..)Mark8.5876Total

Number(2x)(6x)(lx)(lx)

Total= 17= 48= 7= 678 (7.8 out of 10.0 - or 78% out of 100)

Question 9: How do you think the course might be improved?Eight of the ten students responded to this open question by writing suggestions toimprove the course. Their responses were as follows:

The chapters were quite difficult so it would be better to have more classesto discuss them. It is better to talk to other people on this subject than toread it and not understand it

If, in the Gavins and Steen book, the author introduces/applies theories ofhis or her own which differ from/is not mentioned in Stockwell, thisshould be pointed out in class. Otherwise, it can work confusing[confusingly]

Perhaps some chapters from the Gavins & Steen book should complimentthe Stockwell book a bit more (i.e., terminology, etc.)

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Some terminology from Stockwell clashed with the one from Gavins andSteen. Maybe something can be done about that

Explain more what cognitive poetics/stylistics is and why this extraresearch is necessary

Keep the interaction dimension Maybe some of the stuff could be applied to a film or something because

that should be possible but I am not sure how to do it. It would be a nicechange

Could be better or improved if both books are to be complementary andif they are meant for cognitive stylistic lessons. It should not be forgottenthat the student in question does not know anything about the subject'

5. DiscussionIn this section some of the relevant aspects of the data will be highlighted and

contrasted. This will be done question by question. Tentative conclusions will alsobe drawn after each question. These will then be summarized at the end of thissection.

The first question showed how easy or difficult the students found the course.None found the course "easy" or even "relatively easy," and an overwhelmingmajority (70%) labelled it "difficult." By and large, these were very capablestudents. In fact, some were very talented. All of them went on to pass the course,some with considerable ease, gaining grades of 85%, 90%, and even 95%, in onecase. Why then, one might ask, did the vast majority of them experience the courseas being "difficult" while none of them found it "relatively easy"? Since none ofthese students had ever taken an introductory course in (textual) literary stylistics,the answer might lie in a fundamental lack of a basic stylistic knowledge, whichmay have given them the feeling of being ill-prepared.

Question 2 attempted to pin this down by asking them what they felt thereasons might have been for this "feeling of difficulty." Students were allowed tochoose any of the five potential problems (or even add a new category, which nonedid). The five were (1.) the actual topic of cognitive stylistics, (2.) the books, (3.)the lecturer (and more specifically his teaching methodology), (4.) the timeframework (i.e., the forty-two contact hours that went into the fourteen weeks ofteaching), and (5.) themselves (e.g., could they have spent more time and/or efforton preparing and executing the course?). Students were allowed to circle as manyof these five categories as they thought necessary. There were, eighteen marksallocated in total. Exactly one third (33.3%) were distributed among the last threecategories (the teaching methodology, the time-framework, and the input from thestudents themselves). The first two categories, the topic of cognitive stylistics andthe two books chosen, gained two-thirds of the votes (66.6%). This suggestsoverwhelmingly that if there is a weakness in the course that is preventing thecreation of an optimal learning environment, then it should be sought here.Interestingly, the students experienced the bqoks as being twice as perplexing for


learning as the topic of cognitive stylistics itself. This observation is not as clear-cut as it seems. As such, it will be addressed in much greater depth later in thissection and in the conclusion to this essay.

Question 3 was an echo of the third part of question 2, It functioned as a checkto see whether the students might feel intimidated to mark the teacher and histeaching methodology higher than it actually deserved, even though all responseswere anonymous and were completed without the teacher present. Both sectionthree of question 2 and question 3 appeared to agree that the instructor and histeaching methodology did not have an overriding negative effect on how thesubject of cognitive stylistics was experienced. In fact, all six open responsesseemed to suggest that the opposite might have been the case (see the courseevaluation data section again for an overview of these responses).

