Many of the certainties that we were trained in, both in literary studies and in linguistics, have been falling away over the last few years. The questioning of arbitrariness, one of the key and apparently unshakeable foundations of modern linguistics, has been the most challenging and revelatory shift. In critical literary studies, there has been a long-standing, core acceptance that form and meaning were randomly separate, at every level of language from phonology to discourse, and that therefore there can be no describable stable meanings, no repeatable experiences, no concepts that are not relativized, and discourses that only compete ideologically and at the level of rhetorical ornamentation. We are beginning to see that these consequences are false because we can no longer rely on a presumption of arbitrariness. Cognitive science, in particular, has been demonstrating over and over again that it is iconicity that drives language, communication, and aesthetics, not...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Book Review|
March 01 2022
The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition
Margaret H. Freeman,
The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition
. New York
: Oxford University Press
, 2020
. xv + 205 pp.
Peter Stockwell
University of Nottingham
Peter Stockwell is professor of literary linguistics at the University of Nottingham and a fellow of the English Association. He has published twelve books and over ninety articles in stylistics, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics, including Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading (2009), Cognitive Poetics (2020), and The Language of Surrealism (2017). He coedited The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (2014), The Language and Literature Reader (2008), and Contemporary Stylistics (2007).
Search for other works by this author on:
Poetics Today (2022) 43 (1): 183–185.
Citation
Peter Stockwell; The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition. Poetics Today 1 March 2022; 43 (1): 183–185. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9471080
Download citation file:
Advertisement
180
Views