Question 4 sought to discover which of the ten cognitive categories, and hencewhich chapters, might have been experienced as being most difficult. As inquestion 2, students could circle more than one category. Generally speaking, onecan see from the total column that there seemed to be a slight overall preference forthe chapters presented in the Stockwell book compared to those presented in theGavins and Steen book (33 votes to 27), but this difference was minimal and canthus be deemed statistically uninteresting. Also, chapter for chapter, on a week-to-week basis, the Stockwell book came out slightly on top with 5 votes to 4 (there wasalso one drawin the third session on cognitive deixis). The slight advantageenjoyed by the Stockwell book was perhaps to have been expected in a workwritten by a single author, as opposed to one containing chapters written bydifferent academics.

Sixty topics (33 + 27) were thus chosen in total by the ten students. This is anaverage of six topics per student. In light of the fact that students were only obligedto choose one topic this is quite a considerable number. The fact thus that studentschose six of the ten topics to highlight as "interesting" suggests that this was anenjoyable course to take and that the chapters, and by default the books, wereexperienced more positively than they were negatively. This is in contrast to someof their more overt comments on the books, offered in some of their open-endedresponses although there were, of course, many positive responses here too.

There were also some odd anomalies that this questionnaire produced withregard to what students thought that their topic/chapter preferences were. Firstly,the cognitive theories that students professed to like best were "scripts andschemas" (8 votes), "figures and grounds," "text world theory" and "narrativecomprehension" (all 7 votes) and "conceptual metaphor" (6 votes). However, byfar the most popular with 13 votes was the category "mental spaces and discourseworlds,"* However, these choices were not reflected in their selection of choice oftheory for their final papers where "cognitive deixis" was chosen by 40% of thegroup as their preferred theoretical framework with which to analyze a text of theirchoice.** In the original question, cognitive deixis had received just two votes.

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making it the lowest and thus the least liked of all ten topics. "Mental spaces anddiscourse worlds," on the other hand, with its initial 13 votes was not chosen by asingle student as a theoretical framework for their final papers. With no votes at allit was thus the joint lowest.'"

Moreover, since most of the students should have been proficient in grammarbecause they were either language or communication majors, they neverthelessseemed to shy away completely from the more grammatical topics for their finalpapers. "Cognitive grammar," for example, was not chosen by a single student asa theoretical framework for their final paper. With the exception of cognitivedeixis, most chose instead to opt for the more discourse-based approaches such as"text world theory" and "narrative comprehension" (2 each). This would perhapsseem logical for literary students, but the fact that there were no literature studentsin this course makes this somewhat unexpected. Perhaps then a lack of ability andlack of confidence to conduct simple stylistic analyses at phonological,morphological, lexical, and syntactic levels might have had some bearing on thisdecision to go for these two more discourse-based approaches. A preparatorycourse in basic literary stylistics to augment their existing knowledge of functionalgrammar might go some way towards giving these language and communicationstudents the confidence they appear to need in order to attempt the more grammar-based cognitive stylistic analyses that were on offer."

Question 5 sought to obtain direct responses to the contents of the books. Sincethere was a 100% reply to this section (i.e., a total of twenty written responses), thissection cannot be treated as irrelevant. Again, as has been seen earlier, severalresponses, or parts of responses, seemed to suggest that both books, and by defaultthe subject of cognitive stylistics itself, would have been more comprehensible,and hence more useful, in an analytic environment, had students been given prioraccess to additional knowledge in the field. Just some of the responses thattypically reflected this were (1.) "I have the feeling that I need more input in orderto fully understand and follow the book"; (2.) "The book was a rather goodintroduction although sometimes too elaborate and slightly difficult forbeginners"; (3.) "OK, but often went too fast"; (4.) "The overall structure is clearbut where it elaborates on the theories it seems unclear and leaves me with a lot ofquestion marks [questions]"; (5.) "Some of the theory is difficult at times"; (6.)"More material would be even better." These requests for "more input" and "morematerial," as well as the observations that the subject presented in its current formis "difficult for beginners," that it "went too fast," that it "seems unclear," and thatit is "difficult at times" all appear to point to the need for additional stylistic inputprior to such cognitive courses.

Questions 6 and 7 sought to discover to what extent students thought that theyhad learned something meaningful from the course. The results wereoverwhelmingly positive: 95% claiming that they had learned something from thecourse and 100% claiming that they had been encouraged by the instructor to


develop their own opinions on the subject.'^ This appears to clash somewhat withsome of the data pointing to the aforementioned "difficulty" of the course.Question 8 sought to re-test the data from questions 6 and 7 by asking the studentsto give the whole course a grade out of ten.'^ They were encouraged to take intoaccount all of the aforementioned criteria, especially the topic, the books, theteacher, and the time framework. The majority of the responses (60%) gave thecourse an 8.0, and 20% gave it an 8.5. The average of 7.8, however, was slightlyless. This 78% average is not as high as the percentages suggested in questions 6and 7. In light of the fact that question 8 offered the students far more choice andscope (i.e., it was not just a simple "yes/no" question), I am inclined to believe thatthis figure of 78% is by far the more accurate of the two. I am also minded tocategorize this outcome as "satisfactory," albeit with "room for improvement."

The comments from question 9 might be seen as being of most importance,since the question addresses the central notion of how this course might beimproved, without actually explicitly leading students towards the idea of apreparatory course in mainstream stylistics. These responses can be put into threegroups concerning the course material, the teaching methods, and the generalcomments about the study of cognitive stylistics itself and how it might beimproved. For the purposes of this particular article, the third of these appears tocarry the most importance. Hence, the primary focus here will be on that.

With regard to the first category, one student noted that "some terminologyfrom Stockwell clashed with the one from Gavins and Steen. Maybe something canbe done about that." Even though this student, and perhaps others too, generallyexperienced this as being true, this was arguably not the case. I can only concludehere that a basic lack of knowledge at a general level of stylistics might have addedto this seeming confusion regarding the terminology between the books, which, tomy mind, was not present in the widespread manner in which some students appearto have experienced it.

Additionally, there are two further comments in this section that take a similarperspective. These are (1.) "If, in the Gavins and Steen book, the author introduces/applies theories of his or her own which differ from/is not mentioned in Stockwell,this should be pointed out in class. Otherwise, it can work confusingly"; and (2.)"Perhaps some chapters from the Gavins & Steen book should compliment theStockwell book a bit more (i.e., terminology, etc.)." In my view, as an experiencedstylistics lecturer, the books complemented each other very well, and I have heardstylistics colleagues throughout the academic world who have read the bookssupport this view as well. Indeed, with the exception perhaps of one or twochapters, the material and the theories presented in both books were, to my mind,essentially both lucid and noncontradictory. Once again thus, I can only surmisethat a lack of basic general stylistic knowledge might have played a significant rolein this "confusion," experienced by some students, rather than any apparentincompatible terminological references in the two books, since, by and large, no

506 Michael Burke

such confusing inconsistencies existed. Indeed, when pressed during the lessonsthese so-called "confusing theories" and "terminological mismatches" oftenturned out to be relatively simple stylistic phenomena, like, for example, the notionof "deictic shifts" and "linguistic foregrounding," which are mainstream ideas instylistics, but difficult to grasp if you have never encountered them before you doso in a primarily cognitive environment.

The comment, "explain more what cognitive poetics/stylistics is and why thisextra research is necessary," shows to some extent just how lost some studentsactually were by the end of the course in a cognitive domain largely devoid oftangible stylistic-linguistic analyses. From the previous feedback on the teachingmethodology, especially that set out in question 2, one might conclude that themethods that the instructor chose to apply could not have had too negative an effecton the way the course was experienced. This was also the case for the lack ofnegative feedback regarding the time spent on the course. Further, this is also seenby the way in which the course was generally evaluated at 78% out of 100.Arguably therefore, something is missing, and that something, as I have beencontinually suggesting throughout this article, might very well be a prior groundingin literary stylistics.

Something similar can also be said of the comment, "the chapters were quitedifficult, so it would be better to have more classes to discuss them. It is better totalk to other people on this subject than to read it and not understand it." The "moreclasses" that this student is requesting probably does not mean more classes incognitive stylistics, since this is already a fourteen-week course (i.e., a wholesemester). Rather, it could point to some desire to know more about stylisticsbefore starting this more advanced cognitive level of stylistic study. Such apreparatory course would, I believe, have gone a long way toward addressing theinsecurities that this particular student had.

The most telling comment, however, as to why we, as stylistics teachers,should seriously contemplate why we should first consider guiding our studentsthrough the shallows of linguistic analysis in a separate course, before we obligethem to jump in at the deep end of cognitive studies is the comment that "studentsneed more background if they are to understand the theories in these books." Thisstudent is, to my mind, wholly correct. It would seem completely inappropriatefrom a pedagogical perspective to continue to ignore such a genuine request: anappeal that I all too often heard voiced in the classroom throughout the fourteen-week period that I taught the course. And although I attempted to fill in as much ofthis missing elementary stylistic knowledge as I possibly could during thelessonsas verified by a number of appreciative student comments reproduced inthis articleI still felt that I was trying to teach two courses at once. The upshot ofthis situation is that it cannot but impede the creation of an optimum environmentin which to teach cognitive stylistics at an upper undergraduate level. The potentialconsequences of this state of affairs are obvious.


6. SummaryThis pedagogical study has looked at the teaching of just one undergraduate

course in cognitive stylistics to a specific group of twelve students. It has examineddata in the form of written student responses from an end-of-semesterquestionnaire, which included closed questions, open-ended questions, and yes/noquestions. It sought to interpret relevant parts of that data in order to gain insightsand draw conclusions, the upshot of which has been to make suggestions in anattempt to improve future teaching strategies, so that an optimum learningenvironment for students might be created in the cognitive stylistic classroom.

In the introduction to the methodology section in this article I predicted that themajority of the students might very well struggle to link those very cognitiveconcepts that they were in the process of learning back to linguistic form andfunction for the practicalities of stylistic analysis. From the responses that havebeen given, it seems not unlikely that this was indeed the case. Based on the data,this study has thus concluded that a prior grounding in mainstream literarystylistics will in all likelihood be beneficial to undergraduate students takingcourses in cognitive stylistics. In claiming this, I am in no way suggesting thatsimilar preparatory courses in mainstream literary theory or philosophy orcognitive psychology would be any less suitable. As a stylistician, I can only speakfrom my own perspective, and to my mind such a foundation course in literarystylistics would appear to be advantageous for general learning purposes.

Although the evidence that has been put forward here is far from conclusive,I would conjecture that I might not be too wide of the mark here. From thesetentative conclusions, I am also inclined to suggest that much larger comparativesurveys should be conducted within far stricter quantitative, empirical frameworksin order to test these results. Moreover, a cross-cultural dimension should also betaken into consideration in such future testing. Arguing for a foundation course inliterary stylistics may seem like a lot of extra preparatory teaching work, but ifstudents are to get the full benefit of studying cognitive approaches to literaturewithin either a stylistic, poetic, or rhetorical framework, then the onus is on us, astheir teachers, to make sure that it is done in as solid and responsible a way aspossible. A study of cognitive (top-down) reading processes is extremelyimportant in any study of reading, including stylistics. However, bottom-upanalytic processes must be of equal importance in the text-mind interface, certainlywithin an undergraduate teaching environment. This is why I believe studentswould benefit from acourse in mainstream literary stylistics prior to taking a coursein cognitive stylistics, even if that preparatory course has to be of a very short albeitintense nature.

In conclusion, it is safe to say that cognitive approaches to stylistics are a realand ongoing aspect of our stylistics teaching. They add new cultural, cognitive, andneuroscientific insights into our ever-expanding exploration of the all-importantreaderly notion of context in stylistic analysis. As such, they are here to stay. But

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in order to offer undergraduate students accurate and optimum insights into theinterface between the human mind and human language in stylistic scholarship, thepersuasive properties of linguistic style should be explicitly taught, prior to anydetailed cognitive stylistic analyses being attempted, A failure to do so would bedetrimental to our students.'''

Notes' For better or worse, the terms "cognitive stylistics" and "cognitive poetics"

are often used interchangeably. In order to assist comprehension, throughout thisarticle I will refer to the subject exclusively as "cognitive stylistics," even thoughwhen teaching I frequently used the term "cognitive poetics," This decision is thusbased on considerations of clarity and practicality rather than on ones of ideology.

^ As in all surveys, questions are always unavoidably loaded. It is for thisreason that data obtained from such preset questionnaire-type experiments cannever be deemed wholly objective. Notwithstanding, an attempt has been madehere to make the questions as impartial as possible under the circumstances,

^ Elsewhere I have argued why it is inappropriate to view generativeapproaches to language as "cognitive" approaches, despite the fact that such a labelis commonly used these days in mainstream generativism (Burke),

The course in question was taught in the Word and Image program. Itinvolved the application of numerous cognitive frameworks to the reading andinterpretation of advertisements in the print media. These cognitive frameworksincluded iconicity, metaphor, force dynamics, and image-schemas,

' There was in fact an eleventh topic in the books, which dealt with theextremely important notion of the role of emotion in cognition. However, it was leftout of the evaluation because, owing to time constraints, it was not dealt with in asatisfactory manner during the course itself.

'' The two who did not take part in the survey were both female students whowere joint English and CIW majors,

' This particular response mirrored exactly the response that the same studentgave for question 5.

" Taking both books into consideration, the maximum vote that a topic couldhave received was 20, depending on weekly attendance (the lowest, of course, waszero).

^ The word "text" is being used in its most liberal of forms here to also includefilm and images in general. With regard to the actual material that was analyzed inthe end-of-term essays, of the twelve students only five chose to analyze a literarytext. Five others chose to analyze film, one chose to analyze song lyrics, and onechose to develop her own critical comparative model by contrasting subworlds(from text world theory), contextual frame shifts, and deictic shift theory.


'" Perhaps the fact that only eight students (66.6%) were present in the weekthat this topic was taught (the joint lowest of the whole semester) might have hadan effect here. These findings, though extraordinary and in need of moreinvestigation will, however, not be dealt with further in this article.

'' Again, this is something that should be looked at in more detail in subsequentstudies.

'^ The 95% in the first statistic here reflects the fact that one student wasundecided and filled in "yes & no."

" They were told that they could grade it to one decimal point,'" A shorter version of this essay was presented at the first theme-session on

cognitive approaches to literature at the annual Poetics and Linguistics Association(PALA) conference held in Istanbul in June 2003,1 am very grateful to the Faculteitder Letteren at the Vrije tJniversiteit Amsterdam for the funding I received in orderto be able to attend the conference.

I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to the twelve students who tookpart in the course. Their patience and evaluative input were very much appreciated.They were Mawgosia Bos, Ineke Bruinsma, Patricia Cinos-Emperanza, Roel vanDiepen, Illah Evenblij, Lysette van Geel, Mona Hegazy, Anna Kaal, Pieter vanKoetsveld, Trijntje Pasma, Annette Rabbelier, and Tessa Stoke.

Works CitedBurke, Michael. "Beyond Pure Reason: The Influential Role of Emotion in

Language and Cognition," The Belgian Journal of English Language andLiteratures 1 (2003): 31-40,

Dik, Simon. Functional Grammar. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1978.

Emmott, Catherine. Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Oxford:Oxford UP, 1997.

Gavins, Joanna, and Gerard Steen, eds. Cognitive Poetics in Practice. London:Routledge, 2003.

Halliday, Michael. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold,1985.

Langacker, Ronald. Concept, Image and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis ofGrammar. Berlin: Mouton, 1991

Semino, Elena, and Jonathan Culpeper, eds. Cognitive Stylistics: Language andCognition in Text Analysis. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2002.

Short, Mick. "Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature: With an Example fromJames Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Language and

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Literature: An Introductory Reader in Stylistics. Ed. Ronald Carter. London:Routledge, 1982, 179-92.

Simpson, Paul. "Pedagogical Stylistics and Evaluation." The South AfricanJournal of Literary Studies 15 (2000): 510-28.

Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002.Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford:

Oxford UP, 1997.Verdonk, Peter. "Language of Poetry: The Application of Literary Stylistic Theory

in University Teaching." Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature. Ed.Mick Short. London: Longman, 1989. 241-66.

Werth, Paul. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London:Longman, 1999.

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